Elvis talks about John Cooper Clarke
A life of rhyme: John Cooper Clarke, the 'punk Poet Laureate', grants Robert Chalmers his first major interview in more than 20 years
Who'd be the 'punk Poet Laureate'? There's the heroin addiction, the gobbing hecklers, not to mention the cold shoulder from the literary establishment. In his first major interview for two decades, John Cooper Clarke delivers chapter and verse about life with Nico, 'keeping the dream alive' in Milton Keynes and being mistaken for Ronnie Wood
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"On one tour," Elvis Costello recalls, "he went on between Richard Hell and the Voidoids and ourselves. The fury of the crowds was quite alarming at that time. They spat and yelled at John because he was only speaking. What he did was extremely brave, especially for a self-confessed coward." ("My family crest," Cooper Clarke once remarked, "is four white feathers on a yellow streak.")
"His saving grace," Costello adds, "was that he was really fucking funny."
In his autobiography The Big Wheel, Elvis Costello's former bass player Bruce Thomas recalls an incident in Copenhagen during which Cooper Clarke's hotel room had been trashed. Costello's musicians debated where to dump the pillow case in which they'd hidden the shattered glass from a picture frame above the poet's bed.
"The hotel roof is decided on," Thomas wrote, "but the parcel needs a warning message. The wording is discussed. Danger? Broken Glass? No."
The poet, Elvis Costello recalls, taking up the story, eventually appeared and announced that he'd left a sign reading: 'Beware. Shards.'"
That last word, Costello says, "was rendered hilarious by his voice in a way which is just impossible to replicate in print. I think," he continues, "this might be why he is not greatly regarded by literary snobs. They may appreciate 'a voice' when it comes from 'the underclass', and they can indecently patronise it; but do they ever recognise 'a delivery', as in performance? I believe that John should be regarded as being among the very best writers in Britain. He is oddly close to the kind of absurdity and brutal detail you find in 1960s writers such as Waterhouse, Sillitoe an Braine. As for people who sneer at him as a performance poet – didn't Homer declaim?"
