His poem " I Wanna Be Yours" was adapted by Arctic Monkeys and frontman Alex Turner for the band's fifth album, AM, released on 9 September 2013. About drugs, Clarke is both connoisseurial and fastidious – he has a horror of being ill, yet shooting up three times a day allows him to live “like a normal citizen”. John Cooper Clarke, the poet and performer who became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s, has said he didn’t want to quit taking heroin and weaned himself off the drug for the sake of society rather than for his own health.

and even if you got a stretch of park you just had to scrape the grass and there were, like, cinders underneath.

But, yeah, actors just sound like twats when they get all high and mighty trying to shame talk TV hosts, I give you that. And so far, I still don't have the answer but I respect the decision that this is how JCC decided to approach it. l am glad I got to hear the works read by the poet - it is always great knowing you are hearing the poem the way it should be read, and John Cooper-Clarks voice and accent contribute to the experience.

That same year, Clarke featured in rapper Plan B's feature film Ill Manors and subsequently the Ill Manors album. In 1987, he performed live (on crutches owing to a broken ankle) at the Albany Empire in London with Suns of Arqa, recorded two tracks ("Libera Me" and "The Truth Lies Therein") for their album Seven, and featured in the music video for the latter. As he says, whatever your view of Manning's comedy, he was a master at what he did in terms of running a nightclub and encouraging new talent - however grudgingly.The life of a useless flâneur, however, was not encouraged in the 1950s, especially among the blue-collar population of a heavy-industrial metropolis like Manchester. Once he realised that he could perform poems as live entertainment he started to work in local comedy clubs including Bernard Manning's Embassy Club. The bits of the book I’d previously dipped into were superbly written, but hearing the Bargain Basement Baudelaire read his own life story lifts it to another level altogether.

What impresses me the most about his poetry, and by extension this book, is how artistic his artlessness is. Yes, he's a bit superficial with all his accent on style and clothes, and, sure, rhyming poetry is old hat in a way, and he uses the same meter in most all of his poems, and he's so much better without musical backing (despite the talents of Martin Hannett and Vini Reilly, two musicians I otherwise revere unreservedly), but, damn! There were a couple of verbal flourishes which hit the mark, but also, if I'm not mistaken, there was a whiff of both homophobia ("Your Metrosexual Ex") and transphobia ("Crossing the Floor"). Product Disclaimer: Kindly be informed that, owing to the inherent nature of leather as a natural material, minor discolorations or textural variations may be perceptible.

When the teenage John Cooper Clarke announced he wanted to be a poet, his alarmed parents asked for examples of people who had made a living from it. What can I say, the 70's and 80's were a weird, weird, gloriously outrageous, wonderfully fun, utterly ridiculous era. I'm not usually one for autobiographies and thinking about it now, I think maybe the only proper autobiographical writing I've read is Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The first half of the book acts as a social history of Salford and Manchester in the 50s and 60s and it's a fascinating read and it flew by. The book's cover illustration is by Sir Peter Blake, which seems hugely appropriate, given that Blake is probably best known as the designer for the cover of The Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.