PUNK POETRY’S NOT DEAD

I was thoroughly entertained by the BBC 4 profile on John Cooper Clarke and it was a pleasure to see that he is miraculously still in the land of the living after kicking his longstanding heroine addiction.

It’s heartening too to see that he is winning a whole new audience, some of whom were alerted to his genius when a neutered version of Evidently Chicken Town featured on the closing credits of an episode of The Sopranos.

This is still one of his funniest and powerful poems even when the emphatic adjective has been altered from ‘fucking’ to the milder ‘bloody’. Film of his performance in the documentary shows that there’s nothing to beat the original when it comes to the venomous delivery of peerless lines like:

“a fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
waiting for the fucking cab
you fucking stay at fucking home
the fucking neighbours fucking moan
keep the fucking racket down
this is fucking chicken town”.

Poems like this and Beezley Street (which rhymes with uneasy cheesy greasy queasy and beastly) are Britain’s answer to Desolation Row although comparisons to Dylan are exaggerated for someone who has passed the best part of two decades without writing anything new.

WHY STEVE COOGAN IS RIGHT TO BE HACKED OFF

The acceptable face of journalism : Steve Coogan being interviewed by The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger

“It’s all about being decent” is the line that sums up Steve Coogan’s arguments against the way the press abused their powers and intruded on his privacy.

He has been at the forefront of the campaign to expose the dirty tactics in the UK media and one of the victims of the phone hacking scandal currently being investigated by The Leveson Inquiry.

In a video interview with The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, he looks nervous and uncomfortable but pumped up too. He’s among those who is mad as hell at the and is not prepared  take it anymore.

Coogan constantly states that he is happy to be judged by his work as a popular/populist entertainer but does not accept that being in the public eye means his every move and mistake should be publicly scrutinised.