John Cooper Clarke LIVE @ Theatre Royal Brighton 16.11.14

The nasal tones of John Cooper Clarke sit fondly in my memory: on hearing them I’m transported back to the back seat of my mum’s maroon mark 3 Astra, in which he intermittently commentated on our journeys (via CD) around Manchester. I remember being about 9 or 10 years old when mum used to play his Word of Mouth compilation. and me and my younger sister would recite the words to ‘Twat’, pretending to censor ourselves for fear of mam’s wrath, but actually whispering the all too familiar swearwords and giggling as young kids do.

This taken into account, I jumped at the chance of experiencing that nostalgia live for the first time on Sunday, in my adopted home town of Brighton. The venue was the beautiful, extravagant Theatre Royal and it was great to see a proper icon for the first time in such a fancy setting. I wasn’t going to let the grandiose venue put me off – I spent £25 on four drinks at the theatre bar, so to make reparations I bought a few of those diddy bottles of wine from Tezza’s down the road and snuck them in to get into the punk spirit, Brighton-stylee.

The crowd lingering in the foyer before the show started was largely made up of middle agers who were probably there first time round, off their heads on Snakebites and speed, but in 2014 drink bottles of Old Speckled Hen and glasses of Prosecco. It did make me smile seeing a few teenage emo-looking girls who were there presumably with their parents. That’s the beauty of Johnny Clarke: his words unify across generations – you don’t need to have been there to get what he’s saying, neither the time nor the place.

The bard of Salford was a pleasure to watch. He kept it fresh and snappy like his performance style, changing the subject matter constantly. From pure humour watching his rakish person jittering around the stage proclaiming ‘Get Back On Drugs, You Fat Fuck’ and my personal favourite ‘Twat’, to more thought-provoking poems about poverty, ‘Beasley Street’ and ‘Beasley Boulevard’, a follow up about gentrification and regeneration (something that felt very apt being this close to London).

JCC’s hair was even more impressive in person, but his energetic performance meant the height of his gothic candyfloss headpiece gradually fell as the evening went on. Between poems he pelted us with one-liners and top notch word play – indulging in a bit of “Devil’s Avocado” as he put it. Unfortunately, he didn’t do ‘Kung-fu International’ or ‘Majorca’, but I’ll swap them for my favourite joke of the night: “What’s the difference between a Jehovah’s Witness and a Lada? You can shut the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.”

All in all, a top Sunday night, however it’s definitely worth mentioning one of the supporting acts, Mike Garry. A Mancunian poet of a different type to Clarke, he completely stole the show for me. I enjoyed his poetry because it was familiar to me; he mentioned places I knew from growing up, and even did one about my dad’s current local boozer (big up Bernard Manning’s World Famous Embassy Club.) But it was his magnetism as a performer that really drew me in. You could feel that he felt everything he was saying, they weren’t empty words, even though he’s performed them plenty of times, on the same bill as Patti Smith and Iggy Pop earlier this year, which speaks volumes. Give him a listen – the bittersweet eulogy for his mother ‘What My Mam Taught Me’ had me tearing up, and his rhythm and wordplay in ‘Saint Anthony’, a poem about the late Tony Wilson, was très magnifique.

Georgia Richardson