John Cooper Clarke: poetry for the people

Mike Garry and John Cooper Clarke at the Oxford Playhouse, on Saturday, June 3. Review by JON LEWIS

Millions of viewers watching this year’s FA Cup final may have heard Mike Garry’s updated poem St Anthony: An Ode to Anthony H Wilson, a Mancunian hymn to both clubs (although Garry is a Manchester United supporter). Garry mentioned his role in the pre-match entertainment during his act as support for the venerable punky performance poet John Cooper Clarke, also a United fan, at the Oxford Playhouse.

Garry does for Greater Manchester what poet Simon Armitage does for Yorkshire: he roots his poems among the people and places of this northern powerhouse. Garry, who like Cooper Clarke has a PHD, begins the evening with The Time Traders, from 2022, homage to Terry Hall from The Specials. It’s a heartfelt tribute that brings in Faustian pacts and the composer Giuseppi Tartini suggesting Hall’s otherworldly genius whilst mentions of bedsides, consulting rooms and nightly prayers fuse the everyday with the creative.

He recites the original, quite brilliant, version of St Anthony during his act, a homage to Tony Wilson, the founder of Manchester’s iconic Hacienda Club and Factory Records. It’s a long poem that blends iconic talents with tangible Mancunian locations, citing Joy Division’s [Ian] Curtis, Mark E Smith of The Fall and the Busby Babes to reside alongside historical Mancunian rebels like the crowds massacred at Peterloo in 1819.

John Cooper Clarke, who I first heard in 1983 at the Carousel Club in Manchester (the venue where Mike Garry’s parents met, he told me) is part hilarious stand-up with wicked one-liners and surreal crooning of 50s and 60s US classics, and part social observer. Now in his mid-70s, wearing his trademark sunglasses, he’s a laconic raconteur with a mix of new poems and much loved, if x-rated, classics, such as Beasley Street, and Evidently Chickentown. It was fascinating to note a comic line in Garry’s ‘St Anthony, Jesus, Mary and Keith Joseph’ echoing Cooper Clarke’s Beasley Street with ‘Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies / In a box on Beasley Street’. The images of Salford impacted by Mrs Thatcher’s policies is a highlight of this superb night of poetry for the people.