Hootananny, Inverness, 2 March 2009

John Cooper Clarke

WHAT IS the last thing you would expect to see in Inverness on a dreary wet Monday night? The Loch Ness monster buying fish and chips in Church Street? A small army of dwarfs performing a conga around Falcon square?

In Hootananny’s Mad Hatter’s venue I saw something far more surprising than either of those things. It was John Cooper Clarke, the black magician of poetry, casting spells with words. Stick thin, with a shock of dyed black hair and pink spectacles, Cooper Clarke is every inch the punk poet. He engaged with the audience from the moment he stepped on stage, even playing with them as he did an impromptu sound check.

Poetry should have a bad name, and John Cooper Clarke has been doing his best to give it one for almost thirty years. This gig was no exception. He began his act with well observed and sharply delivered stand up that very quickly had the audience on his side.

A great deal of his material was brilliantly funny, often twisting the meaning of words so that they sprang out of the dark corners of his mind with a caustic humour. His topics are traditional, and listening to his Manchunian accent you would be forgiven for thinking that you had accidentally wandered into a Northern workingman’s club that had somehow escaped up the M6 to the Highland capital.

He focussed on difficult relationships with women, the pitfalls of marriage and problems in understanding the complexities of modern TV advertising. Not earth shattering topics but, thanks to his exceptional skill with words, his material was superbly crafted.

For the comedy purist it has to be said that not all his material appeared to be original, and some of his gags bore the distinctly mucky fingerprints of Northern comedians like Bernard Manning. Few in the audience, however, cared about where the gags were created and the comedian-cum-poet delivered all his material with well timed accuracy.

Many in the audience were very familiar with his poetry and requests for various pieces were called out to the stage at regular intervals. Cooper Clarke was happy to comply and performed many poems that were clearly personal favourites of people in the audience.

His poetry is performed at a searing pace and, in some poems, you have to concentrate very hard to follow his breakneck delivery and to appreciate the searing wit that runs through much of his work. The sharpest weapons in the poet’s armoury are rhythm and rhyme, and these are essential components of his art. He displayed admirably that he is almost unequalled as a master in the use of both of these tools and all his poems were as well crafted as they were hilarious in their content.

His poem Beasley Street on the changing face of Manchester was eagerly requested by the crowd as was the less respectable poem Twat. Many of his popular poems may be many years old now but they have not dated, and the energy the poet was able to put into the delivery of each and everyone gave you the feeling that he wrote it yesterday.

The gig was originally scheduled to take place in the Ironworks, but was shrewdly relocated to Mad Hatter’s bar, possibly as ticket sales failed to meet expectations. Had he appeared in the much larger Ironworks the audience and Cooper Clarke would have felt lost in the less intimate venue. The move to Mad Hatter’s gave the gig an intimacy that generated tremendous atmosphere for the sixty or so folk there.

The partnership between the two very different venues seems to work well and allows a flexibility that otherwise would not be available. Getting an audience anywhere in Inverness on a cold, wet Monday night in February is a great feat and the almost full Mad Hatter’s bar gave the gig warmth that the Ironworks would have lacked.

That Cooper Clarke is still around and capable of creating a stir with his poetry and stand up is a tribute not only to his constitution but to his obvious passion for language. This was poetry with dirty underwear on a night when cynical, bad tempered poems poked the world in the eye. John Cooper Clarke is still giving poetry the bad name it deserves.

© John Burns, 2009

Links

• John Cooper Clarke
• Hootananny
• Ironworks
• John Burns at Purple Comedy