Interview / Robert Chalmers reviews the erratic career of the high-velocity poet John Cooper Clarke
Mancunian Candidate
It probably says something about the changes in British drinking habits that many of the people who have been boasting recently that they can remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot a quarter of a century ago, could only manage an informed guess as to their whereabouts during the latter stages of last New year's Eve. For John Cooper Clarke, who “remembers both occasions,” 1989 began, predictably, with an obscenity — put his way as he took the stage in the early hours for a solo performance in a North London pub. “Bollocks!”, shouted a remarkably well-spoken “voice of sanity” at the front, then “Music!”; a greeting which, momentarily at least, put the poet off his stroke. “I'm sorry,” he explains, “I'm not very well. I've got amnesia and deja-vu at the same time. I can't remember what happens next.”
There was, to be frank, more than a little deja-vu in the air. Clarke's live shows — though still fast, witty and dangerous — consist substantially of the same set he has been performing to club audiences since the lates Seventies. He relies on the old crowd-pleasers; “Beasley Street”, an uneasy amalgam of “desolation row” and the Salford slumland of Joan Littleford's radio documentary This Classic Soil : “Where the action isn't / That's where it is / State your position / Vacancies exist / In an X-certificate exercise / Ex-Sevicemen explete / Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies / In a box on Beasley Street.”
There are also “lifestyle” tirades like “Health Fanatic” (“beans, greens, tamgerines and low cholesterol margerines”) and off-the-wall satire like “I Married A Monster From Outer Space; “When we went walking / Tentacle in hand / You could sense the earthlings wouldn't understand / They went 'nudge-nudge' when we got on the bus / Said 'it's extra-terrestial, not like us / And it's bad enough with another race / But fuck me, a monster from outer space'.”
Following his split, 6 years ago, with Martin Hannett, whose group The Invisible Girls accompanied the poems on records like 'Snap, Crackle, & Bop (1980) and Zip Style Method (1982), circumstances have conspired to allow Clarke to continue to make solo appearances without using much new material. In Manchester clubs like The Explosion, and Mr. Smith's, John Cooper Clarke, the definitive - if not absolutely the first - Gothic Punk, created a persona which was dramatic to the point where it was not really necessary “do” anything else; this one would run and run.
His audiences have stayed surprisingly young, and the under-12's now know him best in his latest, brilliant incarnation as the unlikely sidekick to the Honey Monster in the Sugar Puffs adverts. Neither has there been much competition from other “street” poets: acts like Seething Wells and Graig Charles never came close to Clarke in terms of inspriation, although their superior stamina took them to a wider public. (Thus when I rang the poet Gavin Ewart, he told me that he had barely heard of John Cooper Clarke, but was “more than willing to give an opinion on Atilla the Stockbroker”.)
A couple of days after Clarke's performance in Finsbury Park, I travelled to Salford to ask him whether he had, literally, “dried up”. He showed me into his flat — the ground floor of a semi-detached house, itself in an Usher-esque state of disprepair — and he had hardly lit the candles (“special occasion”) before he was off: reciting from memory, Bauderlaire's poem “Le Vampire”; a doom-laden work at the best of times but, read by John Cooper Clarke, by candelight, in Salford, almost overwhelming.
“Great, that, isn't it. We didn't do languages at school so I had to learn in translation. I love that bit where it goes 'Fool'. In French,” he went on, “that's Imbecile” (to Clarke this is, like “vegetable”, a word of four syllables with an almighty stress on the last; but then French as delivered in his concentrated Salford accent, doesn't sound any more exotic than English). The attraction of Bauderlaire (“the baddest mother on the block”) is as much biographical as literary: “All those guys were my heroes, like de Nerval with his powder-blue cape and his lobster on a leash. And when they asked him 'Why a lobster?', he said 'It does not bark, and it knows the secrets of the deep'.”
Cooper Clarke's difficulty, as he told me, is not purley a case of writer's block (although he is considerably less prolific than in the Seventies). The work which he does manage to produce (mostly prose, or poems coloured by the kind of morbid opiate imagery once favoured by “whacked-out cases like Coleridge and De Quincey”) is, he explained, not the kind of thing that weekend pub audiences judge to be compatible with a “good night out”: “I still do some theatre readings, but usually it's a pub, where the audience is all stood up, and they want to hear the old things.”
Although it is probably never quite fair to try to represent a “performing poet” - even the best of them — on paper, in the sense that their written work is always, to some degree, an aide-memoir to their readings, I asked Clarke to read me some of his newer poems. Typical of the things he has done recently — if not an articulation of the problem itself — is “Give Me What I Need”:
“Poetry and laughter, how frivolous the sound / Where imminent disaster and misery abound / Les Fleurs du Malcontent lie strangled in the weed / You may never know what I want, but I know what I need. / A victim by profession; blame it on the girl / With the vacant possession of the sedentary world / I believe in miracles, it's written in the creed / Immaculate connection. Give me what I need.”
At the same time Cooper Clarke's live act has, ironically, shifted increasingly towards stand-up comedy. He is one of the few performers who can face the notorious Tunnel Club in Deptford “with equanimity”, handling obscene hecklers with reflex responses (“I hear we have a clergyman in the audience. How did you get in without a tie?”).
Part of the trouble may be that he is just too much of a “one-off”. Cooper Clarke has also done work for the Poetry Society — like last year's “Poetry Live” readings at Waterloo Station — and feels that he is “quite establishment” now that “Evidently Chicken Town” is included, with works by Dante and Milton, in the Faber Book of Political Verse; though Adrian Henri (who topped the bill over Clarke in the early days and “felt like going home in The interval, he was so good”) feels that “he's still under-rated because of his association with music. Apart from that collection [Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt] he's never been peroperly publsihed. People don't expect to sit down and read him.”
Then there is the presence of what Cooper Clarke describes as the “F-word” in his verse (in “Evidently Chicken Town”, “the F-word” crops up 82 times in 50 lines; this kind of average has proved to be something of a stumbling-block to his inclusion in programmes like Poetry Please). Such considerations did not deter Salford University from commissioning him to write a new poem on L S Lowry: “I did my best.” Clarke told me, picking up his notebook again, “to get away from 'Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs' ”: “The aniline shades of the deep Irwell / It's pestilential ethers swell / Malodorous clouds like sombre shrouds / Hiding heaven from bloody hell / The idle hands of the devil's dowry / Knock-knock rent man Mr Lowry:. “Well”, he adss, his habitual pallor accentuated by the flickering light, “he was a rent man, wasn't he?”
The unpublished prose pieces (“sit-down writing”) include “The wreck of the Primadonna” — a parody of Poe's “MS Found in a Bottle” — “Tadpoles – the Poor Man's Caviar”, and a Mickey Spillane spoof, “Death Takes a Holiday”:
“It was time to move. I pulled on a raincoat, put away a pep-pill, set fire to a cigarette and split. Outside, someone strangles a saxophone, elaborately. A sideways focus revealed a sky-blue Bel-Air reversible Isetta Bubble Car rocking on it springs. 'Get in, Jim' said a voice from a thouosand fathoms. She wore her platinum pompadour like a halo. She resmebled Saint Teresa of the Roses, in one of her cheesier moments.”
“I wanted to make it a whole novel,” Clarke told me. “I've still got the last line fixed in my head: 'I would remember. The night would forget.' ”
In one sense it seems absurd to complain at his lack of published product. Cooper Clarke still feels “gutted” at the death of his friend and one-time flat-mate, Nico: many of his difficulties of motivation spring from his fondness for the demi-monde existence which she was once felt to represent and his consequent distancing from the “real world”. (“In Holland, this guy asked me how much I charged for haunting houses. I told him that would all depend on how many rooms he'd got.”) Much of the inspiration for his early poems came from his work experience, first as a short-order chef in Rhyl, then as a motor mechanic and “assistant to an insurance company's 'wounds' photographer”, though Clarke, as he points out, “never lived exactly nine-to-five”, even in his heyday.
What ventures he has undertaken have been successful — he had excellent reviews, for instance, for his performance, last May, in Jim Cartwright's play Road; yet, to his admirers, his relative inactivity — his absence from the studio especially — remains highly frustrating. He is “unlikely” to work with the Invisible Girls again, and though John says that a record is “a priority”, he has not recently been in touch with Epic. (He is still signed to the label, who told me that they would be “more than interested”, were he to approach them).
Cooper Clarke, who by the nature of his character probably requires a sharp manager more than anybody else in the business, curently handles his own affairs from Salford (though none of the people I spoke to — even those who book him — had a telephone number for him). Alan Wise, Clarke's manager for a number of years, feels that “John will never get back to serious recording without a fundamental change in attitude or lifestyle. Either that,” he added, “or a very good agent”.
Anthony Wilson, who helped to launch Clarke's early career on shows like Granada Reports and So it Goes, thinks that “He probably needs a publisher, to encourage him, But for me, at the moment, the adverts are enough. They're brilliant.”
“There are some more coming up,” Cooper Clarke told me. “I can't say too much about them, except that in one I fall down a 30-foot pit and get savagely beaten with a shovel. I suppose you could say it was gratuitous violence. The kids love it; the whole thing has taken me by surprise. W C Fields' advice doesn't seem to apply to monsters. Kids and animals. Not Honey Monsters”.
Thanks to Robert Chalmers for sending it in.
Copyright acknowledgment is hereby graciously given to The Independent for this totally unauthorized violation of their proprietary copyright. We hope they don't mind too much.