Dr John Cooper Clarke is on his way back to Scotland for a run of dates this autumn, including a show in Glasgow in October, before bringing the curtain down on the tour at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in November.
“If you’re gonna fall on your ass,” he says, laughing down the phone from Salford, “don’t do it at the Glasgow Apollo.” Clarke is recalling one of the more hostile nights of his early career, when he supported Be Bop Deluxe in Scotland in 1978. The Apollo crowd, he says, “didn’t take any prisoners”. Clarke lasted only minutes before retreating from the stage. “Luckily,” he says, “I got back on that bike. Within the year, he was back in Scotland, this time touring with Elvis Costello & The Attractions and Richard Hell & The Voidoids, playing to audiences far more attuned to the sharp, rapid-fire poetry that would make him one of the defining voices of the punk era.
Now, decades later, Clarke talks about Glasgow with genuine affection. “That’s the wildest town,” he says. “Fantastic.” Edinburgh occupies a different place in his memory. During the conversation, he drifts into stories about Nico, surrealism, and the strange cultural currents that flowed between Manchester and Scotland in the late 1970s. Clarke recalls that Nico, the former Velvet Underground singer who later became a close friend, spent time living in Edinburgh, also performing in the city, while involved with members of the punk band The Scars. “I can see why she would have liked it,” he says. “She was always very self-contained, Nico. I remember her from before the Velvet Underground, when she was appearing on Ready, Steady, Go! doing these strange folk-pop records with that deep voice of hers. She was unforgettable from the start, really.”
For Clarke, after decades on the road, cities become emotional landscapes filled with ghosts, football grounds, theatres, pubs, paintings and music. Scotland leads him naturally into memories of Salvador Dalí, whose painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross made a huge impression on him growing up in Catholic Salford. “The view from above,” he says of the painting, now housed in Glasgow, “really brings home the pain.” Long before he understood surrealism, Clarke encountered Dalí’s work through religious schoolbooks and crucifixes hanging above classroom walls. “It just made you look at the whole issue again,” he says. “From a human point of view.”
In conversation, he moves effortlessly from Dalí to Denis Law, from Catholic processions in Manchester to The Ramones at CBGB. Football, inevitably, remains close to the centre of things. When the conversation turns to Manchester United F.C., Clarke’s voice briefly becomes that of the nine-year-old boy who witnessed the aftermath of the Munich air disaster.
“There are less of us every year that were at those games,” he says. “So get me while I’m still around,” he adds, laughing, before moving into more serious territory. “I was nine when Munich happened and, you know, you think you’re going to live forever, don’t you? So when somebody young dies it’s a terrible shock. That was the tragedy of it. They were so young. It wasn’t like older people passing away, which you sort of expect. These were lads in their early twenties, some of them still in their teens. And then it was the suddenness of it all. You go to bed and they’re there, then you wake up and it’s on the front page of the Daily Mail. Some of them didn’t die straight away either. Matt Busby was in an oxygen tent for months. Duncan Edwards was touch-and-go for days. It affected the whole school, really. Everybody in Salford felt it. Most people in Salford were United supporters because Old Trafford is actually in Salford. The special bus service stopped right outside our apartment block, so for us it was completely woven into everyday life.”
He also lived through the era of Denis Law, George Best and Bobby Charlton. “Oh, they were fantastic; absolutely fantastic. Denis Law especially, was sensational. He was cool in the old-fashioned sense of the word. If he scored a genius goal, you wouldn’t see him hugging everybody and carrying on. He’d turn his back on the goalkeeper, walk back to the centre circle and spit while everybody else was going apesh*t.” Did punk feel like the moment where poetry could properly fit into popular music? “Definitely, there aren’t many periods in pop music where the lyrics are genuinely important. Usually, they only really make sense when joined to the music. But with punk, you could actually read the lyrics. ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, ‘Career Opportunities’, those songs had their own internal logic. The lyrics mattered; that’s why I thought I might fit into that scene because suddenly words mattered again. “Sex Pistols were fantastic and The Clash as well. Even the American side of it, like The Ramones, had social observation in there, little vignettes.”
Nearly fifty years on from that disastrous Glasgow Apollo support slot, Clarke is still getting back on the bike.
John Cooper Clarke will play The Pavilion in Glasgow on 20 October his tour finishes in Edinburgh at The Queen’s Hall on 27 November
