I Wanna Be Yours

Dr Clarke, not that he carried the honorific back when I first met him, has been an on and off presence in my life for over a third of a century. Hearing him for the first time (probably Twat, but maybe Kung Fu International and soon the iconic Beasley Street about which I once gave a lecture) what leapt off the Dansette was the power of the language. Not just the surprising similes and miasma of metaphors, the rhymes, the cadences and, beyond even those wonders, the power of the delivery. That his backing band, The Invisible Girls (led by Martin Hannett, who didn't make it), supplemented the poetry with a whirling, woozy Kraftwerky soundtrack made the whole experience almost too good to be true.

Reading his own autobiography (this really made for the audiobook format), we hear something of a familiar story. The odd jobs, the gig at Salford Tech, the Punk Poet moniker, The Old Grey Whistle Test and then success and lots and lots of drugs - proper stuff too that killed plenty of his friends, not that Johnny is one to dwell on such matters.

It's such fun hearing of those who come into his orbit, a catalogue of the 70s counterculture that morphed into the culture, and he has few bad words for any of them. To use a very 2020s expression he'd probably hate, he's keen to own his mistakes and is sufficiently self-aware to know that readers would guffaw at the slightest sign of hypocrisy.

But that stuff is a tad dull in a book that dazzles in its machine-gun sequence of 60-odd chapters far more than it drags. Martin Amis claims that writers should avoid dreams and sex, as the subjects are too private - well you can add the relentless pursuit of gear to that short list. We know the addictive personality very well and Johnny certainly fitted that template, as he'd be the first to say. How he remembers it all, or any of it at all, is a miracle.

It's a small price to pay for the cascade of characters and ever-changing flats and houses that this restless soul worked through. It was something of a surprise to me to hear about so many women, but, seeing as he was aware of the attraction of a dissolute poet to a certain kind of art school girl, he didn't need to try too hard - and didn't. He left a trail straight-haired Nico lookalikes in his wake (but, despite sharing a flat, but the ex-Velvet herself), but I suspect that one side effect of the heroin user is that most women had probably had enough of him by the time he moved on.

That said, though he demanded much of associates, friends and lovers and he must have been tremendous company not to have been dropped pretty sharpish. Even more so, people kept helping him out - fancy a Sugar Puffs advert Johnny? You wonder if he ever apologised to anyone, because he's not the apologising kind - and who wants to read a whole book by one of those guys?

Like Danny Baker ten years or so later (with whom JCC shares much), he carved out a space in which I found a small corner - working class tales, celebrating not wallowing in the possibilities it offered, conceived and executed with supreme confidence and humour and never a shred of sentimentality or apology. Like me and Danny, he also enjoyed a very broad approach to culture (no 'high' and 'low' gatekeeping for us) and "Luxury, pure unashamed luxury" the moment he could afford it.

I found a voice because Dr Clarke had shown me his - I doubt my life would have been a tenth as fortunate as it has been had I not heard the phrase "Like a sucked and spat out smartie / You're no use to anyone". Only Wodehouse comes near lines like that.

Incredibly, he's still with us at 76 and is as 'National Treasure' as it comes - daytime TV, school curriculum, Desert Island Discs. But he never modified his accent, never wrote from anywhere other than the heart and he still looks pretty much the same. Not bad, Johnny, not bad.

Dr Clarke, not that he carried the honorific back when I first met him, has been an on and off presence in my life for over a third of a century. Hearing him for the first time (probably Twat, but maybe Kung Fu International and soon the iconic Beasley Street about which I once gave a lecture) what leapt off the Dansette was the power of the language. Not just the surprising similes and miasma of metaphors, the rhymes, the cadences and, beyond even those wonders, the power of the delivery. That his backing band, The Invisible Girls (led by Martin Hannett, who didn't make it), supplemented the poetry with a whirling, woozy Kraftwerky soundtrack made the whole experience almost too good to be true.

Reading his own autobiography (this really made for the audiobook format), we hear something of a familiar story. The odd jobs, the gig at Salford Tech, the Punk Poet moniker, The Old Grey Whistle Test and then success and lots and lots of drugs - proper stuff too that killed plenty of his friends, not that Johnny is one to dwell on such matters.

It's such fun hearing of those who come into his orbit, a catalogue of the 70s counterculture that morphed into the culture, and he has few bad words for any of them. To use a very 2020s expression he'd probably hate, he's keen to own his mistakes and is sufficiently self-aware to know that readers would guffaw at the slightest sign of hypocrisy.

But that stuff is a tad dull in a book that dazzles in its machine-gun sequence of 60-odd chapters far more than it drags. Martin Amis claims that writers should avoid dreams and sex, as the subjects are too private - well you can add the relentless pursuit of gear to that short list. We know the addictive personality very well and Johnny certainly fitted that template, as he'd be the first to say. How he remembers it all, or any of it at all, is a miracle.

It's a small price to pay for the cascade of characters and ever-changing flats and houses that this restless soul worked through. It was something of a surprise to me to hear about so many women, but, seeing as he was aware of the attraction of a dissolute poet to a certain kind of art school girl, he didn't need to try too hard - and didn't. He left a trail straight-haired Nico lookalikes in his wake (but, despite sharing a flat, but the ex-Velvet herself), but I suspect that one side effect of the heroin user is that most women had probably had enough of him by the time he moved on.

That said, though he demanded much of associates, friends and lovers and he must have been tremendous company not to have been dropped pretty sharpish. Even more so, people kept helping him out - fancy a Sugar Puffs advert Johnny? You wonder if he ever apologised to anyone, because he's not the apologising kind - and who wants to read a whole book by one of those guys?

Like Danny Baker ten years or so later (with whom JCC shares much), he carved out a space in which I found a small corner - working class tales, celebrating not wallowing in the possibilities it offered, conceived and executed with supreme confidence and humour and never a shred of sentimentality or apology. Like me and Danny, he also enjoyed a very broad approach to culture (no 'high' and 'low' gatekeeping for us) and 'Luxury, pure unashamed luxury' the moment he could afford it.

I found a voice because Dr Clarke had shown me his - I doubt my life would have been a tenth as fortunate as it has been had I not heard the phrase "Like a sucked and spat out smartie / You're no use to anyone". Only Wodehouse comes near lines like that.

Incredibly, he's still with us at 76 and is as 'National Treasure' as it comes - daytime TV, school curriculum, Desert Island Discs. But he never modified his accent, never wrote from anywhere other than the heart and he still looks pretty much the same. Not bad, Johnny, not bad.