John Cooper Clarke, the bard of Salford, is hitting old London town again next week with a show at the Palladium, a venue that still holds huge allure for the national treasure that is Mr Clarke.
“I’ve done larger shows, arenas, festivals, Glastonbury I've done a few times, but numbers of bums on seats is not everything.,” he tells the Standard on the phone from Essex, “The Palladium has been surpassed long ago in terms of audience capacity, but not in terms of kudos and class.
Lenny Bruce used to used to have a routine that's around a washed up comic, and his agent is pitching his final big chance, and it was an appearance at the London Palladium. In the States, you know, or anywhere in the world, the mention of the London Palladium would mean that you were at the apex of show business. This my 4th time of doing it.”
Yes JCC is a man who at the age of 76 is more popular than ever. One of the few famous people left who you can identify by silhouette alone, this is one of the great survivors of literary entertainment, who began his poetry career by opening for punk bands and managing to survive those environments by the strength of his look – a sci-fi beatnik version of an L.S. Lowry figure – the hilarity of his wit and the sheer genius of his wordsmithery.
As those punks saw, and as anyone in the years since has found at his shows or in his books, here is a man who shoots from the hip and the heart and never takes it all too seriously. He’s just a dude, and people like him for it; and more than a few have had their lives changed by him. Alex Turner, for one, who loved his work and of course turned one of Clarke’s poems into song from, with the mighty I Wanna Be Yours from the album 3AM.
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“Last time I was out in the States, Arctic Monkeys were doing a doing a show at a sports arena in Queens . I was just going to announce the band, but the guys insisted that I do the number I Want To Be Yours, which they converted into a wonderful song. I introduced myself and the whole place seemed to react positively. I was knocked out by that actually. I did not expect that that many people in Queens would know who I was. That was a real revelation.”
Not that he is too fazed about any of his popularity, certainly not spun out by being in a position where he has both rock n roll cool and an establishment respect.
“I don't know whether it's the older people dragging their kids out or the other way around,” he says on his cross-generational appeal, “I think being on the GCSE syllabus helped a lot. That introduced me to a whole new generation of fans. Alex Turner speaks about that. Without it, I think I might have been a legacy of a certain age, but thanks to that happening, more people than ever are seem to be into me.”
His latest book, WHAT, is just out on paperback and hit the Sunday Times Bestsellers list as a hardback, not bad for a poetry book. Ask him to analyse what it is about his poetry that is magic though, or what the process of writing it does for him, and he wriggles out of it:
“I don’t write it for the usual reasons why people seem to write poetry. I don't write for any cathartic purposes or because I think it'll make anybody, including myself, a better person. I don't know what it is. It has a kind of magic, but I don't care to analyse it because of the fear of it disappearing into thin air.
This is a very common superstition with artists of any type, I think. You’ve got to keep it intuitive somehow. I know it's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. Thank God it's me.”
Has he ever been in any kind of psychoanalysis?
“No, I kind of liked the idea of it, but I never felt I had any reason to, I mean, I'm the last normal guy alive,” he says, then remembers, “I was in a dope clinic 8 million decades ago. I don't want to dwell on it, but part of the regime was that we were allotted a reputable psychiatrist.
My psychiatrist was a charming guy called Morris. Anyway, we finished up just talking about movies, and he thought that apart from drug addiction, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me.”
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Dwelling on his own psyche is a non-starter, but playing at the Palladium clearly means a lot to him, as someone who was inspired to perform by watching some of the Golden Era of Showbiz as a kid in the Fifties. Watching Bob Hope at the Palace Theatre Manchester was the big one for him:
“That was a real eye opener because that American-style humour was not at first very popular in this country, not in 1958. People were very like my dad, who had a great sense of humour, but his favourite people were people like Max Miller, the ones who were an extension of the music halls really. I liked them too, but there was a great deal of resistance to the slick, observational American urban comic.
But being, an aspiring young man in the Fifties, I thought it was great. I liked all those American comedians, and I was a big fan of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies. That whole American humour really got to me.
So seeing Bob Hope... there was only one guy in that theatre not laughing and that was Bob Hope. I was what, nine years old at the time, and all these gags were about golf and divorce. I didn't know nothing about that, but even so, something about the cadences of his voice, the expression on his face, and the fact that laughter is very infectious, the fact that all these guys that were five times my age were cracking up and Bob delivered it in the conversational manner that he did... I was I was really impressed by that.
I remember he got into trouble. The Midland Hotel in Manchester was where any visiting stateside acts of any measure would stay. Bob Hope did a week at the Palace Theatre and the first night he says, ‘You know, my hotel room is so small that the rats have round shoulders.’
The management of the Midland Hotel complained and it made the papers. Next night, he comes out, and his first line is, ‘I got to apologise to the management of the Midland Hotel about something I said last night. Of course the rats don't have round shoulders…’
Are you getting it? I loved that, how good it is that you introduce something local.”
Well, isn’t that Clarke all over? Old school Hollywood urbane cool with a kind of British northern street wit edge? It’s a combination that turns out to be timeless and one that keeps his creativity burning. He wanders off to his study to read me some of his latest poems. I hear him rustling papers and naming poems he’s working on... “Aggro-phobia...that’s AGGRO... get it? Here’s one: ‘Edgy. We're much more dead than alive, I'm edgy/Didn't sleep till I was 35, edgy/Didn't sleep till I was 35 in a bed of nails on a gravel drive, edgy.’
It just keeps on coming and this guy will never stop, thank God. Grab one of the last seats at the Palladium if you can for what he calls, “Seventy minutes of righteous entertainment, something for everybody. Tell all your friends about it.
I mean there's worst things you could be doing. Sticking up a gas station or killing a guy. So just as an alternative pursuit, this is a good move.”
John Cooper Clarke performs at the Palladium on 19 March
