I Wanna Be Yours: John Cooper Clarke

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Curiously, everything after his rehab and recovery seems rushed or at least in a lot less detail. Which feels odd, too, because it seems it's these years that he's never been happier. Perhaps there's not much to say about happiness! One of the greatest and coolest things I've always been able to tell people is that, not only do I live in the town where Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Humpty Dumpty were written, but that the captivating individual that is John Cooper Clarke lives here. And when you happen to see him, in these very ordinary settings, it's a bit like magic. He has such a striking and inimitable presence, it's like seeing a Tim Burton character come to life. He's like Edward Scissorhand's older and more sensitive brother.

I'm not usually one for autobiographies and thinking about it now, I think maybe the only proper autobiographical writing I've read is Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Now I can add John Cooper Clarke's I Wanna Be Yours to make a list of two. In ‘Wanna Be Yours’, Clarke recounts his life from early years growing up in Salford, to dedicated follower of fashion, via failed attempts at a music career, through embryonic proto punk poetry to life as a household name, playing the London Palladium and residing in Colchester (of all places). When the teenage John Cooper Clarke announced he wanted to be a poet, his alarmed parents asked for examples of people who had made a living from it. “I discovered that most modern poets had to work as teachers, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, doctors, diplomats, railroad workers, tax collectors, publishers or postal clerks,” he recalls in his memoir. Even Philip Larkin “turned out to be a librarian by day”. His father’s feelings about these literary aspirations were summed up in three words: “Get a job.” So he did.

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The first part of the book, had me fascinated, since JCC is not far off the age my Dad would have been and so his fascination with the cinema and movie stars was something also that my Dad used to treasure. It feels a little like we're being invited into his world just a little at this point. It felt like half of the book was about his heroin addiction and his sourcing the drug and how he took it or what the effects of it were like. I know the book is an autobography and this is what his life was like for around twenty years, but I found it depressing to read. Again that probably is not the books fault but not what I want to spend so much time reading. Sideways glances on existence from a man who has lived a very interesting life. By all acounts JCC single handedly kept Pablo Escobar in hippos (I jest)

A lot of the poems are fun, if not profound, although they're mostly pretty sound (There, a little poem in a review for you, even had a rhyme) Every drug addict is virtually the same person. There’s not really much point in dwelling on it. I needed money more than ever, so I had to work. The glamour was flaking off with every new job. I really felt like I was selling my sorry ass.” The poems can be witty and funny, but along with some bitterness and cynicism and a lot of crudes and foul language, so it's not to everyone's taste if you are not aware of the poet and you are just taking it off the shelf. John Cooper Clarke honoured by University of Salford". BBC News. 19 July 2013 . Retrieved 9 October 2015.

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Clarke added: “It was a tedious saying among hippies: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I was very much part of the problem.” Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth I used to think trees were dirty, because when I was a kid in Salford you'd climb them and come off filthy, it was like you'd been up a chimney... and even if you got a stretch of park you just had to scrape the grass and there were, like, cinders underneath... it was horrible... [5] However, every so often I find a poem that I just love. For me, one of those poems was I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke. It made me curious, I started reading other poems by him and I kind of fell for his clever use of rhyme and unusual emphasis on syllables. Yep. I really liked it.