John Cooper Clarke is perhaps the most stubborn and remarkable survival of the UK punk heyday of the late 1970s and early 1980s; and we waited until November 2011 to witness the man in action at the York Duchess - an uninspiring cellar of York's ugliest and most derided building - The Stonebow. The fascinating history of one of England's finest settlements has given us the magnificent Minster and extensive city walls - all we can manage in the twenty-first century is out-of town shopping centres and numerous Park & Ride sites.
The fact that Cooper Clarke has done the voice over for the Domino's pizza TV advert might suggest the guy has sold out, but his performance couldn't have been more different from the slick advertising of today's media. John is often described as a performance poet, yet most of his act is little different from a stand-up comedian, with a few verses of swearing thrown in. He has a loyal cult following built-up over several decades of assaulting our tender ears with rhyming and non-rhyming rants that puncture any safe view of the world, while ignoring the insistence of our 'advanced' society on political correctness.
A local student had the unenviable task of being the warm-up guy for the great man, struggling to raise more than a tiny ripple of applause with his version of performance poetry, without the many hilarious asides of the old master. With a great deal of bravery and persistence the young academic might eventually carve out a career of wordy comedy, but very few will survive the harsh decades of public indifference.
An evening with John Cooper Clarke is about as far as you can get from the usual Saturday night diet of appalling game shows, Strictly Come Dancing or the X Factor, but I'm glad we made the effort to leave the comfort of our sofa in the middle of rural nowhere for a blast of poetic comedy that is truly unique - though not for the faint-hearted. Long may he continue to tour the obscure haunts of Britain - keeping it real; some appearances on post-watershed telly are also long overdue for the Salford lad, now for some inexplicable reason living in Essex !
I can only hope that John achieves the ultimate ambition to own a disabled parking badge (despite no obvious disability) allowing parking directly outside any place he wishes to visit. If this dangerous trend develops it could be an end to the infamous Park & Ride as we know it.
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