The Time I Sort of Saw John Cooper Clarke
I Think I Heard My Name
Down here in the South Pacific, you sometimes wait years, decades even, to see a favourite artist. So, when they turn up, it is great to bag that ticket and re-listen to those album tracks in readiness for the night.
So, it was in 2012 when John Cooper Clarke (JCC) finally got to these shores. I had the ticket, the mates, and the homework listening done. It was a double act with Clash behind the scenes insider Johnny Greene. He was on a raconteur tour, the stories, the anecdotes of being with the only band that mattered.
In a busy venue with mates to catch up and craft ale to drink, it was more just cockney geezer blather in the background. The stories were probably good, but to hold an audience of 300 odd for any length of time? Maybe not. Not me, anyway; on my early gig high, the craic was good. My mates were good company, but on this 7% ale, everyone was my mate, and I was having great conversations, like, what a rapport with this guy I had just met like I had known him years. Another pint? Yes!
JCC burst onto the scene alongside the punk and post-punk scene. He was drug-cool-thin and a man of words. The Ronnie Wood hair, the Lou Reed shades, and the mouth of a Manchester punk. A torrent of words and vocab all packaged up as the punk poet. In some student flat somewhere, someone put on the album ‘Snap, Crackle & Bop,’ when it got to the greatest put-down song rant ever: Twat I was sold.
These lines have never left me: ‘Like a recently disinfected shithouse / you’re clean round the bend.’ Absolute mad genius. Most people now know him from the indie poem of choice for weddings, ‘I Wanna Be Yours,’ which I have read myself for a happy couple.
It lists in a marvelous poetical form why the antagonist narrator should be the attachment of choice for the chosen partner. More recently, it got the cover treatment from the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ with a moody film noir soundtrack treatment.
Other early delights include: ‘I Don’t Want to be Nice’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown,’ where the word cleverness and simple music backing elevates the spoken word to unbridled joy.
He did have a dark and melancholy side which produced what I regard as his best work. ‘Beasley Street’ is misery wrought large on Thatcher’s Britain. It is unremittingly bleak as he relates life for the leftover and forgotten. It is a nearly seven-minute opus with understated backing. It is apt that Joy Division luminary Martin Hannett produces the album and features Manchester maestro Pete Shelley on guitar.
In a late-career coda, his mate Hugh Cornwell discovered a little-known baritone sing voice and put JCC to work in the studio for a set of covers from their formative days. The standout is ‘Johnny Remember Me,’ one of those 1950s murder ballads. The video is a gothic mist and moody hoot with Hugh as the straight-man chauffeur. For odd fun is MacArthur Park with an even odder video of cake making.
Back to Wellington and 2012. The lighting changed, and folks were moving into the stage area … standing up was an unsteady wobble, but I was ready and headed in. The thin-legged vocal legend was up on the mike doing his customary read-out of all names who had brought tickets. What a personal touch to hear the Mancunian accent dash through the roll call. I think I heard my name.
I was heading back for the door for some fresh air. That 7% ale had hit like a ton of bricks. Just a walk around the block, and I’ll be back in soon. One circuit completed no better. I could go back in or carry on walking to the railway station and the sanctuary of home …
I think I heard my name …
