The poet relates tales of his childhood, run-ins with Bernard Manning – and explains why he wishes Ken Loach would lighten up
Dr John Cooper Clarke, Salford’s favourite son, arrives in the whitewashed upper room of St John near London’s Smithfield meat market trailing a suitcase. He’s met the fish man on the way in who, like him, has travelled up from Essex this morning, so he can vouch for the freshness of the oysters. Clarke’s come from an appointment with his tailor, though you can’t imagine his sartorial instructions have changed much in the half century in which he has evolved from strung-out punk poet to alternative national treasure: drainpipe kecks, jacket with lapels as skinny as he is, ditto: tie, boots with a bit of a heel, hair with a varied and interesting life of its own, and shades. Today is no different. “The thing about that mod look is you can keep it all your life,” he says, from the survivor’s vantage of 72. “As long as you maintain your silhouette, as I have endeavoured to do.”
Clarke’s recent memoir, I Wanna Be Yours, provides, along with many other vivid pleasures, a window on the changing influences on British youth culture from Tony Curtis onwards. “There’s a solid tradition of working-class people dressing up at the weekend for a big night out,” he says. “Whereas the salaried classes might put a cardigan on and mow the lawn.” He starts off his memoir suggesting that its aim is to “fleetingly call up events that best illustrate the flavour of my existence,” but his recollections are far more precise than that suggests.