John Cooper Clarke on touring with the Buzzcocks, meeting Chuck Berry, and inspiring the Arctic Monkeys

In this episode, Louis speaks with the Poet Laureate of Punk, the Bard of Salford, the Doctor: performance poet John Cooper Clarke. The pair discuss John’s time touring with the Buzzcocks, meeting Chuck Berry backstage, and how his poetry inspired Alex Turner to form Arctic Monkeys. Warnings: Strong language and adult themes. Links/Attachments: Book: Have It, John Cooper Clarke (2026) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/john-cooper-clarke/have-it/9781037404191 Book: I Wanna Be Yours, John Cooper Clarke (2020) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/john-cooper-clarke/i-wanna-be-yours/9781509896127 Advert: Honey Monster & John Cooper Clarke (1988) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ced-0BwY9E Poem: A Subaltern’s Love Song, John Betjeman (1940) https://allpoetry.com/A-Subaltern's-Love-Song Poem: Slough, John Betjeman (1937) https://allpoetry.com/poem/8493391-Slough-by-Sir-John-Betjeman Song: That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, The Smiths (1985) https://open.spotify.com/track/48veRDsAEBOJJnVnnabV99 Poem: Evidently Chickentown, John Cooper Clarke (1980) https://open.spotify.com/track/3bJxvUhRN4nJgab71HkIjc TV Show: The Sopranos (1999-2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/ Poem: TWAT, John Cooper Clarke (1979) https://open.spotify.com/track/0yEZiblovbuepAogvzSe2w Poem: I Wanna Be Yours, John Cooper Clarke (1982) https://open.spotify.com/album/2etRijq79Wz2U9TIy9ZpdM Song: I Wanna Be Yours, Arctic Monkeys (2013) https://open.spotify.com/track/5XeFesFbtLpXzIVDNQP22n Film: House of Usher (1960) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053925/ Book: Tales of Mystery & Imagination, Edgar Allen Poe (1839) https://wordsworth-editions.com/product/tales-of-mystery-and-imagination/ Book: Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1857) https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shop/books/the-flowers-of-evil-les-fleurs-du-mal/ Poem: The Man Who Didn’t Love Elvis, John Cooper Clarke (2018) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/john-cooper-clarke/the-luckiest-guy-alive/9781509896066 Poem: Salome Malone, John Cooper Clarke (1978) https://open.spotify.com/track/597ALlSF9Zz08DmYaTrKAr Song: I’m A Lazy Sod, Sex Pistols (1977) https://open.spotify.com/track/760CNZQRrfO7Dse1mkYVn6 Poem: A Cheap Agnostic Funeral, John Cooper Clarke (2026) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/john-cooper-clarke/have-it/9781037404191 Producer: Millie Chu Senior Assistant Producer: Maisie Ellen Williams Junior Production Manager: Rosie Pender Production Executive: Francesca Bassett Original Music: Miguel D’Oliveira Video Editor: Scott Edwards Audio Editor: Tom Guest Executive Producer: Arron Fellows A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hi there. I'm trying that out. Hello there. A few different greetings. Hey, y'all. Welcome back to the Louis Theroux podcast.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  In this episode, I'm joined by the poet laureate of punk and evergreen fashion icon, Dr. John Cooper Clarke. John came to fame in the 70s as a performance poet touring alongside the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Buzzcocks. His poetry intertwines humour, surrealism and razor-sharp social satire. All of it chronicled, well, his whole life is chronicled, in his brilliant memoir, I Wanna Be Yours, which I highly recommend. I read it, cover to cover, from soup to nuts, from foreword to afterword, as preparation and enjoyed every minute.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  His greatest hits, poetry-wise, are evidently Chicken Town, which was featured in the penultimate episode of The Sopranos, over a kind of montage, setting up the final denouement of the series. It's a bleak, dark, it's poetry but with a musical backing, description of a kind of dystopian urban cityscape. Beasley Street and his poem, I Wanna Be Yours, which gave its name to his book, and decades later found a whole new audience when The Arctic Monkeys turned it into a song that's now passed four billion streams.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  I wanna be yours. No, Millie's shaking her head. Through the 80s and 90s, John was a lower-profile figure, sidelined by an addiction to heroin, a period we speak about in the conversation. We recorded this interview in September this year at Spotify HQ. In fact, this was the new studios, Made in Voyage.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  I'm looking around at the new studio, liking what I see. It's so simple, it's classic, it's sort of Bauhaus in its aesthetic. Walter Gropius, you know what I'm talking about. Keep it simple. Form and function. I'm just throwing out random words, phrases. John joined me to promote his newest poetry collection, Have It. It's actually just written Have It, but I think that's how you might say it. Which came out in October. Do check it out, it's brilliant. A quick warning, this conversation contains strong language, adult themes and discussion of addiction. All that and much, much more coming up.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Apple TV. We all love a suspenseful TV show about true crime or serial killers, don't we? Well, Nocturne, the newest crime drama series on Apple TV, is a really, really good one. When a victim of notorious serial killer, Eurek Walter, unexpectedly turns up alive, Detective Jonah Lynn has to race against time to find the one person still missing, while his protege, Saga Bauer, goes undercover to get answers from the killer himself.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Eurek Walter has been locked in the basement of a riverside psychiatric hospital under six feet of concrete. But people are disappearing again.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Just like before.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Nocturne stars Stephen Graham, Liev Schreiber and Zazie Beetz, and it's based on the international bestselling book series by Lars Kepler. Don't miss Nocturne, a new crime drama series, streaming 30th of October on Apple TV. Subscription required.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  We're here because we have reason to believe there are more victims.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  They're here because I brought you here.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to meet you. We've not met before, I don't think.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  No, I don't think so, although I did meet your double once on a flight to New York. Yeah, I embarrassed myself, you know.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Did you? What did you do?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  I give you the thumbs up. I was walking back from the lavatory down the middle of the plane and there you weren't.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  There I wasn't.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  But little did I know that.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  A lookalike.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  So I tapped, I tapped him on the shoulder.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  And went Louis.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Simply that, you know. I didn't want to get too familiar. You know how it is on a long flight.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  You don't really want to make any new pals, do you, on a plane?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Do you fly business or first these days?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  I go business if it's, say, you know, to the States, eight hours and over. I would go business.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a funny story in your book, about which more later in the, in the episode, because I'm a big, I loved reading your memoir, I Wanna Be Yours.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Really? You've read that?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Genuinely. And there's so many funny things in it. I'm going to try not to geek out on it too much, because I want, I want to reflect, you know, more than just that one particular cultural product.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair enough. I can't believe how much I left out.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  For real. It's quite long.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  And that's quite a chunky book, isn't it?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a, it's an easy read, but there's, it's three, it's three, I counted the pages. Well, they were numbered, I'll be honest, but it was 250 pages before you got on stage to recite any poetry, and it was on page 300 that you enjoyed some success. But everything before then is just growing up in, you know, in Salford and adverts, movies that you liked, style, fashion, haircuts. It's a deep dive into cultural esoterica.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's my world, I think. I'm a scratcher of the surface, rather than a digger in the depth, if you say it. Style over content guy. Put it that way, I think. I look for the kind of the universal in individual, personal style and things like that, I suppose.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  I thought you were going to say you were a magpie of the detritus of the commercial...

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. See, you put it better than I did.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Of the commercial age.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's fair enough. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Because you seem to take huge amounts of pleasure in the, in the verbatim wording of adverts from 50 years ago.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Right?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  You quote one, I wish I brought the book with me. There's one, there's a quote from an advert, and it goes, and this was the slogan, you'll remember, and it's just the same word repeated over and over again.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Oh, it was a firm called Morton's.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Is it peas?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Who specialised in canned garden peas. Yeah. Morton, Morton, Morton, Morton, Morton, Morton Garden Peas. Morton, Morton, Morton, Morton, Morton Garden Peas. Why does everyone love Morton Garden Peas? Because Morton tastes better. Morton tastes better. And it fades out with Morton tastes better. So what was that name again? Morton.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Why do you think?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  The success of adverts.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  That was, see, that was a great, that was good right there.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Repetition.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  You did, while we're on the subject, shall we do this now? You did an advert to some success with The Honey Monster.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that was my first taste of the advertising world.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Not many people can say they worked both with Nico from the Velvet Underground and The Honey Monster from Sugar Puffs.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  None, I don't think, apart from me. Plenty of people have worked with The Honey Monster, don't get me wrong. Kevin Keegan.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Really?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, quite a few.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  I'm sure there were others.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  He had quite a few partners, actually.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  He didn't work on his own, maybe. He needed a plus one.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  He needed a sidekick.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Because I went back and watched it. It can be found, you won't be surprised to hear, on YouTube. Holds up quite well. It's surreal, it's sort of garish, lurid, as most children's adverts are, I suppose. Lot of wobbly camera. It's directed by someone called Willie.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Willie Smacks.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Smacks.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Great name. It sounds like a cereal.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  It, it, yeah, it does.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Or sexual abuse.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Sugar Smacks.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Or sexual abuse.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  In fact, Sugar Puffs had a rival, didn't they? Kellogg's brought out a rival to Sugar Puffs. They were exactly the same, but they were called Sugar Smacks.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a rival to Quakers did Sugar Puffs, and Kellogg's came, came up with Sugar Smacks, exactly the same thing.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Have you heard of puffer puffer rice?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. What was that? Was it like, it had a kind of Hawaiian sort of jingle that went with it on the TV, I remember, yeah, sort of. Oceans of energy, air, air, puffer puffer rice.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  And that felt like.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Why do you remember that?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Well, because adverts are made by experts.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Uh, trained in the art of fixing something in your mind that won't go away. So, you know, these people are good at their job.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  I was on my way somewhere, I've still got it in my mind, but what I wanted to reflect is that on the morning of, of the taping of your, uh, Sugar Puffs advert with the, um, honey monster.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  The honey monster, yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Uh, do you have to sign an NDA not swearing not to reveal who's under the, I'm assuming there's a man under the costume?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there is, there is. I think I had to, you know, go the, you know, sign the official secrets act on that one.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  That's big. Um, but you, that night, you had quite a rough night.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Oh, what went, narcotic wise?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, you were in the throes of, well, you should say.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Well, yes, I was in the throes of, uh, of drug addiction when I made those, uh, adverts. That's why the money was so handy.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Because I was an addict. So, uh.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Overdid it, had an injury.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Worried about, you don't wanna meet the, the honey monster like with a claret all over your face.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Exactly, claret all over my boat race. I know what you mean, yeah, but they had, they had the best, uh, uh, makeup department in the world, you know, they made me look like, uh, Johnny Depp's better looking kid brother.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  You did look.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Even though I was, you know, only twenty minutes before.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Covered in claret.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  They patched you up.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that showbiz though, eh?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Where I was gonna.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Showbiz with the lid off. That's what, that's what, that's your game, innit?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Uh, I like, I like, I hadn't thought about it like that, yeah. Lid on and off. You wanna, you wanna admire the packaging and, and then you wanna see the factory, bit of both.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Well, I'll put it like this, everybody likes sausages. Nobody wants to visit the factory.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  No. I wouldn't mind visiting, I'd be curious.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  What, a sausage factory?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Do you eat sausages?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  You don't wanna go to the factory.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Where I was going was, you said you, you were on a plane and you saw someone who looked like me. You've told the story about, um, meeting Chuck Berry.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I emceed for Chuck.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  He seemed to radiate a sense of recognition at you.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, my ex-manager was, I was, I was in Manchester just for one night. And it was, it was a long time ago now, I mean, Chuck's been dead quite a while, but, uh, and Tony Wilson, the late Tony Wilson, and my late ex-manager, uh, pulled up, uh, at the curb and said, hey Johnny, get in, we're, we're going to see, uh, Jerry Lee Lewis and, uh, Chuck Berry on a double header on the Opera House, in Manchester Opera House. So I said, what, tonight? He said, yeah. I said, uh, as Mr. Manchester, I'm, uh, writing myself as the emcee for this event.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  So, oh yeah, okay then. So I did a really good job on it, you know, I mean, I love those guys, I love their work anyway. So, uh, I remember what I said, how I brought on Jerry Lee, it was, uh, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Faraday, Louisiana.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Ninety-nine pounds of industrial strength, rock and roll, radioactive dynamite. The greatest piano player that ever lived. They call him the killer. His name is Jerry Lee Lewis.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  What kind of year are we talking, mid eighties?

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, late eighties really, yeah, eighty-eight maybe. So, uh, you know, that did the business there. And then it was, it was Chuck's turn to go on. I was in a crowded green room full of, uh, Americans, you know, people that were in, you know, that were, uh, on Chuck's payroll and that, and, uh, and Chuck Berry walked across the, uh, the open door. And, uh, he was ready to go on, I could see that, he had his, uh, Gibson three-three-five slung around his neck and he was almost doing that duck walk thing that Chuck was known for. So I thought he's ready, he's stage ready, so, uh, you know, and then he came back and did, did a kind of cartoon Looney Tunes double, exaggerated double take in my direction, you know.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  So he said, hey, how you doing? So I figured, at, at the time I was wearing, uh, I needed a haircut, so I was wearing a bandana around my head. So I figured he thinks I'm one of the Rolling Stones or something, I'll say, well, you know, he's, he's mistaking me for somebody else, how would I be on the radar of Chuck Berry? So I did the business and, no, I'm your emcee for this evening, Mr. Mr. Berry, you know, the great admirer of your work. I brought him on and, uh, give him the big build up. And then I, and while he was on, I went round all his pals, you know, and I was like, uh, listen, who does Chuck think I am? And, and they're all like, Americans, you know how polite they are. Oh, he knows who you are.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  He loves your stuff.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  You know, and I'm saying, well, you know, why, why would he? You know, you don't know who I am, why would Chuck? So I said, listen, I, I need to know who he thinks I am, because I'll be that guy.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Anything for.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  The likes of Chuck Berry. So, uh, a lyricist that I've long, long, long admired, by the way, let's factor in my oeuvre here, you know, I've always admired his, uh, lyrics as being, you know, I've always thought, there's a rock and roller with a library curb.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. We should talk about your oeuvre. Did you use that word?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Oeuvre, I did, yes.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Um, you, you, you, I love your use of language. You throw in quite a few Yiddishisms as well, I've noticed.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, from the neighbourhood, from the old neighbourhood, that.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  I found this quote on the internet, I'll try and credit in the outro, cause I'm not sure who came up with it. They described you as a poet who writes about darkness and decay, but makes people laugh. A human cartoon, a gentleman punk, a man who has stayed the same for thirty years but never grown stale.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I love the human cartoon.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're happy with the term poet?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely, it's what I do.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  But you have a rock star aesthetic.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Well, only in wardrobe, in the wardrobe department, I think. You know, poetry is not often found in the world of rock and roll, it's a, it's a contemplative kind of pursuit. Requiring reflection and, uh, achieving some kind of sedentary reverie. Whereas rock and roll is a, is a world of instant gratification or the desire for such. They're not natural bedfellows, poetry and rock and roll. But, but, but you know, you can find the poetic in rock and roll.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  If you refer to something as poetic, it doesn't actually have to be poetry, does it? If you're talking about any kind of art form.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  No.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  You know, if, if something stays with you and, and, you know, and you remember it for the rest of your life after the first exposure to it, it's said to have a poetic quality. But you know, you, you get that in the world of fashion, movies, rock and roll, you know, the poetic quality. But your actual poetry, there's not much of that in the rock and roll world, really. Although punk rock was an aberrant period in that regard, you know, I think for the first time in pop music, lyrics were of equal importance to the tune.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Well, you'd have to, you'd have to ignore Bob Dylan, wouldn't you?

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Well, that's sort of, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  The Beatles' later output.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I wouldn't deny that, you know, I mean, if you, uh, if you read those lyrics, it would come across like poetry, wouldn't it?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  You know, I've, I've gone, I've, I've, obviously I've done my prep, God forbid I shouldn't.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Blimey, you've really crammed it in there.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  I hope I have, uh, and it was a pleasure to do so, may I say. But, um, I'd always thought of you as a kind of a creature who'd come to fame, which you did in fact, in, in, you know, as part of new wave and punk in the late seventies, but you, as you say yourself, you, you were slightly older than a lot of those guys, you were born in forty-nine.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I was, and, uh, every time one of them, uh, you know, an old punk rocker kicks the bucket. You know, you get their real age. I'm the only one that didn't lie about my age, it turns out.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  No, but it was a, you know, I mean, it was a young man's thing, you know, you can't be a punk and over twenty-one.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Is that what they said? Those were the rules?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  A punk is a worthless.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Petty crook, innit? Or a, you know, there's lots of definitions of the word punk. A jailhouse catamite.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  It's, I think technically the original definition, yeah. It's someone who's been so humiliated and degraded, quote unquote.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  That is worthless.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  They've been subjected to sexual pleasure of the dominant males in the, in the, in the cell.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  So it's not, it, it's not exactly a compliment.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  So the punk thing was its own aesthetic that you happened to chime in with, or at least you kind of fell into step with having come up as, you know, part of the sixties generation. You talk about style in the sixties, um, and again, like, as we said earlier, you're known for your style. You sort of hit on a style in sixty-five or thereabouts.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Um, when you would have been fifteen, sixteen years old.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Sixty-five, I'd been sixteen, yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and more or less stuck with it. You said, in fact, you say, here's a quote, the way I dress has always been the same since sixty-five. My only nod to the whims of fashion has been in the hair department. The gold standard is Rod Stewart circa sixty-six, when he got a bit more messy, choppy, coupe, so vage.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  That's it. Yeah, I know, I would, I would also include Ronnie Wood in that.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Ronnie Wood.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, Ron was a big influence guy. I saw it in nineteen sixty-five, I went to see, uh, a group called The Birds, not the same ones that did Mr. Tambourine Man, The English Birds, pre that, uh, B.I.R.D.S. In fact, that's why they spelt it with a Y, the, uh, you know, because of The Birds, which was Ron Woods Band, uh, the kind of R and B moddy group. When they were on at a local club called the Oasis in Manchester, so I was a member of that club. Out comes Ronnie Wood and you could immediately see why they were called The Birds, because of that sort of crested hair.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Cockatoos are coming to mind.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  That's right, and he was a bit beaky like me, you know, a skinny guy with a big nose and, uh, messy hair. So I thought, well, he looks all right on it, you know, if, if I make him my kind of template. Where I can, uh, settle on it and ease, you know, actually, it's not that ea, it's not that easy to maintain that kind of hairdo.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  No, you've got to put the work in.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  It takes a lot of work to look that bad.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Did you, how do you describe the kind of poetry that you write?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  You know, in, you know, I'm pretty old school. Most of the stuff I write rhymes, not all of it, but most of it. Uh, so I'm pretty old. I see myself as part of a tradition, which is no, no bad thing really.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Who else is in the tradition?

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Anybody who writes rhyming verse, yeah. Sir Henry Newbolt, Rudyard Kipling, uh,

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Chuck Berry.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Chuck Berry. Do we, where do we go all the way?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  John Betjeman, that is my governor.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  I, I, I was thinking of Betjeman. You don't name him in your book, but.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Do I not?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  No, but it is very much storytelling, unapologetically popular, populist in the sense it's not, it's not particularly enigmatic, is it?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Well, no, it's populist. I mean, put it this way, uh, th- these are the twin poles of his fanbase. My mum.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  A cleaner and the King of England.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  It must be, it must have been doing something right.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  That's the one. Everybody loves that one.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, furnished and burnished by all the shots on.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Beautiful, beautiful. The thing about that one is when they mentioned, cause he, you know, he's, he's obviously a man from another time. Even when I saw him in the early sixties on those TV shows he do, or travelogues he did for Shell Oil.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Did he do that?

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, they were the kind of sponsors of these programmes that he did on ITV, in the early days of ITV. And, uh, wow, he made that medium his own, even though he was a shambolic sort of old school antique kind of guy. He wasn't phased at all by this new thing of commercial television. And, uh, he was terrific. But when he, when he did that Joan Hunter Dunn poem, the bit that puts it in the modern world, just that mention of the car park. Just give it that suburban resonance that was like, I'd never heard that in a, in a English poetry before.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Maybe most famous now for the poem about slough come friendly bombs and rain on slough.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Great. See, there's, you know, Morrissey could have written that line.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  I bet, I bet he's a big fan. I can't prove it, but I bet, yeah, I bet he is a mega fan.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  I read his memoir. We're getting way off. This is supposed to be about you. Yeah, Mozes, did you?

• 22:33Speaker 03

  No, I've not read it yet.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  It's a good read. He shouts out a lot of poets. I can't, I don't think Betjeman's mentioned. He, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll come back to that on perhaps when we get Morrissey on as a guest.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Well, I love his, I love his lyrics as well.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Do you know Mozes, that fellow Mancunian?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  I don't know Mozes very well, no. I, I, I met all the other Smiths, but not Mozes. But I love his work. It's fantastic. I love his songs. I love that line, I've seen this happen in other people's lives and now it's happening in mine. What a line. Who hasn't thought of that? Who hasn't had that thought in that? You know what I mean? That's populism.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Um, let's shout out a couple of your best known verses. Chicken Town is a big one.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  It's internationally famous.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  It is.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Uh, thanks in part to The Sopranos.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Oh, big style, yeah, absolutely.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Used over the outro, the end sequence of apparently the.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  The penultimate episode, actually. In fact, the last, it's the last time they used music over the back credits on that show, so quite memorable.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Would you be comfortable doing like maybe one or two stanzas? Probably the whole wouldn't be too much.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  What the fucking cops are fucking keen to fucking keep it fucking clean, the fucking chiefs are fucking swine and fucking draws the fucking lineup, fucking fun and fucking games. The fucking scummy fucking blames is nowhere to be fucking found, anywhere in chicken town. And then the bridge. The fucking train is fucking late, you're fucking waiting, fucking wait, fucking lost, fucking found, stuck in fucking chicken town. But when I first recorded that, I did it bloody. I did it bloody. And the reason is that I stole.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Instead of fucking, you mean?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I stole, I stole the whole thing really from, uh, a song, uh, written by a squaddie in the, who was stationed in the Orkney Islands during the war. And, uh, cause there was nothing to do up there with a guy from, I don't know, Newcastle or one of the main cities. And there he was in the Orkney Islands, nothing to do. And it was like the, the bloody flicks are bloody old, the bloody seats are bloody cold. You can't get in for bloody gold in bloody Orkney. And it goes on like that, you know, bemoaning the lack of facilities and entertainment in, uh, Orkney. I just turned it into Manche, well, where I was living at the time, Manchester, but it doesn't have a specific.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  It's not identified. You might have just revealed something that you've kept quiet for thirty years.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, it, it, you don't want to mention that it's Manche, you know, it's, it would take away its international reach.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Anywhere is chicken town on a bad day, isn't it?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Of course it is. Yeah, it has an international.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Why chicken town, do you think?

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Well, uh.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Why does that work?

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Actually, I pinched that off, uh, one of Bob Dylan's, uh, is it Stuck Inside a Mobile?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  You're revealing all your secrets.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, Stuck Inside a Mobile, uh, that, that one. What's it to?

• 25:23Speaker 00

  With the Memphis Blues again.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  What's it to you, Moby Dick? This is chicken town. That's the line. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, seemed like a reasonable name for a, a town that has nothing going for it.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  And they have it. So anyway, I wrote it bloody. And then I went to the States, uh, about a year after I'd written it. You know, I was just about to deliver this number and I figured, you know, bloody ain't a swear word in America. You know, it's merely a.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Description of a scene of carnage.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Right, same with inequality.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  You know, yeah, wars and what have you, bloody, bloody war. So I thought I'd better change it to fucking while I'm in the States. And then as soon as I did it, I thought, why didn't I do this in the first place? You know, fucking is miles better than bloody. Gets lots of bloody, you know, but fucking, that's a percussive kind of hard consonant.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Fricative.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Hard driving word, you know, anybody can make a mistake. That's why they put rubbers on the end of pencils.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  But I was right, you know, I wish I'd recorded it as fucking, that's all I'm saying. So that's one of my big regrets.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Uh, how did it come to be on The Sopranos? Did they call you? Did David Chase, is it David Chase, the big Sopranos?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, isn't it? HBO, David Chase, yeah. A great series. I was already a fan. And, uh, I didn't have any representation at the time, I have any management at all, you know, I just used to do shows that came across over the phone, over my house phone. Which thankfully, you know, always came at an opportune moment, you know, but, you know, most of the time I was broke. So when I heard that they'd used it, I'm, you know, I'm glad they took that executive decision and, uh, and went ahead and used it, you know, it's, it's only been good.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  They must have paid you a little bit for it.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  No, I don't think so, no. I didn't have any, I didn't have any representation of any kind.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  But they can't, but surely, I'm not trying to be mercenary about it, but I would have thought there's a, a small pecuniary advantage to be derived.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Well, as things panned out, you know, uh, I would have paid them.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Exposure's always good.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Don't tell them, you know, it's okay to tell them now, but I don't think there's any, no, I don't think there's any money coming from that, but you know, uh, uh, with regards to the profile, fantastic. To be involved with such a seminal, uh, show as The Sopranos is.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  You're on GCSE syllabuses, twat is another one. Um, and.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  That's not on the GC.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  It's not, I don't know. I've written it down. Maybe, maybe it isn't.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Well, it's a great favourite, yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  And I wanna be yours. And as a, as a part of his GCSE studies, it came to the attention of a young Alex Turner.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Future lead singer and artistic, uh, prima mobile, that's not the right word, but main mover of, uh, Arctic Monkeys.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And he said it to music. So that, that was another pinnacle, wasn't it?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's sensational that he did that. I can't thank, thank them enough for, for doing that cover. And it's not exactly, I mean, he's brought something to the table as well. He's, he has actually. There's a big difference, like as we were saying earlier, uh, between a poem and a song. Uh, but he's, he's taken a poem and converted, and completely converted it into a song.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  It might be his, it might be, it might be Arctic Monkeys' top song according to Spotify.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Four and a half billion streams.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Stop it.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Where, where have you, where have you got that from?

• 28:57Speaker 03

  I've got people who ring me up and keep me updated on that sort of thing, you know.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, four and a half billion.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust. I wanna be your Ford Cortina. I will never rust. I'll do one more stanza. This is me doing.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  If you like your coffee hot.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Let me be your coffee pot.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  You call it shots.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Which is a double entendre.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Right?

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Cause a shot is also a portion of coffee.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  I just wanna be yours. I wanna be yours.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Do you know what? I never, never spotted that. Yeah, shot of coffee.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, come on. You did, you're winding me up.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  No, I'm not winding you up. But I'm gonna pretend I did now.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Cut that bit out. It's in my act now, that.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Samsung. Nothing feels worse than coming up with a great idea when you're miles away from your laptop, an office, or even a pen and paper. Thankfully, the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra with smart tools and a long-lasting battery gives you the freedom to create anywhere. With a stunning, dynamic AMOLED 2X display, complete with Dolby Atmos surround sound, you can be truly immersed in the creations you love, while smart, built-in creative tools help you bring your ideas to life faster. Now, the creatives listening will love this. For the first time on an Android tablet, Adobe Photoshop comes preloaded and ready to go, combined with the included S Pen. Your ultimate workday, your ultimate escape, all in one tablet.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Head to samsung.com. Adobe Photoshop subscriptions are required and sold separately. Galaxy features require a network connection and a Samsung account login.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Let's talk about, you've had a complicated life, like, I mean, I know you've described it as, you know, a bower of pleasures in many respects. You feel very appreciated, I'm sure. There's been ups and downs. But going back, one of the striking things is, and I'm going back to your book again now, is you've got nothing but nice things to say about your parentage and family, although they're not vivid in the book.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  They're not vivid?

• 31:33Speaker 00

  No, they don't come completely to life. You'd say a lot more about hairstyles and different kinds of fashion than you do about mum and dad. And in fact, one of the lines, one of the things you say is, bear with me, "I was a mystery to my parents and they were a mystery to me." That's on page two.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Is it? But when I was sick, as I got, I spent a lot of time in hospital, you know.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Tuberculosis?

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, if you're, it's only a theory, this, don't, you know, don't act on it or anything. But I think, you know, if you're seriously ill as, as a kid, I think, you know, you develop an inner life.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  A personality that's, that thrives in silence and loneliness.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  You know, so I think that might, might have a lot to do with it, I don't know. But I read a lot, you know, I was, I wasn't, I had a, most of my life has been quite sedentary. So, which calls for a lot of watching of the TV and the reading of books and comics.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Tell me about where you were growing up and what it was like and, and, you know, your dad was an engineer, right? Mum was basically at home, was she, or?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, most of the time. She was a part-time cleaner, you know, some of the time. And then she worked at a high-class confectioner's and tobacconist for a while, you know. I think she liked to get out of the house.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you weren't hard up? It was like you were well provided for, but not living high off the hog?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Oh, not, not at all. No, no, no. What you would have called, you know, without any qualification, working class. You know, we, we went on holiday for a week in the summer and stuff like that. And if they were ever broke, it wasn't made apparent to me. About the one time, apart from one time where my dad, my dad liked to bet. He was okay when he kept it to horses.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  But they owned a casino on the corner of Salford Dog Track. And he started hanging out there for a little while, but I think he got in over his head to the point where our electricity was cut off. And, you know, the bitter irony of my dad wiring up entire cities and us having no electricity was, you know, I think it got to him and, you know, he, he stuck to the horses after that. And we never knew a moment's penury.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Were they readers?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  I liked it when we got the electricity cut off. It was before we got a telly on, I would have moaned about it, but, you know, it was before we, we actually had a TV, so it was quite fun, you know, with paraffin lamps all over the place, cooking beans on an open fire. You know, with my love of the, of the Wild West, it was quite enjoyable, really.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  American culture spoke to you a lot.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. That was all there was. You know, even in my teenage years, everything I liked seemed to be from America.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  What was it, do you think, that, that it resonated with you? Did it feel escapist or glamorous?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, glamorous, I suppose, yeah. That's the, that's the best way to describe it. Before we got a TV, I, you know, I would go to the movies four times a week and sometimes even more. And it was kind of my mum's movie date. Because my dad was, you know, he would be in, in the nest, you know, wiring the joint up. And my, you know, my mum wanted to go to the movies. I guess she thought, you know, if she takes a kid with her, she's not going to get mithered by any geezers.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Mithered?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, mithered, you know, pestered, approached, by a bloke. You know, because she was, you know, for a while she was quite cute.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  My mum. I know you can't sort of see your mum in those terms, but you know, I can see it now, now that I'm older than she was then.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  You know, I can, I can see that she was quite cute.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  You were whatever the male equivalent of a cock blocker is. Maybe that is a cock blocker.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  A cots blocker?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Cock blocker.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  What's that? Oh, is that what it is?

• 35:53Speaker 00

  You just stop the?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  To keep guys away from a, just, a guy whose job it is to keep guys away from the shit.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  I think it's usually the other way, like, why did you cock block me? I think it's used in that context, like, one man to another. It's, it's not, it's quite ugly.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  It is ugly because it's got that kind of penile dimension, hasn't it?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  It's the opposite of a wingman, I suppose.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that was her movie date, so I thought, which meant that I had to have an arrangement with her. If she came with me to see a cowboy picture, I had to go and see three, what they actually unashamedly referred to as women's pictures. That would be kind of frothy romance.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Kind of thing. But I even liked them because, you know, those American film stars, you know, they, they had access to clothes that weren't even in the shop windows in England. You know, so it was, there was always some kind of eyeball candy going on, on those, those items. So, yeah, I enjoyed just going to the movies.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Why, why do you think schooling you didn't get along better?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  I don't know, I'm not a team player. It was on all my reports, not, no team spirit.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  So I don't know, it was too loud, it stank, people were pushing you around the whole time, you know, it just wasn't the world that I was used to, really.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  It's sort of mystifying in a way, but maybe it shouldn't be. That your talent went, well, did it go unnoticed or was it noticed and?

• 37:31Speaker 03

  While I was at school. In the last year, it, it had become noticed because we had a very inspiring teacher called John Malone, who, he was, he was a real athletic outdoor type on, on the one hand, you know. But he, he also had this, that side of him that was fond of the romantic poetry of the nineteen century. And he infused the whole class with an enthusiasm for poetry and increasing one's vocabulary. It pays to increase your word power, as the Reader's Digest used to say. And he really kind of made that happen so that, and it wasn't even like, it wasn't

• 38:15Speaker 03

  a posh school, believe me, it was, put it this way, we had our own coronary.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Forget about it. But no, he infused the class, the whole class with this, so it was a kind of competitive atmosphere. And that's when I realised, you know, an epiphanous realisation that poetry was, you know, primarily a phonetic medium. You know, you don't, reading it to yourself really isn't the full experience, you know. So even if I'm reading the poetry of, of another poet, I would read it aloud, even if I was in a, alone in a house, you know, because to me, since that realisation, poetry for me is a phonetic medium. And that's why public recitations of my work is my favourite part of the job, really.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  You give Edgar Allan Poe quite a big shout out.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I love him, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got into him because of that movie, The Fall of the House of Usher, starring Roger Corman.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yes, directed by Roger Corman.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Is he in it as well?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  No, he's not in it. Vincent Price is the main guy in it. You know, he was in them all, actually. So I went to see The Fall of the House of Usher. It scared the life out of me. I was technically too young, but how old would I have been? Eleven.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  So I sneaked in for that one. And frightened the life out of me, obviously, you know, it's a very lurid and horrific film. And then I got interested in Edgar Allan Poe. And who would write this sort of stuff? So I went to the library, got Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. And then I discovered that he also wrote poetry. So I read his poetry. I was struck by the strict meter of it all, you know, not a syllable out of place. And it kind of had an instant effect on me.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  And then I discovered that Charles Baudelaire had translated, had put his own poetry to one side in order to translate the entire catalogue of Edgar Allan Poe into French. So then I figured a better look into this, you know, Charles Baudelaire. You know, he was my kind of guy. It turns out he was a bit of a, you know, flaneur.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, Boulevardier.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you know.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Sure, what, nineteenth century French bohemian dandy?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Careful dresser.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And his kind of views on poetry was, you know, he seemed like a modern guy.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  You know, he just wanted to kind of reflect the entire citizenry of Paris somehow.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Les Fleurs du Mal.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Is his big one, his collection. I don't think, I haven't read it, I haven't read it.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Oh, it's terrific stuff, yeah. I only know it in translation, of course. So, yeah, big, very important, two guys, very important, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Chuck Berry.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Elvis.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  You, Elvis, you've got a poem about Elvis.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  America.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Do you want to do your Elvis poem?

• 41:27Speaker 03

  How does it go, yeah, uh, oh, how does it go, the man who didn't love Elvis?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Opinions, it's like, something about opinions.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, what is it?

• 41:36Speaker 00

  I should have brought it. Shall I have a quick look, it might be, is it in one of these ones? I can't remember which one.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it might be, I think it's in that one, let's have a look. Because I have this tradition where I write an Elvis poem every August.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Do you?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  You know, on the anniversary of his.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Why does Elvis, uh, mean such a lot to you?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Well, let's ask anybody in the world and see what they say, and that goes for me double.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  No, no, the greatest, I mean. Crikey, the best thing that can happen to a song is for, is to have Elvis singing it. The man who didn't love Elvis, there it is, yeah, I got it for you. A sad sack sitting in a sickly groove. The band kicked off, he couldn't move. What was he trying to prove? The man who didn't love Elvis. The man who didn't love Elvis is not as other men condemned to miss the point time and time plus time again. From which benighted neighbourhood? Whose golden vision is a colour of mud? And what does he have instead of blood? The man who didn't love Elvis.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  When all his opinions fade to grey. Six feet under the frozen clay. We will forget what he had to say. The man who didn't love Elvis. So the pressure's on the guy who doesn't love Elvis.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Well, I get it. Nice, thank you for that. We should talk about coming to fame, that you put the journeyman years, you have odd jobs for a while, right? Do various things.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  I have toiled at many tasks.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Um, one of your early opportunities was brought to you by club comedian no longer with us, Bernard Manning.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, right, the first guy to pay me for what I do.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  So that's an important guy in one's development in this fleaky world.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I should probably contextualise it again. He kind of fell out of favour, didn't he? Because he did unapologetically racially charged, to put it somewhat euphemistically, material?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, absolutely, he blotted his copybook many times by modern standards, but he was a river to his people.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  He was a river to his, there are many tales of his extravagant generosity.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Right, and I think no one.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  His largesse.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  His largesse, right, his munificence, but also a bit like Mussolini and his trains.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see what you're saying.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  He kept the jokes running on time.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a very, a very modern and apposite summation of Bernard's position in the world right now. But he was a very popular performer, and again, going back to Elvis, you know, he was, he was very finger on the pulse in many ways. Out of time in, in every way now, but.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  How did his talent spot you?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Well, he did, I approached him actually, you know, and it went like this. I was looking for, I was looking for somewhere I could declaim my work, you know, and that place really didn't exist. And obviously, everybody was trying to put me off, but the idea of becoming a professional poet, you know, it's the only gift I have. The only thing I was any good at ever, even at school. You know, it was that or nothing. So I was determined to sort of make a living out somehow, become a professional poet. But obviously, everybody tried to put me off doing this because poetry has never been a recognised engine of wealth.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  So all my family were, oh, keep it as a hobby, you know, and all this, you know, get a job. Tuck your shirt and get a job. But I thought, you know, no, this is the only job I could really do with any skill. So I thought, who would my dad recognise as a northern bloke? With a degree of show business success? One guy and one guy only in this town. Bernard Manning. You know, and his club was the sort of go to place for people like my dad. Not that he was any kind of racist or anything like that, but, you know, he had other arrows in his quiver.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  It was a club that Bernard didn't just perform at, he owned it, didn't he?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  He owned it, yeah. What's it called, the Embassy? That's what he spent his money on when he left the Oscar Rabin Orchestra, he opened his club in.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  He had some business now, see, like, he basically owned the factory, as it were, didn't he?

• 46:06Speaker 03

  That's right, he did, and he developed his comedic skills as an M C, really.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  And, you know, it became like the main event of his own club, in a way. So I thought, if I get a gig at the Embassy Club. I went in the afternoon because I knew he'd be there then, you know what I mean? And there wouldn't be any other distractions. So I said, you know, hello, Mr Manning, you know, my dad's a big fan of yours and have you got a spare fifteen minutes? Any night this week? He said, why, what is it you do, kid? So I says, poetry. He says, oh, they don't like poetry here, kid, half of them can't fucking read. So I said, well, it's not that highfalutin', you know, and that. So I gave him two lines from a poem, a poem that I knew called Salome.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  And it's about a punch up in a dance hall. Predating Sophie Ellis-Bextor by several decades.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Right, author of, or certainly practitioner of the song Murder on the Dance Floor.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but this one was, it's about a punch up on the dance floor and it contains this couplet. When the ambulances came, she was lying on the deck. She fell off her stiletto heels and broke her fucking neck. He says, yeah, that'll do, I'll give you a quarter of an hour. I'm not going to say I was a screaming success on this, you know, it wasn't really my demographic, the customers at the Embow. You know, they were much older than I was and for a start, you know.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Plus, you would have been rocking a, a, a kind of modernist aesthetic.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, like I say, you know, I've dressed like this since nineteen sixty five, but I went there in a suit.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  You know, I didn't have long hair and I was dressed like I imagined a cabaret performer or a look.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  So you, you were able to find an audience and.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  In that world, in the world of.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  How, how do you want to, because you're out of step with the hippies and you've got a few things. Uh, I liked some of your phrasing about hippies. Your first wife, she was part of the hippie scene, could we say that?

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Was she Christine in the book?

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Christine, yeah, yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Anyway, here's the, here's the relevant quote. This is you speaking. I didn't like the clothes, the music, the attitude, the lifestyle advice, and especially the food. Think Weetabix.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Oh, Weetabix.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  I like Weetabix, but never mind. The disgruntled offspring of the bourgeoisie, irreparably traumatised by their luxurious childhoods. Back then, I was quite the little working class warrior. I was simply too chippy to be a hippie.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that, yeah, yeah, I'll go along with that.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  So then punk comes along. Tell me about, how did that all happen in, in your world?

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Well, that works in my favour because

• 48:59Speaker 03

  I was trying to make it in the world of cabaret and there was a, which was a flourishing area in, back in the mid seventies, especially in Manchester, you know, unbelievable uh, amount of cabaret joints. Uh, you know Bernard's Place, the embassy is a bit out of town, you know, it's in a a place called, uh, Colleyhurst or Harperay, you know, very deprived neighbourhoods. Uh, but I was trying to make it in the, having, having appeared at Bernard's Place, which was like the worst case scenario for a poet. I was met with the, the poet's, uh, worst enemy, indifference. You know, they just spoke, spoke to each other.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  At the embassy club?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Not hostility?

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Not hostility, even worse, indifference. So I was trying to make it in the central Manchester clubs like, uh, Fagin's and, uh, Sinatra's and, uh, there was a whole bunch of clu- clubs then, the Golden Garth. You know, I, I dragged my sorry ass around the, uh, the cabaret joints of central Manchester to a greater or lesser degree of success. And like I say, I was, uh, clad in my sonic suit.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Uh, I was doing all kind of, plus I had very short hair as well then, so I, I, I looked like anything other than a hippie, but if you, if you're if you have any memory of nineteen seventy five, seventy six, even the, uh, middle aged guys were wearing floral shirts and sprouting, uh, louse ladders and various facial furni- furniture.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, sort of anchorman Ron Burgundy aesthetic.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  That's it. You've got it, yeah, yeah. I looked like I was, uh, unfashionable to that world. But it was just what the punk wo- world required, you know, the, we're all if you're listening to that song by the Sex Pistols, uh, I'm a lazy sod. There's that line there, we don't care about long hair, we don't wear flares. So I thought, well, if they're the only two rules, I'm already, I've ticked both boxes, you know, I had short hair and I wore a suit. And then, uh, I went to see them at the lesser free trade hall that had been organised by, uh, the then singer with the Buzzcocks. Uh, a guy called Howard Devoto, who is still with us now.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  But it was him that got me involved in punk rock and he was sort of saying, you know, you shouldn't waste your time around these cheesy cabaret joints, Johnny, you know, why don't you get into punk rock, you know, you'd fit right in.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  So I said, all right, I'll give that a go. So I started going around with the Buzzcocks, you know, very around, around the provinces. And it, it just went from strength to strength. At first it was a bit la- bit lairy, but it just, once they knew who I was, you know, and that I was a regular fixture on the punk rock, in the punk rock world. You know, it be, it quickly got more, uh, amenable. So that was great advice and I can't thank Howard enough for talking me into that.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  You said, um, the celebration of all that was negative. Uh, you said everything ugly was beautiful.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  It's a good way of putting it.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, deliberately, deliberate ugliness, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's like br- brutalism, you know, you can see what they want. When you look at it through that prism now with the, with the time lapse, you can see that it, it, it, there was a lot of style in that world at the beginning.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. But then you say, uh, that also led to spitting at, uh, performers.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Oh, that was rock.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  As a mark of respect. So what would you do? Like, people would be flubbing at you?

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Uh, disgusting. That, that, it was some idiot at the NME or Sounds that, uh, that purported the idea that spitting at the act was a sign of respect. You know, because it fitted in with that ugly is pretty, you know, you don't applaud them, spit on them.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  So what would you do if it happened to you?

• 53:05Speaker 03

  It did happen to me, obviously, you know, but I had to change my wardrobe for a start.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Did you not tell them to stop doing it?

• 53:11Speaker 03

  It, no.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  What would be the point? They'd have done it more. And it led to the, my adoption of the leather jacket.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  That I stopped wearing suits at that point, you know, I just thought, you know, but the dry cleaning bills were prohibitive. So I got a, I got a leather jacket, simply white with a damp cloth.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  It brings us to this question of like politics and music and you suggest that punk sort of got retrofitted with a political message that wasn't really native to it or intrinsic to it.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I stand by that, yeah, absolutely.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  What's the problem with politics?

• 53:52Speaker 03

  With the politi- the politisation of something like punk rock?

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Or yeah, or art in general, I suppose.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Well, because art is meant to be useless.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  That's an Oscar Wilde quote.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  I, I totally agree with the, with the, uh, uselessness being the defining feature of all art. As soon as something, something becomes useful, it's not art anymore, is it? In, in general, speaking. I mean, if I was to apply my poetical skills to the endorsement of a political party, then it would be propaganda. Or if I was to use my poetical skills in the service of a particular consumer product, then it would be another kind of propaganda, it would be a promotional.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  So it would have a use. I mean, I'll, I'll tell you,

• 54:44Speaker 03

  doing adverts is, I'm better at that than politics because I've written poems for products, you know, jingles that have been rejected. And they're just too good to throw away. So provided I don't use the product's name, you know, they've become standalone pieces.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Well, go and tell me.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  All right. I recently did a, a bunch of jingles, took me a hardly any time at all, it, it wrote itself, as soon as I got an angle on it. My first question is always, is it, is it a thirty second or sixty seconds? And this one was thirty seconds, so, and it was for a a gin manufacturer. So I came out with a bunch of them and a bunch of jingles, you know, it's a thirty second lad, for instance, uh, um. When the working week gets under your skin and the afternoon is wearing thin, it's five thirty somewhere, let the evening begin with gin. Not going to give you the name because it didn't pay.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  There was that one, at the, uh, at the at the public bar of any welcoming inn, he's the geezer with the goofy grin. What got him into the state he's in? Gin. Chin, chin. Anyway, they were, they were rejecting all of these, uh, what, what, what was the other one there? For a night of unrequited sin, drop your inhibitions in the inhibition bin.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Take on the world and win with gin. So I had a bunch of these like that, so, so, oh, the best one was, uh, my favourite was, uh, from a nerve grinding red mist to the, the pink haze of the optimist. It's a short step from that to this. Oh yes, it gets you pissed.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  So they didn't like the fact that I was suggesting that it got you inebriated.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could see why.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  They wanted to promote

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it will probably, they always put that little thing on saying like, please drink responsibly.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Responsibly, yeah, so I wasn't really giving it that.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Bit of a mixed message.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Really taking that approach.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Well, this is the problem with the marketplace, they're very risk averse.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  They are risk averse. They're risk averse. Why does anybody drink gin?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Doesn't taste particularly nice.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Put that in the rhyme. Doesn't even taste that nice, drink my, my gin.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, not even with ice.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Not even with lemon and ice. It doesn't, it never really leaves you.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Still gets you pissed in a trice.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Fucking hell, man, you're going into business for yourself.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  I can't improve on that.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  And similarly, I took up a job for a re- for an insurance company. So, you know, same thing, yeah, three line jingle. Uh, but I got that one, but I had to rewrite them all. I thought, insure, I can sell insurance. What, how do you sell insurance? You scare people. Nobody thinks about insurance unless they're at least anxious about some minimum requirement.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Right, house burning down, floods, tsunamis.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  That's it. So it's, so I sent them a few like this one, for instance, uh. The banana peel on the high wire, the puncture in the spare tyre, the danger of a deep fat fryer fire. You need insurance. And it went on like a few of them, really scary. A piece of ice about the size of a pie hits your face from out of the sky. That's exactly why you need insurance. And they went on like that. They got more and more horrific as uh, as it went on, you know. But my thing was scare them into it. Anyway, I sent them off, expected them to say, well, fantastic these.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  You look at, actually, uh, we worried you might scare the customers off.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Too strong.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  So I was like, no, I'm trying to scare the customers on.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  But anyway, they didn't, they didn't like that approach.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  What's your, what's your process in general and has it changed?

• 59:08Speaker 03

  That's an intelligent question and uh, uh, no, it's just graft, grafting on it.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  You start with an idea.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I suppose so. But I will answer you in the same way that the late Bill Withers answered someone. The writing of songs requires a particular kind of magic. That I don't wanna in, get involved, you know, I don't wanna kind of mess with.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  You don't wanna cock block the muse.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It involves a kind of magic that he didn't want to analyse it. Out of existence. And I think that's a very common, very common su- if it is a superstition, it's a very common one amongst uh, art- artists.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  You know, I never leave the house without a pen and paper or anything, you know, I'm pretty old school about that.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Really?

• 59:59Speaker 03

  But uh.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Have you got one with you?

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Anything on it today?

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Not today.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  I know you're not big on technology. You don't have a phone, is that right?

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  I've got a phone in the house, one I don't have to put in my pocket.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  And, and, and computers?

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  No, I haven't got one of them.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  But there's so many.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  My daughter has and she lives in our house, so I'm not entirely.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  We're in the age of, um. Yeah, it's almost this sort of binary approach to subjects where everything becomes a zero sum games. Are you in favour of it or are you against it? And everyone's throwing red meat to their respective tribe, right?

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right there. Yeah, yeah. Shades of meaning and nuance are a thing of the past. Thing of the past.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  And then you've, some of the punks, the older punks have gone quite right wing. Some have gone or stayed left wing.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  A lot of them were right wing in the first place.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Right, the Ramones were, you know, were Republican voters.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Well, Johnny was, yeah, yeah. Joey was a Democrat lefty. The Jam, when they first came out, were uh, conservatives.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  But now they're the, now they're, they're the darlings of the left now, yeah, they, he's sort of.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  You've never identified politically in the narrow sense?

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  No, I leave it alone, uh, uh, entirely. I think so anyway. Can't, can't think of any.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  I think you're political in the broad sense.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, broad enough to make no difference, I think. You know, I'm certainly not party political in any way or uh. You know, but I think that's the, that was the great thing about early punk, you know, they weren't, they didn't have a blueprint for a better society or anything like that. You know, it was, it was sort of whingey and complainy. You know, without having any kind of uh, set of apparatus to create a better society. It was, it was nothing to do with that.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it wasn't programmatic. And I think when you're.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, very well put, that's the word I was looking for.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  When you're an underculture, you have the luxury of impotence.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, the luxury of impo- you're good, man. You're good. I like that, the luxury of impotence.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Cause it doesn't really.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, who cares? It's a punk, you're a punk, you're a punk. Who cares what you've got to say? You punk. Shut the fuck up, you punk.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Not, you knocked off a chemist chucking a brick through the window.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Fucking hell, yeah, I'm sorry about that.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  And stole a huge bottle of what turned out to be laudanum. Are you all right talking about this a little bit?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  What, drugs?

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, drugs and the heroin.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not an expert, that's the trouble, you know, it's uh, the last thing.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  You only need to speak to your experience. I'm not asking for any policy pointers or.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, rotten, really, in retrospect.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  What you're saying is at some indeterminate point, heroin somehow made itself indispensable. And eventually you were shooting up three times a day.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, that even, that's quite abstamous in a way, you know, you, you, that's the thing with that stuff, you know, you, you have to be kind of a bit careful. Cause every lot you buy, every time you buy some, it could be twice as strong as the last stuff you had.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  So you, you know, you can't be careless with that, uh, with the opiates, yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Um, what was it doing? I mean, I know it's such a basic way of asking it, but.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  What was it doing for me?

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  What was it doing for you?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  No idea what I was looking for there, uh, if anything.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  It was, because it doesn't sound like it was part of a scene especially. You were keeping it secret from, even your close friend Steve, you say, like, I wasn't telling him.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  He would have been judgmental, um.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Well, he would have been worried and.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Worried, probably. He would have been disappointed, probably.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Disappointed, worried, all them sort of things that I didn't want to kind of inflict on anybody particularly, but uh. You know, uh, sleep has his house and uh. And that's what it provided for me, a kind of a buffer zone between me and everybody else.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  I mean, I always wonder whether with a gift, like a poetic gift, there's an ancillary or, or a kind of symmetrical

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  downside, right? And a partness that um, allows you to see things clearly. Um, or gives you a distance that makes you appreciate aspects of life that other people don't see. But along with that, a sense of, I don't know whether it's oversensitivity, aloneness, it's kind of a romantic cliche, but there might be something.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  There might be something in it. They, they, you know, cliches are cliches for, you know, for a good reason, you know, they catch on. Because there's just a great deal of accuracy in them. But I think the main requirement, I, I think this is possibly where opiates kick in. Uh, the, uh, the main requirement of writing poetry is idleness. And uh, it's very good for that. And yet really the life of a junkie is not idle. In fact, it's.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Very purposeful.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  It is. Never, you know, never, uh, in fact, never an idle moment. Which explains why I didn't write anything for ten years in the eighties, for instance.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  You were dedicated to maintaining.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, my, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And uh, you know, and that's a very chaotic life. People who think chaot- chaos is desirable, I don't think I've ever, it's nothing more tedious actually than chaos. I don't remember when I didn't rely on routine.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, I like a, I do like an ordered life, but you can't have that and

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  and be messing about with heroin.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Are you tired of talking about the Nico years? Can we open up on that just for a second?

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  There's not much to really say, you know, we led a very, very sedentary life, you know, uh.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Well, let, let's bring the audience with us. For a number, what, a couple of years, you and Nico were housemates in Brixton, Nico being the lead singer.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  With the Velvet, well, she wasn't the lead singer. She only, she only sang on two or three.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  She was a featured singer.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Featured, yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  With, with.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Introduced after the, after their formation, really.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Uh, but singers on Fanfatale, one of their big hits.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, great, the stuff she did with them.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  It sort of embodied the Fanfatale, which was part of the mystique.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  But I liked her before she joined the Velvets even, you know, she was, uh, she brought out a couple of uh, records, uh. Before she ever went to the States. So I remember reading about the, uh, uh, an album coming out of the Velvets featuring Nico and I thought, oh, I don't know if it's the same.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  How did you come to be living with her in Brixton in the eighties?

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  We, we shared a manager for a while and uh, and she was living in Manchester, I was living in London and uh, and uh, she, she went on a tour of Italy. And uh, she had a few, few shows in Italy, but she neglected to pay her rent while she was away from her apartment in Manchester. So when she returned, all her luggage was stacked up and they'd rented her apartment off to somebody else. Therefore, uh, uh, her, her manager, who, who had been my manager. Uh, said, all right, if Nico moves, moves in with you for a while indefinitely. I said, yeah, sure, no trouble.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Cause, well, you know, we had met before that, you know, a number of times and uh. I'd just got out of a drug clinic, so it didn't help my recovery any.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  Put it that way.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Uh, so she didn't do me any favours on that score.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  But uh.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  She was using it at the time.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, she, she came back with a bunch of, a bunch of uh. Neapolitan heroin.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Shanghai Sally.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  You're lovely, yeah, the Chinaman's Nightcap. So I wouldn't at that point.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Harry the Horse.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got it, baby. So that wasn't much of a help in that regard, but having said that, you know, our time together, you know, she was, it was fine, fabulous, yeah. I was a big fan of Nico. She did a great version of a Bob Dylan song, Pre- Velvet. Uh, I'll Keep It With Mine.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  That's a great, I know the one you mean.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Beautiful, isn't it?

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes, as they say. Her version of the Jackson Brown song, These Days is also exquisite. There's still, there's a book been written about Nico in the latter years and there's, there's a couple of tableau of you and her in this slightly disordered house with crumpled tissues around and you kind of collapsed in front of a TV.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  I was like, I was watching that.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  It's like four in the morning.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  People won't remember when there was nothing on TV.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  There was no TV, so it's just a snow, obstinate.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, snow, that's like a blizzard of interference on the screen.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, the visual version of white noise.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  And someone switches it off and then you're kind of catatonic on your knees and you sit up and go, yeah, I was watching that.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, probably was as well, actually.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Well, we've got to arrive somewhere. Come on. Uh, where have we arrived? Here's where we've arrived.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Uh, what strikes me is this, is, is your book is so great and also that there's, there's a, there's a missing piece, which is part of maybe what makes it interesting. There's a suggestion of that much chaos and, and disorder and kind of brilliantly entertaining avoidance, if I may.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  Because given how much you go through, it's amazing how good you are at not making it grim and bleak.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Oh, well, thank you for saying that. Yeah, well, that's obviously my, my, you know, I see myself as really part of the entertainment business.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  And it's written in the key of comedy, but it could have been written in the key of tragedy, I guess.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  It could, I suppose, yeah, yeah. But I don't, I don't feel that tragedy would tell

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  the, the proper story, really.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  You know, I've always been, I can't remember when I wasn't able to

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  crack a joke or, you know.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  You died twice.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, that's, that's true, yeah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  In Australia?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, Australia, yeah. And, uh, only in retrospect do I feel that that wasn't, wasn't at all like me. I do value being alive. I, you know, I've never had a suicidal thought in my entire life. And I'd like to stay alive as long as it's humanly possible. I, I think that's why I avoid anything remotely. I can't even think of anything that I would say was a, would be a kind of interesting tragedy, other than the death of my friends.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  You know, and which is something that you have to get used to, but never will.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Well, and, and, and that's a helpful segue to the new collection, um, Have It.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  And there's a, there's a preoccupation in a couple of the poems with mortality.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  There is a bit, yeah.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  And feeling a bit out of time, maybe.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Oh, definitely that, without, without a shadow of a doubt. I'm like, I'm not a modern guy, no way. I'm anti-deluvian by today's standards, incredibly so.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Do you want to do, what do we think? Two Stanzas of A Cheap Agnostic Funeral?

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're great. That, that's, uh.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Go on, that's, that's right where we're at, isn't it?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  I'm very, yeah, I'm very, uh.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Can you read it? It's quite small.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I can, I can manage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Cheap Agnostic Funeral by Dr. John Cooper Clarke.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Me and my fading team in a gated accommodation scheme where luxury living is the paramount theme, Cohiba smoke and Oakland beams, sentimental magazines. Miasmic in the extreme with a fragrance to furnish any feverish dream. Kiwi polish and brilliant scene, senior service and shaving cream, standards, mate, know what I mean? Muzak backing up every scene for me and my fading team. Jack, those cats were clean, my fading team. Wait a minute.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Me and my cryogenic crew, Walt Disney, Michael Jackson and me too. The frozen chosen few. Enough already with the boo hoo hoo. In a thousand years, we'll be good as new. What's a kind of happy-ish ending?

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yes, part of the techno baron elite.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  I like, I like a happy ending.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  I don't think Michael Jackson is frozen.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  I think he is, isn't he?

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  I'll check that. What about this, though? Here's it, here, this is you. Looking back on it now, I see that although I like to think I've led a charmed life, I never took the safe route. I always thought it might not be good right now, but it's going to pay off later. This gets me that. And every time I've been proved right in the fullness of time.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Deferred gratification, huh? That's an old fashioned concept, isn't it?

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, quite religious.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Certainly not rock and roll concept, huh?

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Live fast, die old.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Yep. Slow down, die old. Leave a lousy looking corpse.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, leave a wrinkly corpse.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's my, uh, limited ambition from now on.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  Nice one. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Hey, no, it's been, I hope you've got enough.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure we've got loads.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Well, I'm gonna say to you what I say to everybody that interviews me.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  And you're no exception, Louis. Don't make me look like a cunt.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  That's it. I'll do my best.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  Is it a deal?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Deal.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  Shake on it.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Shake on it, yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  I know I can trust you.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  And welcome back. Wanna be yours. I'm better in the higher registers. Wanna be yours. I haven't dialed it in, it's early. Check out his new collection, Have It, and of course, I Want to Be Yours, the book. One of the great things about John's book is his, his love of language, um, using terms you might not even, I hadn't heard before. You know, it's, it's, it's often, it's not money, it's shrapnel or Kipling or just phrases that make you laugh. I literally laughed out loud several times reading the book, which for me is a lot. So yes, Millie said afterwards, I was showing off um, peacocking about word long words.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe that's true. Sometimes you just, you're just like your kids in the playground, you know, showing each other your shiny words. I just threw in munificence at one point for no very good reason.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  I don't think it even worked in the comments.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  It wasn't even funny. It's not even a cool word. It's a stupid Latinate word. Um, John's one of those people who think, I would love to have him as a friend, right? And, but we didn't swap numbers and I generally don't do that. If you're coming on the podcast, don't ask me for my number. It's gonna be awkward. I don't want to be your friend. That's a joke. John's Sugar Puffs advert is still up on YouTube, not still, it hasn't been up since he recorded it in like eight, the early eighties, but it's been put up on YouTube and you can watch it and it's very amusing. There's a bit where he gets knocked into something and then they've created these spindly arms and legs, like there's some puppeteering going on. It's just a very weird mashup.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Um, and massive props to John for running with my dimly remembered puffer puffer rice reference. From nowhere, he conjured up, uh, fragments of the original advert. I Googled puffer puffer rice, like it was decommissioned as a cereal sometime in the mid seventies. I think they figured out it had less nutritional value than styrofoam peanuts. Right? He's got this amazing, almost, is it an eidetic memory? Like this memory for, um,

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  the detritus, the culture. Anyway, I said that to him in the chat, his amazing recollection of everything that was on TV. He must have been watching a lot of TV. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com/resources. Thanks for sticking around. Until next week.