I remember sitting backstage one night with Cooper Clarke and the late Chris Sievey, alias Frank Sidebottom, another former cult hero who has been propelled to mass fame, in his case posthumously, through Lenny Abrahamson's film, Frank, released earlier this year. I operate on a capsule wardrobe because I spend a lot of time on the road, so I aint got the whole rainbow spectrum of colours in my luggage. and Football Focus. Im not a handsome man and its damage limitation. Otherwise, I ask for the apparatus for a gin and tonic. I figured I had to sign somebody." '", His delivery, stage presence, and an enviable ability to think on his feet, mean that, like a great actor or musician, he bears repeated viewing. I prefer to see it as a sexual relationship that is recognised by the police. She was well, and recovering, and looking forward to Spain. Was Nico easy to live with? 'Yes mother. I thought it was fabulous: great amenities and lavishly fenestrated new houses, with generous garages. That could be the Ramones, or Hogarth, or Yevtushenko - who, incidentally," he added, "really loves John's work. The 2,000-seat venue, which has hosted entertainers including Bob Dylan and David Bowie, has proved to be a little small for Cooper Clarke. Poetry is a phonetic medium. "I prefer to do this one from a stage," he told the audience, "because BBC bleep operators have sued for repetitive strain injury and my swear box doubles as a high yield pension fund. My message is always the same: dont even do it once. The bloody chief's a bloody swine. Baudelaire was my hero. [18], In July 2013, Clarke was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts by the University of Salford in "acknowledgement of a career which has spanned five decades, bringing poetry to non-traditional audiences and influencing musicians and comedians." The truth is, Caligula, if I was opening for them, they were better than I was. It was a time of letters left unopened, heavy curtains warding off the maddening reality of daylight and, as he would concede, anxiety and reclusiveness. ", I spent three months, off and on, on the road with Cooper Clarke for this article, and this monologue has found its way into his act. Him and Grard de Nerval: the guy that wore the powder blue cape and walked a lobster on a leash. [4] During an April 2018 episode of Steve Jones' radio show Jonesy's Jukebox, Clarke revealed one of his early inspirations to be the poet Sir Henry Newbolt, reciting from memory a portion of Newbolt's poem "Vita Lampada". DaveM66 His agents saying: Dont go screwing it up again, youre opening for Doris Day at the London Palladium. And why did Lenny choose the Palladium for that routine? Every style of English suburban house is represented there, but all at two-thirds scale. And I am very lucky to be here really. His response has become something of a mantra. ("This paper's boring, mindless and mean / Full of pornography, the kind that's clean / Where William Hickey meets Michael Caine / Again and again and again and again / You see all kinds of ugliness and hideous excess / But you never see a nipple in The Daily Express."). "Sometimes," the actor Steve Coogan once said, "I ask people: 'Have you ever heard of Cooper Clarke?' John has a brilliant and retentive mind and an exhaustive knowledge of all kinds of culture. Anybody. Lowry." He is a genius,' I think, 'Oh, thank God for that. newmanshh Clarke's poem "Out of Control Fairground" was printed inside the Arctic Monkeys' 2007 single "Fluorescent Adolescent" CD. 36acm "Please," he asked the audience at Shepherds Bush, "if you ever see me in a vegetative state - drooling and incontinent, having to be reminded of my own name - just leave me in peace. Prison had become like a never-ending party. The Luckiest Guy Alive by John Cooper Clarke is published by Picador (14.99). That is the story of the Donald, and because in this business I learned long ago you should never knock success, I cant help admiring the crazy fucker in some way. But mostly it is down to his brilliant rambling dramatic monologue of a stage show, which has become less staccato over the years. I think he moved to the States for a while, but Im not sure the act travelled with him. He moved back to Manchester, focussed on his art and was eventually spotted by the head of CBS, the late Maurice Oberstein. Its like men wearing short trousers. Those English periods were a happy time. Clarke has lived for the past 25 years in Colchester, Essex. mac_abre Charley Barnes hands over Sabotage Reviews Director to Heddwen Creaney! After that, old ladies started to hit me in the street with their umbrellas.". .and this years most read reviews are. coastangel A fan of the show for 60 years, he described it as having "all the finality of a suicide note, without the actual obligation of topping yourself". You're late home.' And I thought: Wow, imagine being young and living in a mod town like Stevenage! And then I did for a couple of years. Official Sites. My look is very easy to maintain but that wasnt always the case in the 80s, I couldnt find anything. I won't be the one whose life is turned into legend. I thought very carefully before I embarked on mine," he explains. Cooper Clarke had not been deemed worthy to participate in that event. I began with a question from one of the many performers who, no doubt, owe just a little bit of their style and delivery to watching Clarke with an audience, seeing how it might be done. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. ", The poet laughed. And at 66, the original punk poet is not about to stop any time soon, Netflixs endless cancellations signal the end of the prestige streaming TV era, Jeff Beck had a phenomenal car collection, How to wear men's jewellery beyond that one single chain, Ten coolest things to do in London this week, Joe Locke and Kit Connor cant believe any of this is real, The best classic hairstyles for men that just won't quit, All the must-read books to look forward to in 2023, A quick call about tracksuits and Kendrick with Kano, No More Red, Arsenal's campaign for a safer London, wants you to join the team, Print copies & Digital access for only 1. English punk poet John Cooper-Clarke first began performing his verse backed by a local folk group called the Ferrets, but with his rapid-fire verbal delivery and stinging social commentary, he quickly emerged as the poet laureate of the punk movement. 2016 Zip Style Method. ", On stage, such classics as '36 Hours' may be followed by some surreal monologue that might or might not recur in a subsequent performance. If you went to see a band, the Beatles, the Stones, they were up there on the stage; you would naturally expect all the sound to come from their general direction. The theme of the big estate is the great British automotive industry: Wolseley Drive and Morris Road and Austin Crescent. Is that a stage name? It can be done, clearly, but it aint easy. In the past, I have worn a more adventurous colour palette but Im red/green colour blind so its an area of anxiety for me. Clarke also recorded a song with the band entitled "Dead Man's Shoes". Get it wrong by even half a syllable, and you are condemned to an eternity of spitting on your ancestors, after committing ritual suicide in a public place. Poetry, especially, is meant to be heard. We had to learn The Lady of Shalott, by the late, great Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was 12 pages long, and I have to say I am all the better for it. It's often asserted that he wrote nothing in his lost years; this isn't quite true. No. [26] He has also been a panellist on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Erik_Debonair TA: Do you do much Skyping?Never. "You and John Lennon. [13][14] He described this period of his life: "It was a feral existence. Pinchy & Friends - Sleepy The Bug (ft. Warrior Queen) - Aktion Pak. ", His time in rehab is not a period he is keen to revisit. The Kray family had a bolthole there. The first guy goes in, 'screw me stupid.' "If there's a gene, I got it from my ma," he says. (De rouille et d'os) [Original De xido y Hueso (Orginal Motion Picture Soundtrack). Click here for tour details, John Cooper Clarke will be launching The Luckiest Guy Alive at an exclusive reading with Q&A session at Hoxton Hall, London N1, on 1 November. "Yes?" A state of reverie and the virtue of idleness are paramount. One of the more fortunate breaks in his poetic career, he suggests, was that he looked like a punk before punk rock arrived. "Because you know what the Japanese are like. The fury of the crowds really was quite alarming at that time. But thats the secret: the sound of the language, those sonorous words. I remember thinking, this must be what Stalingrad was like. I hate the word itself. Like Ranulph Fiennes. If anything, I go for a high-waisted trouser the Simon Cowell except I wouldnt attribute it to him, Id attribute it to flamenco dancers and matadors. In the early Nineties, in a pub in Withington, South Manchester, Tony Wilson, the late founder of Factory Records, stopped in the middle of a sentence concerning another of his favourite subjects, himself, then told me: "You know, it isn't me. Do you get some element of therapy from writing and performing your poetry? He had Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Sinatra obviously the great American songbook. However, I am interested in what you get out of it. The one message I would like to send out is that this is not something you can pick up and leave alone just like that, you know. "I have two heroes in my life," he says. Writing is the prism through which you see the world. I used to think trees were dirty, because when I was a kid in Salford you'd climb them and come off filthy, it was like you'd been up a chimney and even if you got a stretch of park you just had to scrape the grass and there were, like, cinders underneath it was horrible[5], His first job was a laboratory technician at Salford Tech. With horrible results.". The Bard of Salford John Cooper Clarke became a doctor today after receiving an honorary degree in his home city. There they are, bulldozing these beautiful villages so someone can get to Manchester quarter of an hour earlier. The fact is you need help, though. "Who caught it off whom?" Now, he makes sure that he arrives at any venue two hours early. A much underrated garment, the jegging: they never need ironing and they hold their colour. Dr Clarke, as he styles himself, wearing his honorary doctorate from Salford University with pride, has always had that effect; to the many devotees of his live performances over five decades, he is both much imitated and inimitable. Because he was confident that in whatever borscht-belt dive he found himself theyd immediately get the reference: Hey, thats the place the Queen of England goes. What a thrill walking out there. He speaks with love of the life he has created there, referring often to his wife, Evie, and daughter, Stella, his guiding lights. The truth is Im not just a practitioner of poetry when I am on stage I am like the police: never off-duty. It's his reluctance to discuss narcotics - "and it always, always comes up" - that mean that he will very rarely subject himself to interviews of any length. unknownuser [2] He returned to live performance in the 1990s, appearing again with Suns of Arqa in 1992 at The Witchwood in Ashton-under-Lyne. '", If you've seen him regularly over the years, you might be surprised by the material he's dispensed with, or revives just occasionally. I figure any town in the whole world has an equivalent of the fictional neighbourhood I describe. Cooper Clarke met the Cologne-born icon in Manchester in about 1980. The third punter - Jewish guy - hands over his fiver and says, 'paint my house. What is on your rider [dressing room request list] these days? Final nail in Julius Malema's political coffin? Mention that the Bard of Salford was to visit the Observer office for this interview last week immediately prompted snatches of extemporised quotation from some of Clarkes more famous lyrics I Wanna Be Yours, Evidently Chickentown, I Married a Monster from Outer Space from those colleagues who had some grounding in his snarly Mancunian vowels and those who were not afraid of pretending. "No. But then things started to buck up. They spat and yelled at John because he was merely speaking. And it seems hilarious now, when you read biographies about Wordsworth striding out on the fells, whingeing on about Coleridge lying zonked out on the couch on laudanum. A Music War, in which he performed his poem "Health Fanatic". How long, I'd asked him, had he known this by heart? He was a magic realist right to the end. But in Colchester, we've talked for more than six hours in a single session and the most life-threatening substance he has ingested has been a Glenmorangie. He leaves, tired but happy. I'd have been killed not by hostility but indifference. Relax, Its Just a Run-of-the-Mill Nuke Spill. I rest my case. [22], 2015 saw Clarke present a documentary on Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the BBC's second series of The Secret Life of Books. I should say that all my characters are an amalgam or something, Craig, but Vince was the bloke in the downstairs apartment when I lived in Plymouth for a while, real name Frank. [6] He began his performance career in Manchester folk clubs, where he began working with Rick Goldstraw and his band the Ferrets. He'd just finished a show in a small theatre and we were looking for somewhere to eat. My trouser needs are simple: a narrow leg in a dark colour, with jean detailing. [on choosing to become a poet] You get to wear fine clothes and perfume and nobody pulls you up on it. First, theres my domestic situation, my wonderful wife and family. I believe he remained unaware of my poetic tribute. I have to confess that jeggings were one solution. It is merciless about Trump, but even so, you cant ignore the fact that even then he somehow still tends to come out on top. Was Jon the Postman the real voice of Manchester?Id obviously argue not, Jason. "Her writing has this effortless quality. Phil Spector is obviously out of circulation right now, but I am keeping the faith alive. AMRN At bloody fun and bloody games .

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