Drugs – Ramblings on my bookshelves

This is my three hundredth blog entry so I have decided to tackle what turned out to be a fascinating autobiography of the famous ‘punk poet’ which comes in at a pretty massive 470 pages, of which more later. Clarke is now seventy four and has lived a fairly unusual life, which he is extremely frank about in the book. This includes his many years as a heroin addict, indeed his descriptions of sometimes desperate attempts to get his next fix make up quite a lot of the last half of the book, it could have been a depressing read and it says a lot about his wordsmith skills that it isn’t. I first came across Clarke’s work when I went to university in Manchester in 1980 although sadly I never managed to see him perform. His famously stick thin physique was undoubtedly aided by the heroin but I hadn’t know until reading this book that at the age of eight he had had tuberculosis and probably shouldn’t have made it out of childhood in Salford, South Manchester. Clarke is brutally honest about his slide into addiction and the subsequent partial collapse of his career as getting the next fix became more important than anything else. He even took to avoiding his mother after she found out and he claimed to her to be getting help when in fact he was taking even more drugs and progressing to speedballs, cocaine and heroin mixed in one shot this is probably the lowest point of the narrative.

I was aware he had had a drug problem but the extent of it surprised me and I wasn’t really prepared for the story of a drug addict being the main part of the book rather than his climb to be performing and comparing at shows at the biggest clubs in Manchester. Thinking about it later I was also aware that he had largely disappeared for years after the late 1970’s, or at least I hadn’t heard of him for a long time until he reemerged to a larger public presence many years later and yet now plays sell out shows around the world. Indeed his 2024 fiftieth anniversary of performing tour, entitled ‘John Cooper Clarke: Get Him While He’s Alive!’ is already having to add extra dates due to demand for tickets.

There is also substantial coverage of his childhood and early years before starting to perform which was characterised by the poverty of growing up in Salford in the 1950’s and the extra problems due to his poor health. He worked as a bookies runner for a while whilst still at school before the police started to crack down on unlicensed bookmakers and going round taking bets and paying out winnings became too hot a job to continue. He was always looking for a way to earn some money but his apprenticeship on leaving school as a car mechanic eventually ended early due to both parties, employer and employee, recognising that he had absolutely no aptitude for anything mechanical. His desire to be a poet was strong even then but his father pointed out that nobody made any money at poetry until they were dead and it was only the arrival on the scene of the so called Mersey poets from Liverpool that proved that it was possible to make it a career. But it took a long time, and the assistance of Manchester club owner Bernard Manning, now a somewhat controversial figure, that eventually got him onto the stage and making some money at what he wanted to do.

As I wrote at the beginning of this review the book is 470 pages long, but by page 430 we have spent so much time on his childhood, youth and addictions we have still only reached 1985 and I was thinking that this was just the first half of a planned two volume autobiography. Instead Clarke basically sums up the remaining thirty seven years as: Met Evie (his wife), tried and eventually kicked heroin, rebuilt the career, started a family, gained an honorary doctorate from Salford University and nothing else much happened. Thirty seven years in forty pages, I’m pretty sure there is more to that period than that and as I had so enjoyed reading the first 430 pages, covering thirty six years since his birth in 1949, I was definitely set up for volume two.

If I have one criticism of the book it is Clarke’s excessive name dropping, usually in long, frankly tedious, lists of people or bands he has met or worked with, or maybe had worked in the past at a venue he was then working at, which I got into the habit of skipping as I got more into the book but as the last line of the book makes clear he isn’t bothered about criticism of the autobiography.