I WANNA BE YOURS
JOHN COOPER CLARKE
Picador, 480pp, £20
For Anthony Quinn in the Observer, this was ‘a wild ride of a memoir, told in a sardonic Salford drawl that’s always ready with a quip or a comeback’, while Fiona Sturges claimed in the Guardian that you’d ‘struggle to find a more entertaining account of Sixties and Seventies popular culture’. Patricia Clarke in the NME felt it didn’t just ‘fizz with wit’, it cemented Clarke’s ‘status as one of the most distinctive voices in pop cultural history’. ‘There are laughs on almost every page,’ agreed Neil Mccormick in the Telegraph, making it easily the ‘most amusing autobiography of a literary aesthete you are ever likely to read’.
This was a book of two halves, the first covering his early years in Salford and his teenage immersion in ‘ Mad magazine, comic books, pulp fiction, clothes, music, adverts, hair styles, modern art, football and showbusiness’, wrote Quinn, adding that the level of detail made you wonder: is he going to tell us
everything? The second half details his ‘long descent into heroin addiction’ (Mccormick), which devoured 15 years of his life, though even this he plays for laughs. Love saves him when he meets his future wife, and he is now, we learned, something of a national treasure, with his work on the GCSE syllabus and an appearance on Desert Island Discs. ‘His poems, performed in a nasal, hectoring monotone, remain fresh and urgent,’ wrote Joe Stretch in the
TLS. ‘At 71 he remains hugely entertaining live,’ thought Mccormick, and ‘with prose of this calibre’ he dearly hoped there might be more books to come.