Comedy: John Cooper Clarke - Music Box.

The Bard of Salford, all shades and hair, the original punk poet beyond compare.

Poems spat out at frightening pace, about marrying monsters from outer space.

Striding on to the stage like a gothic pipecleaner, John Cooper Clarke has worn surprisingly well after 20 years of spewing out his vitriolic verse. His delivery is still impossibly fast, the hair still implausibly vertical, and the between-poem chat caustic and confident.

Edinburgh is full of people standing up at a microphone for an hour, but this show puts many of them to shame. Fuelled by bile and vodka, he revisits old territory with Kung Fu International and has a superb poetic gag involving an oriental style based on using just 17 syllables.

The audience is genuinely affectionate, in the way a Rolling Stones crowd reserves a special cheer for Keith, just for still being alive.

JCC even has a few cracking gags, although his subject matter is rarely PC - “My ex-wife and I split the house. I got the outside” - but invariably funny. Want a guy whose bite matches his bark? Exit the stand-ups, enter Johnny Clarke.

Until August 26th *****

Colin Somerville

Thanks to SPG for sending it to us.

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