`When I was on CBS records, I only went to their offices twice. It's the only reason why I ever had managers - not because I thought they were any good, but because they could go into places I couldn't. I can't stand in a queue either, or visit people in hospital. I'm not faddish, but I know if I stay too long in an office I'll end up decorating the floor. Filling in forms impacts on me in a physical way. I start sweating whenever I see one."
Sitting in Kilkenny's cool Zuni restaurant, wearing red-tinted sunglasses and his trademark cat-dragged-backwards-through-a-hedge hairdo, John Cooper Clarke - one of the few men who can wear sunglasses indoors without you wanting to smack him, and a performance poet who always seems to generate reviews with the phrase "mixed audience response" in them - looks remarkably healthier than a 50-year-old rehabilitated heroin addict should. The 1980s was a bad decade for Cooper Clarke: lost in a map of needle-marks and a lack of published work that told the world (those halfway interested, at least) of his state of creative stagnation, it seemed he was bound for the ignominy of being yet another statistic.
Yet here he is, ready to perform here in Kilkenny at the arts festival, sharing a restaurant with the likes of Richard Ford, travelling with his French partner, Evelynne, and his six-year-old daughter, Stella. The broken-piano teeth of yore (one white, one black, one missing) have been tidied up and whenever the poet laughs you can see the glint of gold. So this is what happens to punk rock poets, then: they live, slump at death's door, and then, with one almighty stanza-driven bound, they end their days happily ever after.
"I never made any long-term plans," says Cooper Clarke who, when he hears a question he doesn't like (mostly personal ones relating to his erstwhile habits and present domestic situation) nods his head in a birdlike fashion and says "yea" every five seconds. "No reason for it. I was very ill as a kid with TB and I never thought I'd live very long. It's a complete bonus, this. I've got more of a profile now, for some reason. You just take advantage while it's still there, don't you? But, yea, it's better than ever these days. It's proved something I've always thought - there's no need to flog your arse.
"In the old days, the rock 'n' roll period, I used to go on month-long tours, and all that. While it was an interesting glimpse into all that on-the-road lifestyle, there really isn't any reason for me to do that now. Just do a couple of gigs a month - fabulous. Having seen both sides I prefer to have it the way it is now. Loosen up and swing a bit. Just do the gigs you fancy, rather than going everywhere in order to sell product."
When he left school in Salford, Manchester, in 1965, he embarked on a succession of, for him, dead-end jobs: window cleaner, apprentice motor mechanic, mortuary attendant. His nine-to-five career culminated in a two-year stint as a lab technician at Salford Tech ("It sounds quite technical, but all I did was hand out chisels") and from there on he commenced his slow rise to the lofty heights of performance poet. He scammed a regular gig in a Manchester club called Mr Smiths in 1975. It was, he says, a steady job. He'd recite his poetry between compering and introducing people such as Matt Munro. Then he met Buzzcocks' member Howard Devoto who convinced him that his face would fit into the new punk scene.
"Thing was, I was trying to make it as a slick performer at the time - mohair suit, short hair, tapered trousers, tab-collared shirt. Funnily enough, that look fitted in with punk. Then I went to see the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks at the Lesser Free Trade Hall and they seemed like guys I could get along with. At almost 30, though, I was too old. People always say to me: `You haven't changed a bit - blah, blah, blah, you look fantastic'. But that's the beauty of never looking any good in the first place. Your deterioration is not so obvious. It's not like Chet Baker, you know what I mean? One minute he's like the James Dean of modern jazz, the next minute he's Geronimo."
The anomaly of Cooper Clarke the poet, one of the most popular of the past 20 years and the only poet to successfully fuse his street-smart art with rock music, is that he's a largely unpublished one. There has been a range of offers from interested publishers: Cooper Clarke says he hasn't had a collection of his work published in almost 20 years (1981's Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt has long been out of print) because of his own idleness.
"You've never met a more idle person than me," he says with no trace of irony. "You've got to understand that I'm totally shiftless. Even big money won't get me out of the house. Gigs are different: everyone's telling you what a great guy you are and then you get money at the end of the night. It's a tough job, as they say, and thank God it's me doing it. Idleness is the poet's friend - and a sin. Still, at least you can't accuse me of avarice. It's a wonder how I've ever had a career of any kind. A miracle, in fact."
Terming himself a bit of a recluse ("I don't have a mobile phone, I can't drive, I've still got vinyl records and I can't decide whether to change my sound system from mono to stereo. The Internet? It's a foreign language to me."), Cooper Clarke dislikes analysis of his work. His credo of not flogging the product has remained steadfast since his emergence in the late 1970s, yet with a family to support - he now lives in Colchester, in Essex - he has pragmatically taken to writing to commission.
"The deadline is my only discipline, my only structure," he deadpans. "I was recently commissioned by Great Yarmouth Council who were making a six-minute film about the town and wanted a poetical voice for it. I worked with the film makers, something I've never done before. It was all right in the end, but it was a really difficult commission. I had to talk the town up, look for the good. My natural propensity is to go a place like Great Yarmouth and be disappointed immediately and run the place down. An out-of-season holiday resort is automatically a very poetic thing for me. They're uniquely depressing. Profoundly so.
"It was a rigid brief. I had to meet people from council estates, community centres, women's refuges and take what they said into account. How can you do that? The way a poet handles something like that is through first impressions. It's a classic case of art by committee. I've always instinctively known that writing poetry is a solitary, reflective process that isn't helped by meeting large groups of people - people with a vested interest, anyway. I knew this already, so I don't know why I had to convince myself by taking the job on. But I'm glad I did it. It was a character-building exercise and has undoubtedly made me a better person. Mind you, for the three months I was doing it the first thing on my mind when I woke up each morning was Great Yarmouth . . ."
Cooper Clarke's poetry is essentially about faded splendour and misanthropy. Yet, he says with a twinkle in his teeth (can't see his eyes behind those damned shades!), the Great Yarmouth experience now has him looking for the silver lining. "It's a new departure for me."
As is fatherhood - has it changed him? "Maybe it has changed me imperceptibly, but I can't see where. A fair enough question, but one to which I don't know the answer."
His philosophy of life? "Do what you do and hope it becomes popular. I wouldn't recommend it for everybody, but it works for me."
