Chips And Gravy With The Bard of Salford

The title relates to the only time I met and chatted with Dr John Cooper Clarke.

I am not sure when I first came across him but I remember buying the Rabid EP “Innocents” in the nineteen seventies, which opened with “Suspended Sentence” and then the title song and backed with “Psycle Sluts Part 1 and 2”. I saw him on TV working at a Manchester University doing a good Bob Dylan impression in his looks.

The thing is he wrote and performed poetry, and was aligned with the Manchester punk scene. The words were pertinent and funny and relevant to the time and many still are. Although he never really hit the mainstream he has become very famous and respected, as well as being a poet, a Radio 6 DJ and writer.

So you could say I have been a fan of his almost from the beginning and was made up when his first album “Disguise In Love” was picked up by CBS and looked forward to the release. At this time our (me and my good friend Andy Marshall) band The Bok had sent demos to John Peel, Stiff Records, and Rabid Records. John Peel said we were too primitive, Stiff sent a pre-printed rejection letter, but Rabid wanted to put out a Double “A” sided single of “Happy Birthday” and “Mystery Band”.

We drove to Manchester and had a meeting in the basement of Rabid Records house and there was only one guy there, everyone else was in London for the launch of “Disguise In Love”, so Jon Cooper Clarke hand messed up our record company meeting, While we were there Graham Fellows (Jilted John) dropped in to record something for his debut album and said we looked like students.

The Rabid guy asked which studio we had used to record the demos. We looked at him “Studio?”, we just recorded live to a two-track stereo cassette. Studios were unknown to us, but it may explain the rejections from John Peel and Stiff Records.

So we left and drove back to Preston and then the brakes failed so we drove nearly forty miles on the motorway with no brakes, totally mad.

Our bassist the hippy Mark Lester told everyone we were going to be on Top of the Pops and everyone stopped talking to me even though I had said nothing.

Soon after that Rabid went under and that was the end of our non-existent punk-pop career though you can hear the demos here on Soundcloud.

So forward to sometime post-millennium and I find John Cooper Clarke is performing at the Hyena Club. I’m very close to the small stage on a wooden bench table and when he takes a break from his set he comes and sits down next to me. Either he or I had ordered chips and gravy and I told him he had ruined my pop career by buggering off to London with Rabid management when they should have been promoting the Bok’s single. We had a great laugh talking about comedy, Manchester, Rabid and much more. I know it’s not much but that was my chat with the great man.

I saw him at Newcastle’s O2 Academy and he was MC’d by someone I had never seen before, my friend John Scott and you can read about that here.

His site lets you read all his poetry for free and below is the compilation “Anthologia” which is excellent but it is very difficult to extract the CDs from the integrated page sleeves, but he has some good collections out there as CD or in print.