Anyone who watched the final season of The Sopranos – that would be just about everyone, judging by Internet chat boards the world over – remembers the powerful montage scene when Phil Leotardo vows to kill Chris Moltisanti to restore his family’s long-tarnished honour. Anyone who’s followed the career of Manchester performance poet John Cooper Clarke – a sizably smaller group – was probably thrilled to hear the neglected poet’s sinister, hypnotic Evidently Chickentown slowly dominating the soundtrack as the scene fades into the credits. The montage was a brilliant match of image and sound and word and it introduced Clarke, a key but overlooked member of the original London punk movement and the Manchester music scene lionized in such films as Control and 24 Hour Party People, to a massive audience of potential new fans. Clarke, as he has throughout his career, did nothing to cash in on the temporary media attention that drifted his way, choosing instead to continue his quiet life of touring music and comedy clubs in the UK and holing up in the Essex home he shares with his wife and teenage daughter.
Luckily for the committed and the curious, Clarke recently granted a rare extensive interview with The Independent’s Robert Chalmers, published yesterday in the newspaper’s books section. Chalmers coaxes some good (and typically funny) quotes from the reclusive Clarke and gathers some great quotes about the from a number of bigger-name contemporaries such as Elvis Costello and the late Manchester Svengali, Tony Wilson, who once said, “I’m not the one who will have his life turned into legend, in the way that happened to Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud. It won’t be me. It will be John Cooper Clarke.”
