The first time I met John Cooper Clarke, he was wielding a plate of cold meats. “Let me tempt you with my fabulous charcuterie,” he chuckled. Who doesn’t love our real poet laureate? His Desert Island Discs last week was magnificent.
As it should have been: he said he had been preparing for it for 60 years. “Desert Island Discs has all the finality of a suicide note without the actual obligation of topping yourself,” he told Lauren Laverne. “I’m a coconut half-empty kind of guy.”
Actually, I have found him to be the opposite – full of old-school kindness. So much of what he said was hilarious, but more than that it was a brilliant exposition on what life is and what poetry can be.
His school was rough: “Put it this way: we had our own coroner.” But he also had a teacher who was into 19th-century Romantic poetry. He described living with Nico by simply saying she was poetic. I have had the pleasure of seeing him impersonating her singing along to Shake n’ Vac ads as she hoovered, droning: “Put the freshness back.” It doesn’t even matter if it is true. It is absolutely wonderful.
He was straightforward about his years as an addict. He quit slowly and gradually. Still, the luxury item he chose was a boulder of opium.
What came over, above all, was his love and knowledge of poetry, from Ramones lyrics to Baudelaire.
Learn poetry by heart as a kid, he said; while you won’t understand it at the time, it may sneak up on you 30 years later. Poetry is the shortest possible way of saying something that needs saying.
He takes it very seriously, this funny man, and still wanders around with his latest work stuffed into carrier bags. Thank God it is being put into books, too. His words matter. Nothing half-empty there; the doctor in full flow is a total joy.