For Johnny Green And All The Rest...

As has been noted elsewhere the roll call of death has been awful recently, departures of the great and the good on an almost daily basis- Roberta Flack, Rick Buckler, David Johansen, Bill Fay, Gwen McCrae, Angie Stone all gone from the music world. On Monday this week that list was added to by the news of the death of Johnny Green.

Johnny Green was a legend, the road manager of The Clash at their peak, a man who dressed as sharply as the band and who knew what they needed and what was good for them. His book, A Riot Of Our Own: Night And Day With The Clash is perhaps the best book about the band, the one that captures them on the road and in the studio. After hanging up his Clash hat he lived several other lives, a wit and raconteur, for some time the manager of Joe Ely in Texas and was for many years the friend, confidante and manager of the great John Cooper Clarke. When I went to the Apollo in 2022 to see Dr John Cooper Clarke support Squeeze I was as excited when Johnny came on stage to introduce the poet laureate of punk as I was about anything else...

Stay Free (Live at The Lyceum 1979)

RIP Johnny Green and RIP Rick, David, Roberta, Gwen, Angie, Bill and all the others who've gone recently. 

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.