posted on 23 Feb 2017

Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt and other poems by John Cooper Clarke

My time spent in punk music venues in the second half of the 1970s produced a number of moments I’ll never forget. Seeing the Clash perform live in 1977, Patti Smith at the Birmingham Odeon, The Jam at Barbarella’s – all of them etched into my mind. But I still think the most extraordinary performance I witnessed from that period was John Cooper Clarke performing poetry as the opening act for a band I can no longer even remember. It really was remarkable to see this stick-thin Bob- Dylan-circa-1966 look-alike amble on stage and do performance poetry to a near riotous mob of punk music aficionados who simply wanted him to go away. I, however, was transfixed – and not just by his brass-neck. This was ‘poetry’ like I’d never heard it before, delivered in an exaggerated Salford accent, syncopated to some mysterious internal rhythm only he could hear and which rolled language around, turned it inside out and made you yelp with sudden joy.

Thinking back, I am pretty sure this was my first encounter with what we would now call ‘performance’ or even ‘slam’ poetry – the closest I’d come to this before was seeing Adrian Mitchell performing his anti-war, anti-establishment poetry but Cooper Clarke made even this enfant terrible of the poetry world look mild mannered. He performed, on the two or three times I saw him, without the backing of a band but he went on to record his material with the help of the wonderful Invisible Girls who, I think, really understood what he was trying to do and produced wonderful sonic backdrops to Clarke’s often sordid domestic dramas.

Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt published by Arena Books as a paperback original in 1983 captures much of Clarke’s early material and adds a number that were never recorded and I never heard him perform. I think it really helps to have heard Clarke in public performance because it helps to shape the way you read the poems – it’s much easier to identify the ironies and to capture the disgust when you can fill in the tone and delivery that marks his work out as unique.

Cooper Clarke’s urban landscapes and the bizarre characters that populate the poems are often treated with a sort of sardonic humour that can sometimes disguise the subtlety of the observation. This is the poet as voyeur – a watcher of the collective and individual follies of ordinary people often leading extraordinary lives. There’s nothing simplistic however about Clarke’s gaze and he often takes on big social issues - Beezley Street is a visceral,  insightful and sensitive portrayal of endemic, grinding poverty and I Married A Monster From Outer Space confronts the irrationality of prejudice. Religion, the press and fitness fanatics all come under scrutiny and his take on the perpetual push by the media for the return of the death penalty, Suspended Sentence, is positively sinister.

As an added extra, this collection has been illustrated by the Northern Irish artist, Steve Maguire. The enigmatic grey-tones of his drawings have a slightly surreal feel and sit neatly alongside Cooper Clarke’s creations.

I read and re-read these over the course of a couple of days and I find Clarke’s words and phrases popping up in my own speech with monotonous regularity. Life and drugs took him out of the public eye for quite a long time but he’s recently had something of a renaissance – appearances on television and BBC radio presentation have introduced him to a new audience. However, for me, this was John Cooper Clarke in his pomp and if you want to see creativity running riot, get hold of a copy of this.

 

Terry Potter

February 2017