The Bard of Salford
All revolutionary moments in history inspire great poetry, the French Revolution had Wordsworth, the Easter Rising had Yeats, and punk had a snotty rake from Manchester called John Cooper Clarke.
Looking like Bob Dylan if he’d grown up on a diet of fish fingers and cold baked beans, his spittle-flecked, 100mph delivery had the amphetamine rush of punk with the salty language of a northern working man’s club comedian. Thankfully he wasn’t the sort of poet who wrote tortured odes to the painful beauty of council blocks, instead his muse led him up lurid and surreal paths to psycle sluts, homemade porn, monsters from outer space and teenage werewolves.
I wasn’t a huge fan of his studio albums where he read his poems over a rather avant garde musical backdrop provided by post-punk supergroup The Invisible Girls – maybe if he’d been backed by a funk band or drum machine he’d be seen today as a pioneer of white hip hop 20 years before Eminem and The Streets – but it was live that he really dazzled. His act was a cross between Pam Ayres, Johnny Rotten and Les Dawson, confrontational and full of piss and vinegar but funny as hell. Which is why it’s surprising that he only ever put out the one live album, “Walking Back Happiness” from where these four tracks come. This came out in 1979 on 10″ clear vinyl (another reason not to like CDs, they don’t come in different sizes and colours) but has sadly has long been out of print and never reissued.
I’m not going to go into detail about all these but “Twat” deserves special mention, this is a masterpiece of invective (aimed at Michael Heseltine appparently) which should be taught in a class on how to verbally tear someone a new arsehole:
People mention murder,
the moment you arrive.
I’d consider killing you
if I thought you were alive.
You’ve got this slippery quality,
it makes me think of phlegm.
And a dual personality,
I hate both of them.
Sheer bloody poetry, as they say.
Download: Twat – John Cooper Clarke (mp3)
Download: The Bronze Adonis – John Cooper Clarke (mp3)
Download: Gaberdine Angus – John Cooper Clarke (mp3)
Download: Majorca – John Cooper Clarke (mp3)
I was well into the Studio stuff, I think that the eletro backing is powerful on tracks like Beasly Street, The IT Man, 23rd etc and I loved Gimmix, I also had the live EP only sold it when I left the UK a couple of years ago.
I saw him in Southampton around 1995 so well after his high, but he was still awesome fun, spitting out the words at about 500 words a minute in his think manc accent, while standing skinny as a bean yet still topped with that massive hair – magical