“This one's about the day that George Best's fully automatic council house in Timperley went out of control...” Oh yes this was going to be excellent.
I got my first John Cooper Clarke record almost twenty years ago. Due to a series of annoying events I'd never been able to get to see him until last Saturday. A chance glance at the Guardian Guide I noticed he was on in Batley. All in all an eventful evening for a number of reasons.
It seems that there is a new series of events called 'New Varieties' which is being put on in Batley Town Hall. I was pleased to find an old friend of mine who now works for Kirklees Council selling tickets on the door (I still had to pay though). She introduced me to Wild Willi Beckett who, along with Nick Toczek, has organised this series of events. You may not know but Beckett is also the Deputy Leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party; oh yes I mix with top class politicians me.
The support, Thom the World Poet, is worth mentioning only to mention he went down as well as support acts often do. Never mind. So at about 8.50pm JCC appeared on stage.
Having never seen him before in the flesh, and also having had word of someof the medical-related problems he's had over the last decade, I was not sure what to expect. A frail old man with none of the punk energy in him? Grey hair perhaps? Oh no; stick insect thin in black with the usual get up; shades and spiky black hair. He still looks, as he himself commented, like a compulsive blood donor.
It's impossible to detail everything he did; so much was funny because of his stance and delivery. He explained how pleased he was to be in Batley, and he seemed keen to see if there were any talent scouts from Batley Variety Club in. He did the familiar line that this was better than playing somewhere like Burnley, "...the sort of place they still point at aeroplanes".
Starting with 'The Day My Pad Went Mad' (which I never knew was about George Best) other stuff followed thus (in the order I can remember them): 'Martin Newman', 'A Love Story in Reverse', 'Evidently Chickentown' (don't try this one at home kids), 'I Married a Monster from Outer Space', 'Hire Car', 'Are You the Business', a combination of 'Health Fanatic' and 'I've got a Brand New Tracksuit', 'Beazley Street' and that poem about his poem titles which have been stolen to become world-wide smashes by someone else.
I'd forgotten how he bravely experimented with various poetry techniques; his limerick in blank verse a clever effort which turned out to be about someone from Leigh which, coincidence city here, was the birth town of the aforementioned ticket seller. Or did she grow up there? I can't remember. Readers of the JCC web site will be familiar with his Haiku; this is a rigourous form of Japanese poetry where each poem has to be 17 syllables long precisely. Cooper Clarke's effort: "Writing a poem / In seventeen syllables / Is very diffic".
He gave a plug for Hovis Presley who I also think is very good and is playing Batley on 20th December (call Huddersfield Information Centre on 01484 223200). This was nice of him as although Hovis is very funny he's still a derivative of JCC in my opinion.
A friend I was sat with who's seen JCC a number of times over the 80s said he thought this was the best gig he'd ever seen him do. I was so tempted to go and see him the day afterwards in Leeds to make up for lost time. But I didn't.
Given that he was on stage for about 90 minutes but only managed about 15 poems you can imagine the amount of chat and jokes he told; some of his asides were priceless but hard to repeat with the same effect. Safe to say, if he ever went away, John Cooper Clarke is back now and very much in form. Now if only he'd manage to get round to coming out with another record with all his new material; that's all we can ask for.
Drew Radtke