MY SIX BEST BOOKS
John cooper clarke
JOHN COOPER CLARKE, 69, is the performance poet who toured with the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello. His best-known album is Snap, Crackle & Bop. His latest tour kicks off at the Leicester Comedy Festival, February 7-25. comedy-festival.co.uk
HOLY BIBLE: KING JAMES VERSION Collins, £20 This has every story you’ll ever read. Staying in hotels before 24-hour TV, it was just there in the bedside drawer. All the great songs – country, soul – are informed by this book.
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL by Charles Baudelaire Oxford Classics, £8.99 As a young urbanite on a budget, this anthology proved to be pivotal in my development. He seemed to be ultra-modern before his time and inculcated in me the idea of a professional poet. Most of the poetry by Wordsworth and others was rural but this all took place in Paris.
THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE, AGED 133/4 by Sue Townsend Puffin, £7.99 His pedantic and pessimistic idealism was immediately affecting. I read it after it was serialised on Radio Four. It’s incredible that a woman could inhabit the character but, like all great humorists, she knew nothing is funnier than relentless tragedy.
AGAINST NATURE by Joris-Karl Huysmans Penguin, £9.99 This is too rich to read more than a chapter at a time. It’s about a guy who leads an almost monastic life but in utter luxury. He has a black feast to celebrate his loss of libido. Its over-the-topness appealed.
MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS by Jonathan Meades Unbound, £12.99 I share Meades’s view that there is no such thing as a boring place. This makes you look again at the tedious and is the perfect companion in my peripatetic work. I see power stations and disused factories in as much detail as the Palace of Versailles.
A RIOT OF OUR OWN: NIGHT AND DAY WITH THE CLASH by Johnny Green Out of print I worked with them a lot. This is by their road manager, with illustrations by the late great Ray Lowry. It talks about how ugly life was before punk, when clothes and music were rotten. Punk was a return to the rock ’n’ roll values put down by Elvis.