It will be no surprise to anyone that John Cooper Clarke's autobiography I Wanna Be Yours, is everything you might expect it to be; rambunctious, alliterative, slickly rhetorical with more pop cultural references and detail than one man should contain and remain alive. It is a well turned performance in prose form. That the man, and the poetry, has remained alive is a triumph of the will.
His life story rolls out then in a flurry of words, puns, bad and good jokes, plus frequent and unashamed name dropping. He is a fan who has often not just met his idols, but also worked alongside them, with the occasional unhelpful interference from an absolute plonker of a manager. His memoir appears populated with cartoon like individuals, completely Dickensian character types. At first this was a delight to be with, after a while you begin to wonder exactly how long he can keep up the unrelenting pace of baroque banter. The answer would appear to be indefinitely. So you have to be up for keeping up. He is a performance poet renowned for the high speed style of delivery, after all.
We get to hear of the entrepreneurial shenanigans of his manager Wisey, his drug supplier Jackie Genova, and sharing a flat with 'the doom chanteuse' Nico. Whilst sketching a vivid picture of them all, its also a grudgingly affectionate one. He does in a way understand them, permits them there little peccadilloes, and is never wantonly cruel. Throughout this his private self remains behind the carefully packaged and practiced poetic performance persona. John Cooper Clarke is one of those people who seems genuinely to be always on, because he doesn't know how to do off, I guess that's where the drug use fitted in. He says he's no team player, a bit of the lone individualist. One does wonder what he's like to live with.
There is a touching grace and humility to him. He knows his worth, enough to not need to self aggrandise or blow his own trumpet. Cooper Clarke appears as the outsider poet, but is curiously quite a conventional, apolitical one. He is that rare thing a popular poet, who just about makes a living out of it. And now we know that it all began with the classic inspirational teacher who by encouraging him to write showed him the way out of Salford, so hats off to Mr Malone.
He has never concealed the drug dependency retold here in gaudy technicolor. He neither excuses nor sanitises it to make it palatable, nor gives it the glamour gloss of rebellious non-conformity. He struggles in the middle with his very human love and hate of them. He tells you what he enjoyed about his drug use, whilst also telling you about the financial ruin. What being a slave to an addiction will make you do.
As a lifelong fan, I sailed through all its 460 pages. The early years, the punk years, the drug years, the rehab, the late renaissance, its all here. If like me you lived through this period, its a reminder that even in the midst of the grim and messed up 70's & 80's, the north threw up gloriously unique talents such as Professor John Cooper Clarke.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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