I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke review - wry and dry

When the teenage John Cooper Clarke announced he wanted to be a poet, his alarmed parents asked for examples of people who had made a living from it. “I discovered that most modern poets had to work as teachers, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, doctors, diplomats, railroad workers, tax collectors, publishers or postal clerks,” he recalls in his memoir. Even Philip Larkin “turned out to be a librarian by day”. His father’s feelings about these literary aspirations were summed up in three words: “Get a job.” So he did.

Before his beatification as “the Bard of Salford” (though he prefers “the bargain-basement Baudelaire”), Clarke was variously a bookie’s runner, an apprentice car mechanic, a cutter in the rag trade, a lab technician, a fire-watcher at a naval dockyard and a trainee printer. But at no point did he give up on his ambition to be a poet. Early on he realised that, in order to get paid, he would need to combine his way with words with live entertainment. In the early 1970s, he road-tested poems such as “Salome”, “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” and “Kung Fu International” at local comedy clubs (Bernard Manning was an unlikely mentor).

Later, having caught the attention of Buzzcocks’ Howard Devoto, Clarke opened for local punk acts, his spleen-venting, pop culture-referencing verse chiming with their youthful, up-yours attitude. Championed by Tony Wilson and John Peel, he went on to perform with the Sex Pistols, the Fall, Elvis Costello and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. He landed a record deal – his biggest album was Snap, Crackle & Bop (1980) – and published poetry collections. But then, in the late 80s, he dropped out of sight, undone by a heroin addiction that he had been trying to hide for more than 15 years.

In I Wanna Be Yours, Clarke chronicles his life from his early days growing up in a Salford suburb. A bout of tuberculosis at eight offered an introduction to opiates, with morphine provided on tap. Once out of hospital, he was sent to Rhyl to stay with an uncle and take in the sea air. There he spent his days at the library, the cinema or the local fairground where he first heard Elvis over the sound system. School was rough – “put it this way, we had our own coroner” – but his education was decent. At 12, he was tackling Dostoevsky, Dumas, Dickens and Émile Zola’s The Downfall, the latter prompting him to conclude: “Thank God I don’t live a hundred years ago – the shit that could happen to a guy.” At home, he would read his uncle’s Bond books and his mother’s copies of Woman’s Own magazine, the latter providing handy updates from “planet female”.

It’s impossible not to hear Clarke’s voice, rhythmic and deadpan, while reading his memoir. Like his poetry, his prose style is wry and dry. At nearly 500 pages, the book is long though the language is succinct. Mad anecdotes and whimsical gags abound, but wisdom often lurks beneath the wordplay. Clarke has his unreconstructed moments – there is jovial mention of “whores” and “nancy-boys” – but any mockery is at his own expense. He recalls a gig supporting Be Bop Deluxe at Glasgow Apollo, where he was met with jeering. He lasted just four minutes before fleeing the stage. “Like all artists I have a delicate ego,” he writes, “and what I require from an audience is a unanimous display of carefully considered adulation.”

Those hoping for extensive analysis of Clarke’s working methods will need to look elsewhere. “I thought it was better to write clever poetry about everyday shit than to feign an understanding of the entire world,” he says, by way of explanation. He is more expansive on the social and cultural developments of his youth. Indeed, you’d struggle to find a more comprehensive and entertaining account of 60s and 70s popular culture as he contemplates fashion, hair styles, hats, comics, breakfast cereals, magazines, domestic colour schemes and architecture.

Film and music were his biggest obsessions, however. Clarke was a regular at Manchester’s Apollo where he saw Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochrane, Gene Vincent and the Everly Brothers. As his career took off, he modelled himself on Anthony Newley’s titular character in the film The Small World of Sammy Lee, swanking around Soho as “a wise-cracking spieler ... I styled myself as the alluring silk-suited entertainer, slicker than snot on a doorknob, using poetry as my ticket to the Big Life.”

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But when the “Big Life” arrived, he struggled to cope. “Nobody can handle fame,” he says. “It just ain’t right. You’d actually have to be some kind of monster, a sociopath, for it not to devastate your personality.” Clarke had been using amphetamines since his teens but, after trying heroin, there was no going back. After several false starts, he eventually cleaned up, but by this time his career had taken a nosedive.

Clarke doesn’t deal in regret, and recalls his lean years with good humour. Lately, he has been rediscovered by younger artists including Arctic Monkeys and Plan B. His work has appeared on GCSE papers, his poem “Evidently Chicken Town” featured on The Sopranos and, Covid-19 notwithstanding, he still tours. “I’ve had just about every reward a society could bestow on a half-arsed grafter with a rich vocabulary and I thank God for my life on a daily basis,” he notes in a rare misty-eyed moment. Elsewhere, though, he remains bullishly unsentimental. “These are some of the facts as I remember them,” he says at the end of I Wanna Be Yours. “Any complaints, mail them to last Tuesday when I might have cared.”

• I Wanna Be Yours is published by Picador (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.