I Wanna Be Yours: John Cooper Clarke

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He was, inter alia, a bookie’s runner, a garage monkey, a lab technician, an apprentice cutter at a tailor’s, a trainee compositor at a printworks, a caretaker, a fire watcher at a royal naval dockyard. The final quarter is rather like a ship sailing from tumultuous waters into a welcoming harbour, as JCC talks about meeting his French wife Evie and his life of domesticity in Colchester with her and their daughter Stella. I would also suggest that if one does wish to read this book then it will benefit greatly from the poems being read out loud. At home, he would read his uncle’s Bond books and his mother’s copies of Woman’s Own magazine, the latter providing handy updates from “planet female”. He has produced verses that speak in an argot that enhances their effect, not modifying nor limiting their value.

There are one or two that read as mildly homophobic or transphobic (nothing outright, really, but I noticed regardless) and some that I maybe don't get because they're more specific to Britain.Familiar rings,/ I have to get away,/ Its breaking my heartstrings,/ We have a drink,/ On special occasions,/ It makes me think,/ About distant relations.

Indeed, you’d struggle to find a more comprehensive and entertaining account of 60s and 70s popular culture as he contemplates fashion, hair styles, hats, comics, breakfast cereals, magazines, domestic colour schemes and architecture.

They say about people in showbusiness, ‘They ain’t got something extra, they got something missing’. The unique people met from the worlds of music, poetry and drugs are pursued by high and dry anecdotes (in both senses), that never feel like names dropped onto the page to impress. I'd hope to be mistaken about Clarke's intent in those poems, but the others didn't take away the bad taste of those two.

One time, whilst with Nico in Amsterdam, he scores off an old, skinny guy with grey greasy hair and no front teeth. We do travel the journey of how JCC became such a successful poet and the people that inspired him, so that's interesting.

Before his beatification as “the Bard of Salford” (though he prefers “the bargain-basement Baudelaire”), Clarke was variously a bookie’s runner, an apprentice car mechanic, a cutter in the rag trade, a lab technician, a fire-watcher at a naval dockyard and a trainee printer.

not for everyone, but most working class boys or anyone who is not interested in average people and prepared to not to be told how to live. It is possible as a book I may have struggled but when I hear the author making his own lines sing I found it pleasurable. 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. Upon receipt, Clarke commented: "Now I'm a doctor, finally my dream of opening a cosmetic surgery business can become a reality.I think this is because he details a lot of social history, particularly in Manchester in the 60s and the lists of significant people who some of us will never have heard of get tedious. The book is funny in places and I suppose written with a dry sense of humour, I would like to have learnt more about the last twenty years since he stopped taking hard drugs. The second quarter, which has some overlap with the first, describes JCC's first forays into apprenticeships, the working world, and his career as a performance poet.