Up The Junction

My friend Darren had a spare for Squeeze supported by Dr. John Cooper Clarke at the Apollo last Saturday night, a very kind offer which is the sort of thing you don't turn down (one of the pictures here is Darren's, the one at the top). We met in The Bull's Head, a traditional city centre boozer at the back end of Piccadilly Station, a fifteen minute walk from the Apollo. There was a bit if a head spinning culture clash in the pub- it was packed with Man City fans stopping off on the way back to town from the Etihad and glammed up, glittered up punters having a quick drink before going to Homobloc at The Warehouse Project across the road plus a few middle aged folks like Darren and I having a pint before the gig. We arrived in good time to ensure we saw the good doctor. Not long after we arrived and got served at the bar the man pictured below arrived on stage, the legendary Johnny Green, formerly road manager of The Clash, now John Cooper Clarke's tour manager/ fixer/ confidante/ best mate. 

Johnny gave a brief introduction and then the stick thin, behatted, skinny trousered John Cooper Clarke ambled on stage and commenced firing. His act is a well honed, non- stop, rapid fire performance, the jokes, stories and poetry all bundled up together, his one liners and stand up comedy all part of the act, slipping into a cartoon New Yoik accent at times for added effect. The poems, when they come, are delivered at breakneck speed, the nasal Salford accent still strong despite living in Essex of the last thirty five years. Hire Car, Get Back On Drugs You Fat Fuck and Bedblocker Blues are all fired off early on, the still relevant Beasley Street (the first of the classics) is followed by the recent updated version Beasley Boulevard. He reminds us all, that even though everyone thinks Beasley Street is about Thatcher, partly due to the line, 'Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies/ In a box on Beasley Street', he wrote the poem before she took power. Home, Honey I'm High gets a lot of laughs and by the point he's mid- set, the latecomers are being shushed and the Apollo is hanging on every line. 

'I watched the milkman drive off with my wife. Longest three hours of my life'.

The end of the set is a best of JCC, I've Fallen In Love With Wife, the every other word fuckfest of Evidently Chicken Town (which is where I guess the New Yoik accent comes from, the song being played over the end of The Sopranos) and Twat, delivered with gusto and bile decades after it being written, the audience joining in for the last line/ word. Then he rattles through I Wanna Be Yours and he's off. 

Evidently Chickentown

I've never seen Squeeze before. In fact I don't even any of their records but their singles are so much part of post late 70s pop culture that skimming through their greatest hits online a couple of days before I was amazed how many of them I knew. Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook are well into national treasure/ classic English songwriter territory and coupled with their South London roots, plants them firmly in the kitchen sink, slice of life, the sort of space occupied by the likes of Ray Davies and Paul Weller There are times at the gig they seem to sit somewhere in between The Jam and Madness in terms of lyrics and melodies. 

So confident are they of their back catalogue that a song like Up The Junction, for me the pinnacle of their songwriting, that they can dispense with it just three songs in. The Apollo is seated for the gig, the stewards are very keen to ensure no-one is out of their seat much early on, there's no standing in the gangways and the crowd are middle aged plus and very polite. Squeeze power through one New Wave/ pop- / post- punk classic after another, Tilbrook's voice and guitar playing at the front and centre, Difford co- singing and taking the much more growly lead vocal spot on a few. Cradle To The Grave, Pulling Mussels (From The Shell), Goodbye Girl all blaze by. As we get near the end of the set and gorgeous version of Tempted, the audience are up on their feet and the last song, Cool For Cats, is played with no less energy and enthusiasm than it must have been in 1979. There's an encore, Slap And Tickle and then a full showbiz, individual band members solo spotlight affair during Black Coffee In Bed and then we're done, back into the drizzly streets of Ardwick and the walk back to town (a walk that became a long one for me. We went for a few more pints, missed the last tram home- this is sounding a bit like a Squeeze lyric now- and Darren ordered an Uber. It dropped Darren off in Old Trafford and then about half a mile up the road towards Sale the driver told me to get out because he was calling it a night and going home. The walk back through down King's Road, through Stretford and back to Sale took me an hour. Black cabs it seems don't exist any more. As I neared McDonald's in Stretford I considered a cheeseburger to give me the sustenance for the final mile of my trek but the Golden Arches had just closed its doors).

Up The Junction is a work of brilliance, the phrasing, colloquialisms, a feats of memorable lines, the images piling up one after another, with no chorus and the title of the song saved until the very end, 'And now it's my assumption/ I'm really up the junction'. Chris Difford was only twenty one when he wrote it, a novel in three minute pop song form. It was released, I've just noticed, the day before my ninth birthday. 

I Wanna Be Your Vacuum Cleaner

I went to see John Cooper Clarke at the rarefied environs of the Bridgewater Hall on Thursday night, an evening of poetry compered by legendary former- Clash road manager Johnny Green, resplendent in suit and thick rimmed glasses. Johnny kicked us off with the first poet, Luke Wright. Luke has published upteen poems and performed up and down the country and on radio. His poem These Boots Aren’t Made For Walking is funny, the Cooper Clarke influence evident in the rapid fire rhymes. He talks about being a parent and the sneering condescension of his ten year old son towards him (‘it’s like living with Stewart Lee’ he quipped) and counters this with the joys of watching children learning to read. He is funny and sharp and in Dad Reins, moving. He explains the background to and then recites his poem inspired by French situationists The Oulipo who demanded restrictions and constraints be placed on artforms rather than absolute free expression. His poem, Ron’s Knock Off Shop, written using only one vowel, O, a tale of London and Bolton is funny and clever (but not too clever). Luke was inspired by JCC aged 17 and his influence is evident but Luke Wright has a style and tone of his own too, honed from a young age from his home in Colchester, Essex.

Manchester’s own Mike Garry performs a poetic tour de force, an emotive set with tributes to his Mum, to the primary school teacher who taught him to read and to dream, and his famous, tearjerking tribute to Tony Wilson, St Anthony. I’ve seen Mike Garry twice before but here, on the big stage with the perfect acoustics of a chamber orchestra’s home, he is in a class of his own. Very much a home town hero, he reads God Is A Manc and breaks off with asides and comments, then dropping straight back into the poem. 

Garry often wanders away from the mic, singing lines of poetry and songs as preludes to the next poem and he gazes upwards, as if seeking inspiration from on high. His poems are honest, real and heartfelt, written from experience of growing up in south Manchester in the 70s and 80s, littered with references to this town and its people (‘Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Khan’), occasionally sentimental and always affecting. I always find St Anthony moving, especially when listening to the Weatherall remix where Andrew Weatheralll, 80s New Order, Factory and Manchester’s cultural history get bound together in rhyme- it often moves me. In my current emotional state, hearing and seeing Mike perform the poem leaves me wiping my eyes. 

John Cooper Clarke appears after the interval, big cap, long hair, shades and the tightest jeans in the building and launches into his familiar rapid fire, motoric performance poetry, from the streets of Salford (Higher Broughton to be exact) in the late 70s to his recent elevation to national treasure status. The between poem asides, jokes and commentary are as much part of the act as the poems and he doesn’t disappoint- it's a well honed act, clinging to the microphone with his knock kneed stance, firing straight into Hire Car and then Get Back On Drugs You Fat Fuck. He veers between newer stuff and his classics, (I Married) A Monster From Outer Space followed by Bedblocker Blues- age is clearly on his mind as he plays the nations venues after two years of gigs delayed by Covid aged 73.

Beasley Street is rattled out and then followed by the updated Beasley Boulevard, the late 70s slum life contrasted with 2020s gentrification. He reads poems about cars and pies and slows down the pace slightly with I’ve Fallen In Love With My Wife. Throughout the show he frequently flips into a New Yoik accent, this inspired by the films of his youth and the huge tip of the that that came his way when The Sopranos came calling and used his poetry over the end of one of the episodes of the box set, binge TV proto-series. 

The poem in question, Evidently Chicken Town closes the set,

‘The fucking pies are fucking old
The fucking chips are fucking cold
The fucking beer is fucking flat
The fucking flats have fucking rats
The fucking clocks are fucking wrong
The fucking days are fucking long
It fucking gets you fucking down
Evidently chicken town’

There is an encore, which occurs after the briefest of exits- ‘I was gonna milk it’, he says, ‘but there were stairs off the stage’- and gives us Twat, the laugh out loud funny stream of bile, line after line of invective building to the one word finale before finishing with the flipside of Twat, the Yin to Twat’s Yang, I Wanna Be Yours. 

I Wanna Be Yours

Handily, Jezebell (Jesse Fahnestock and Darren Bell) have just done an edit of Evidently Chicken Town, a murky, thumping acid stew poured onto and around John Cooper Clarke. You can get it from Paisley Dark here. 

Fasten Your Seatbelts Says A Voice

Back in spring 2020 we booked a ferry crossing a few nights in Antwerp and Ghent for my 50th birthday. This holiday for the four of us never happened. In March 2020 we went into lockdown and my 50th (in May) was spent on the front doorstep as people came and wished me happy birthday over the wall. The ferry crossing, an overnight cabin from Hull to Zeebrugge, was converted into a voucher. We were planning to use the voucher to go from Hull to Rotterdam (the Hull- Zeebrugge crossing was axed last year) and that the three of us would spend a few days in Amsterdam and by the Dutch coast. In the aftermath of Isaac's death we've all been feeling the need to get away and a week in the Netherlands seemed to be just the ticket especially as we've already paid for the crossing. Then, two weeks ago, P&O sacked 800 workers and since then most of their ferries have been stuck in port. The new poorly paid workforce are untrained and the ferries have been deemed not safe to sail. We have some qualms about using P&O at all due to the appalling, some might say illegal, nature of their business practices although I also don't see why they should pocket our £440 without us getting anything in return- we'll have to square that circle later this year. 

But anyway, to cut a long and tiresome story short, with the need to get away from home and to spend some time somewhere else (almost anywhere else) burning strongly, we took the money we have saved in our holiday fund that we'd put aside for the Netherlands and spent it on a five day stay in Palma, Mallorca. Adios amigos- see you all next weekend. 

Majorca

Far From Crazy Pavements

Sometimes you need a healthy does of bile and anger in your music and your art. The world is a fucked up, unpleasant place at the moment, not least the coverage of what is happening in the USA with the protests and riots following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. The racism that blights the history of the USA never seems too far from the surface, a reminder that for all our pretence of 21st century modernity and sophistication attitudes formed over a few hundred years have very deep roots. You never have to dig very far to find racists and supremacists on social media. The absence of moral leadership at the top of US politics is obvious. Worse, the president encourages further, state sponsored violence by quoting racists in his Tweets. There is footage of policemen making white supremacist hand symbols to protesters. The president hides in the White House, issuing demands to State Governors to 'dominate' the protesters. In the past, even at moments of crisis- 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King or the Rodney King beating by the LA police- there was a sense that the President should act for the good of all Americans, provide some kind of re-assurance, attempt to unite. Trump does none of this. He separates, he divides, he incites, he fuels hatred. He should be removed.



Escaping through music that takes us away from this is the answer sometimes but it's also essential to listen to music that reflects the other side of human nature, society, governments and the way that we have chosen to organise ourselves. Beasley Street was written by John Cooper Clarke in response to the poverty of 1970s Salford and Margaret Thatcher's government and social polices but it's themes and imagery are universal. Released on his 1980 album Snap, Crackle And Bop and produced by Martin Hannett, it's a poem/ song with enough lines to ensure John immortality, not least 'Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies/In a box on Beasley Street'. A contemporary equivalent could be Matt Hancock laughing his way through an interview where he was confronted with a UK death toll of 38, 000 people.

Beasley Street is a torrent of words, JCC painting pictures of squalor, decay and suffering, indelible images of dead men's overcoats, riff joints, rats with rickets, broken teeth, shit stoppered drains, boys on the wagon and girls on the shelf, poison, lager turning to piss, ageing savages, yellow cats, the smell of cabbage, dead canaries and 'the fecal dreams of Mr Freud'. 

Beasley Street

Isolation Mix Three

It's over halfway through April already. The weeks seem to be flying by even though some of the days seem very long. This is Isolation Mix Three. I thought I'd do something different from the ambient, blissed out, opiated sounds of the first two mixes and this mix is something that I first wrote about doing in a post here about three years ago. This is an hour and three minutes of spoken word and poetry and music. Andrew Weatherall features in various guises and with various poets, the Beat Generation and The Clash are represented, there's some reggae and the unmistakable voice of John Cooper Clarke.

Jack Kerouac/Joe Strummer: MacDougal Street Blues

John Cooper Clarke: Twat

Misty In Roots: Introduction to Live At The Counter Eurovision

Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch

The Clash (and Allen Ginsberg): Ghetto Defendant (Extended Version)

Allen Ginsberg/ Tom Waits: Closing Time/America

Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith: The Deep Hum (At The Heart Of It All)

Joe Gideon and The Shark: Civilisation

Woodleigh Research Facility and Joe Duggan: Downhill

Fireflies and Joe Duggan: Leonard Cohen Knows

BP Fallon and David Holmes: Henry McCullough (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Allen Ginsberg: I Am A Victim Of Telephone

Beasley Street

John Cooper Clarke's Beasley Street. Street poetry, I think you'll agree.

Far from the crazy pavements

...the taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
...on a dirty afternoon
Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
...are rendered obsolete
The legal term is null and void
in the case of ... Beasley street

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
... a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter is your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
on the edge of Beasley street

Where the action isn't
That's where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist
In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
in a box on Beasley street

From the boarding houses and bedsits full of
...accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze
wearing dead men's overcoats
You can't see their feet
A Riff joint shuts - opens up
right down on Beasley street

Cars collide, colours clash
Disaster movie stuff
For the man with the Fu Manchu moustache
revenge is not enough
There's a dead canery on a swivel seat
there's a rainbow on the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
silence is the code

Hot beneath the collar
...an inspector call
Where the perishing stink of squalor
...impregnates the walls
The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on ...Beasley Street

The hipster and his hired hat
drive a borrowed car
yellow socks and a pink crevat
nothing la-di-dah
O-A-P
Mother-to-be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shitstopper drains
and crocodile skis
are seen on ...Beasley Street

The kingdom of the blind
...a one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
...The doorbells do not ring
A light bulb bursts like a blister
the only form of heat
Where a fellow sells his sister
...down the river on Beasley Street

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their commom problem is
...that they're not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can't keep it neat
It's a fully furnished dustbin
...sixteen Beasley Street

Vince the ageing savage
Betrays no kind of life
...but the smell of yesterday's cabbage
and the ghost of last year's wife
Through a constant haze
of deodorant sprays
He says ...retreat
Alsatians dog the dirty days
Down the middle of Beasley street

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
Every time they kiss
It's a sociologist's paradise
Each day repeats
Uneasy, cheasy, greasy, queasy
...beastly, Beasley Street

Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph
On a permanent monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street

Beasley Street

I Don't Want To Be Nice

Some more bile for you.

I was planning to post this anyway, but after spending the last five hours at the Manchester Childrens' Hospital waiting for a CT Scan with a special needs 11 year old who hasn't been allowed to eat since yesterday, only to be told that the scan won't happen because they're an anaesthetist down today, well, I don't want to be nice. Not that it's anyone's particular fault.

The bard of Salford, the punk poet, Nico's flatmate, Manchester Dylan lookalike... Mr John Cooper Clarke, originally from the Disguise In Love lp (geddit). This song features Martin Hannett at the controls and playing bass. In case you were wondering.

04 I Don't Want to Be Nice.wma

John Cooper Clarke 'Twat'

One of the bard of Salford's greatest moments to brighten up your Sunday. It turns out we know the subject of the bile in this poem. Trying to keep things as anonymous as possible, a friend of ours had a child the same time as our eldest was born. The father of the friend's child (father and mother are no longer together as a couple) shared a house with John Cooper Clarke way back when, and various events took place prompting the Salford Bob Dylan lookalike to write this about him. So many great lines in this poem- and as a bonus you can probably apply it to someone in your life as well.

JohnCooperClarke-Twat.mp3