John Cooper Clarke: “I love John Betjeman. He seemed to be the only poet my mother was interested in"

“You’re a dedicated follower of toil, working on a Saturday, John,” I jest.

“That’s above and beyond the call,” John Cooper Clarke laughs, “your attitude has been noted.”

There was a long gap between John’s first anthology, Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt, in 1983, and The Luckiest Guy Alive in 2018. But since then, the pace has really picked up – there was his memoir I Wanna Be Yours in 2020, another poetry collection, What in 2024, and now the eagerly awaited Have It.

“Well,” John considers, “I’m under the clock. The later it gets, the more urgent things become. That memoir is about a yard thick, and I can’t believe what I left out.”

“There’ll be a second volume?” I wonder.

“There’s got to be, if only to apologise,” he shoots back.

“The subterranean version,” I counter.

“I’m a reformed character,” he attests.

Let’s talk about Have It, Clarke’s upcoming poetry collection. The press release describes it as ‘facing mortality head on’.

“In all seriousness,” John expands, “there is a few in there inspired by the subject of death. I mean, most of my friends have seemed to die within a week of each other.”

“Oh no,” I say, the joke suddenly knocked out of the room.

“Well, that comes with the territory,” he expresses. “Thank God I lived this long for that to happen.”

One name I was sad to see come up was John’s old mucker Johnny Green – the great Clash road manager, co-author of A Riot Of Our Own, that brilliantly unruly inside account of life on the road with The Clash, and later, for years, Clarke’s travelling companion and foil.

“That’s the main thing  I’m talking about here, obviously,” John says. “I haven’t got enough years to get over that. There’s one particular poem that’s haunted by him. I’m sure you’ll notice when I deliver this number at the Olympia on the 12th of November. It’s called ‘A Cheap Agnostic Funeral’.”

And hopefully there’ll be room for “Il Douchebag” too – if only for the line “Don’t let Mussolini muscle in”. It’s classic Clarke: comic, musical, politically barbed, and somehow instantly memorable.

“Can you recite a bit of ‘The Idiocy Of Rural Life’?” I request.

“The copyright, Karl Marx,” he laughs, before giving me the line – ‘That country pub has clearly had its day. They’re crying out for a car park, and it’s standing in the way’.”

“Killer line,” John adds, then asks, “How did you know about that?”

“You listed some of the new titles on a recent podcast,” I tell him. “And being a rural man myself, that one naturally jumped out. In fact, I was down the pub last night telling someone I was talking to you, and they said, ‘Tell him John Betjeman lived in our hometown.’”

“Did he?” John queries, sounding genuinely taken aback. “What is your hometown?”

“That is a good question, John,” I say, existentially, “but it’s called Mullingar.”

There follows a long pause – the kind of pause in which you can almost hear John trying to place the great man of English letters, Sir John Betjeman, standing outside a Midlands SuperValu.

“John Betjeman lived there?” he says at last. “Has he got some kind of Anglo-Irish connection with the joint?”
“He was staying with the Pakenhams at Tullynally Castle,” I explain. “The ancestral home of the Earls of Longford.”

“Alright, yeah,” Clarke ponders. “That sort of makes sense. He’s from the upper crust, isn’t he? Sir John.”

I tell him that, even more bizarrely, one of the first poems Betjeman ever printed was done by our local paper, the Westmeath Examiner – still going – and that he published it under the name Epsilon.

“Oh, how interesting,” he says, audibly tickled by this unexpected Mullingar-Betjeman detour. “I love John Betjeman, but I didn’t know any of this. Obviously, I think he’s one of the greatest. He seemed to be the only poet my mother was interested in. She used to get books of his stuff out at the library. I think because of those ITV shows that he did, those financed by Shell Oil.”

“He was a real natural for the television,” John continues. “He was completely unperturbed by this new hot media of television, and because of that, because he managed to maintain his personality with the film crew around him, I think that won him a lot of fans.

“I mean, people that didn’t particularly like poetry, kind of got into it because of him. There were people that were fans of his at that time that didn’t even know he was a poet. So he was one of those natural popularisers, I guess.”

Betjeman, John relates, was one of those figures who could make erudition feel effortless. Take him around the country and he would produce, seemingly from nowhere, some arcane scrap of knowledge about a parish church, a forgotten architectural detail, a local oddity.

ARCANE KNOWLEDGE

I note that Betjeman similarly was still writing later in life, with poems like ‘Late-Flowering Lust’ showing a far stranger, earthier side than the cosy caricature allows.

“That’s right,” Clarke says. “Amazing. Mozzer was a big fan, I imagine. He would say something that everybody said a thousand times a day and make it sound like it’s the first time you’ve heard it.”

He thinks of a Morrissey line – “I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, and now it’s happening in mine.”

“Who hasn’t ever thought that?” Clarke quizzes.

Speaking of arcane knowledge, I bring up something I heard John mention on an interview recently – an incredible story of Northern Soul records arriving in Britain as ship’s ballast.

“That’s right,” he confirms. “They were worthless when they arrived in this country. Worthless.”

In America, he explains, the music business was brutally practical. If a record didn’t break beyond its native state and begin making money, that was that.

“From a capitalist point of view, you’ve got to start making money in your first year or forget about it, “he states. “The records they made had the same production values as Motown. And you know, they’ve thrown those records away, and we rescued them on the western-facing seaboards of the UK, we rescued those records from total obscurity.

“They were used as ballast along with comic books and chewing gum – stuff they didn’t think anybody would like. They were wrong, of course. Wrong about chewing gum. Wrong about comics. Wrong about the records.”
American cultural surplus, I suggest.

“Well, their cultural hegemony,” John replies, “was well used by my particular generation.”

John’s relationship with Ireland comes complete with a surreal political supporting cast – Charlie Haughey supplied the title for his live album Walking Back To Happiness, borrowed from a keep-fit campaign slogan, while Michael D. Higgins, long before the presidency, opened for him at his first Irish gig in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre.

Clarke has another gloriously odd Irish political anecdote. On a Belfast-to-Dublin train, he says, he was approached by a man he later became convinced was Gerry Adams, apparently seeking help to get memoir material published.

“Oh yeah, that one,” Clarke laughs. “Nothing will shift it from my mind. I’m sure it was him.”

At the time, he says, Adams had not yet become a familiar figure in British households. That came later. But John recalls, “As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘That’s the guy.’”

What stayed with him was the man, whoever he was, recognising Clarke as “an anti-establishment figure yourself, Mr. Clarke.”

At the end of the conversation, they both made polite, noncommittal noises – then, wisely, “swapped false addresses.”

I’m looking forward to hearing the new poems – ‘Hey Stupid’, ‘Everybody Sucked But Us, ‘Advice To The Suede Shoe Wearer’. Even the titles whet the appetite. Roll on Dublin in the winter.

“I can’t wait to deliver it,” John concludes. “I pity the fool who doesn’t have a ticket.”

• Have It is out now. John Cooper Clarke plays the 3Olympia, Dublin on November 12.