'Poetry is the shortest way of conveying something really big': JCC on Desert Island Discs
Veteran punk poet John Cooper Clarke explained how he’d been a fan of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs for 60 years when he appeared on the radio show with presenter Lauren Laverne on Sunday. He added: “I think appearing on Desert Island Discs has all the finality of a suicide note … I’m a coconut half-empty kind of guy.”
During the programme the Bard of Salford talked about why his poems aren’t political, was fairly unapologetic about his 1980s heroin habit, and described how he was inspired by Pam Ayres’s success in the TV talent programme Opportunity Knocks to perform his poems in public.
Political poetry? “Poetry is forever … politically, one can change one’s mind many times a day.” On giving up heroin: “You feel you’re doing it for society … everyone was worrying about me.“
His inspirations were Baudelaire, and Pam Ayres. The life of “an idle boulevardier”, providing poetry as entertainment, appealed to him. “It was the only life that I would settle for.” Watching Pam Ayres succeed on Opportunity Knocks, he thought: “There you are, why not me?”
At school he was “never a team player”, but he was motivated by an English teacher who introduced him and the rest of the class at a “pretty rough school” to the 19th century Romantic poets. “It became a hotbed of poetic competition … I was the best at it, that’s when I flourished.” They had to learn poetry by heart “Michael Gove-style … really, it’s the only way to do it.”
His first break was at the comedian Bernard Manning’s club in Manchester. Not long after that he was fronting gigs with punk bands such as the Buzzcocks. After punk, “I was always working, but I was doing smaller joints”. When he started taking heroin, “I needed money more than ever, so I needed work. The glamour was flaking off more and more with every job …” When he finally quit heroin, it took a long time to get around to writing poetry again. “The poetry I write now is so markedly different, so superior … I don’t let anything escape now, I love the stuff I write.”
He acknowledged that his fortunes changed after his poem ‘Evidently Chickentown’ was used during the end-credits of an episode of the American hit TV show The Sopranos: “I was coming to the end of the wilderness years … I’m so glad they took the law into their hands and used it. It opened so many doors.” Another good moment was one of his poems, 'I Wanna Be Yours’, featuring on an Arctic Monkeys album. The band members had had “my stuff rammed down their throats at school, and there was nothing they could do about it”. These days, he said “I’m more high-profile than I ever was … I’m pretty kind of mainstream … I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
His final thoughts on poetry? “For me, poetry is the shortest way of conveying something really big … I think I’ve created a platform … you know, it’s a legitimate thing to do now, to write poetry and to read it in public … a pen, a notebook, and idleness … the three requisites of the manufacture of poetry.”
His favourite pieces of music were by Garnet Mimms, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dion and the Belmonts, Ella Fitzgerald, Nico, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and Elvis Presley. And the luxury item he wanted on that desert island? “A boulder of opium, twice the size of my own head.”
