What's the word? Looks like a billion…
Premier – and premiere – punk poet's piece breaks barriers on music streaming service to become 'world's most popular poem'
FROM DAY one, as the British punk cauldron flared into spiky life in the mid-1970s, a quirky versifier who married acerbic commentary with multiple comic twists was closely associated with that febrile rock revolution. He supported bands and recorded his work with musicians in the studio.
Almost half a century later, John Cooper Clarke is basking in the curious glow as author of the ‘world’s most popular poem’ and, again, he’s been riding the rock’n’roll rollercoaster to take to him to the apex of the global rhyming charts.
When ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, an early piece in the bard’s sizeable catalogue, was set to music by one of the biggest UK bands of the last 15 years, I doubt that Cooper Clarke had the slightest sense a that the new media would see his adapted love rap, first heard on the 1982 LP Zip Style Method, chalk up a remarkable billion streams.
But Arctic Monkeys, led by the potent vocal strains of Alex Turner, have seen their version of the poet’s composition attract a thousand million visitors to Spotify and Cooper Clarke is proud, if a little nonplussed, to know that a number representing ‘one eighth of the planet’s population’, as he puts it, has now checked out his celebrated romantic stanzas.
Pictured above: Arctic Monkeys, recent cover stars of Mojo
Cooper Clarke, who was part of the Mancunian new wave boom featuring Buzzcocks and the Fall, Joy Division and New Order, actually hails from the city of Salford, a community with a determinedly separatist manifesto which hates it if its identity is lazily elided with Manchester itself. Think the Bronx in relation to Manhattan.
A rare and eccentric talent, Cooper Clarke adopted the two-piece black suit and skinny tie, a trademark appearance of many a punk at the time, but topped off his striking look with a huge mop of mid-60s Dylan hair and the same sunshades the US folk rocker sported after his conversion to mains electricity. Like Bob he befriended the Beats and hung out with Ginsberg and Corso in the 1980s.
Some way down the road, the Sheffield four-piece Arctic Monkeys, included their take on the Cooper Clarke poem on their 2013 album AM. The group have now carried one of their own fellow Northern heroes into a stratosphere few artists could even dream about. It might have taken 10 years to bust the billion barrier, but Turner is delighted to pay tribute: he recalls the piece being taught in English classes when he was at school.
Why have the Cooper Clarke couplets turned into an enduring classic? The poet explained to BBC Radio 4’s World at One, that the poem has become ‘the wedding favourite of the 21st-century’.
He commented: ‘Alex by virtue of his prodigious mezzo baritone and his skills as an arranger has done a very difficult thing and converted a poem into a song. Thanks guys, for introducing it to the wider pop-picking public of the world.’
See also: ‘Interview #11: John Cooper Clarke’, September 1st, 2022
What's the word? Looks like a billion…
What a marvelously zippy piece of writing. I enjoyed every line in this piece--had no idea that the Arctic Monkeys' translation of his poem to song had garnered a billion views. Your account of his sartorial style, the separatist stand of Salford, and the emergence of his poem as favorite verse for weddings flow marvelously forward. Bravo!