‘I Wanna Be Yours’ a memoir by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, 2020)
John Cooper Clarke is now officially viewed in the UK as a national treasure by virtue of staying alive against all odds and by being a consummate, albeit erratic, entertainer for the good part of half a century.
For the majority of his life he has been a heroin addict and this fact inevitably dominates this autobiography. You won’t learn much on how to write or perform poetry but you will find out how he managed to smuggle drugs through customs in the days before sniffer dogs and terrorist level security.
JCC admits that getting a daily fix has always been a necessity rather than a leisure activity and openly declares that “My entire life was more or less taken up with the junkie routine.” There is no hint of self-pity in this admission and he takes no moral line. In other words, he’s not one of those addicts who wants to warn others of the dangers of drugs; on the contrary he seems to believe that he would have become so successful without this artificial stimulus.
However, from an objective perspective it is obvious that his dependency has had a negative impact on his ability to write consistently over the years. After bursting triumphantly onto the scene during the British punk explosion, the first flush of success proved impossible to maintain. He recognizes that “Enslavement ain’t too big a word for opiate addiction”.
He only got clean in his early 50s at the insistence of his second wife, Evie. If it hadn’t been for her, you imagine he’d be living an arm to syringe existence somewhere or else pushing up daisies. He has already ‘died’ three times and been fortunate enough to have someone around to resuscitate him. In the title poem from his latest collection – The Luckiest Man Alive – there an acknowledgement that the fates are on his side: “I’m the luckiest guy alive/ I got a facial tattoo saying please revive.”
A lot of details he relates in his memoir are fairly squalid and become repetitive. Of poetry he has nothing truly insightful to impart beyond saying banalities like: “The main consideration is what a poem sounds like. If it doesn’t sound any good, it’s because it isn’t any good.”
He sums up his distinctive appearance by referring to “the perilous post-tubercular state of my physique” and judges others as much on how they dress as on their actions. There’s a long check list of famous people he has met or encountered including un-alternative comedian Bernard Manning, Joy Division producer Martin Hammett, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, The Fall’s Mark E Smith, Richard Hell, DJ Mark Radcliffe and Nico. There’s anecdotal stuff about each of these but it’s all on a fairly superficial level. He is not settling any scores in the pages of this book so, for instance, we don’t find out who the blistering diatribe of the poem ‘Twat’ is dedicated to. Pity!
For someone who initially set his sights quite low he has done pretty well. A thick vein of Northern pragmatism has evidently stood him in good stead : “I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss.” What has driven him over the years is a desire to be on the receiving end of “carefully considered adulation” and the likeability factor is in no way harmed by this self-indulgent but highly readable version of his life so far.
