this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, as newsday continues straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. there — i'vejust used seven words and communicated quite a lot. words can bind us together or push us apart. in a sense, we are all wordsmiths, but many of us shy away from the art form that best harnesses the power of words — poetry. but not my guest today. john cooper clarke was once dubbed "the punk poet".

all his life, he has used words, rhythm and rhyme to find humour and truth in the chaos of everyday life. thanks to the internet, one of his poems has become a worldwide viral sensation. so, where does his word magic come from? john cooper clarke, welcome to hardtalk. hello, stephen. it's great to have you here, john. ijust read your memoir and one of the first sentences in it is this one — "all my life, all i ever wanted to be was a professional poet." now, i've heard of kids

who want to be train drivers, professional footballers, but very rare to find a kid who always knew he wanted to be a poet. how come? when i say "always," i guess from the age of 12 i became enamoured of poetry, thanks to an inspirational teacher, mr malone —john malone. who, although he was a rugged, outdoor sporty type of guy, he was a complex character and had a weakness for the poetry of the 19th century — the stuff you might find in the palgrave's golden treasury, which then was the go—to anthology for the educational establishment. right, but you're a 12—year—old boy growing up in a tough neighbourhood in manchester — quite a working—class sort of area — and you're telling me you fell in love with the romantic poets? yeah, he made it work for us, you know? he conveyed this — it wasn't just me that was affected by his enthusiasm in

this regard, you know? he infected the whole class. and, as you say, you know, it was a tough neighbourhood, it was a tough school. put it this way — we had our own coroner. your own coroner! chuckles but seriously, he conveyed this enthusiasm to the entire class and it became a kind of — it was a mixed school, so it became a kind of point of honour to use million—dollar, polysyllabic language. now, yourfather was — i know he was a funny man and a storyteller but he wasn't enamoured with the idea that you were going to make a life out of poetry? that's right. it wasn't generally regarded as a reliable engine of wealth and, of course, money was always a pressing matter in ourfamily. so, in essence, he sort of encouraged you, shall we say, to go out and find a properjob? yeah. and you found several? well, yes — yes, of course. like i say, money was always an issue.

but, no, he advised me against that as a career, you know, but i figured, you know, that there was a place for it in the entertainment world. you know, there were precedents — nobody comes out of nowhere, you know, and i had certain touchstones like the last days of the musical, you know, and the early days of variety. and american culture... yeah, absolutely. ..because you watched lots of american movies and american music. absolutely. so, you had that beatnik thing coming over from the states, where it was a kind of swinging thing to be. do you think that you've broken through, had it not been for punk? no. because what you did was garnished your act to a whole sort of youth revolution?

that's right — that's right. well, i was — when punk came about, i got a residency — this is as good as it got in the cabaret world. i was dressed in a particular way that i thought fitted that environment. you know, i had seen this movie called the small world of sammy lee starring robert stephens and anthony newley, in which anthony newley plays this proto mod—looking character, who would do all the joints in the soho area, you know? gags, this, that and the other — introduce the main act. and i landed that kind of a gig at a club called mr smith's. don't forget — this is about late 1975. yeah, i saw you fairly early on and have a vision of you — you're stick—thin, i think you've got a suit on. suit on, yeah. got this mop of black hair, the glasses — you looked like no other poet on earth that i'd ever heard of. was that very deliberate — you wanted to say to folks...?

0h, absolutely. dressing is one thing that you do on purpose. laughs and so... ..i had this look already established of a, you know, a tonic suit with narrow, parallel trousers, natural shoulder ivy league jacket and so. i already kind of looked punky, in that everybody else, including your elderly relations, had shoulder—length hair by now and were wearing seed packet shirts and flared trousers. so, i did look kind of, you know, out of time. you did. you look... i mean, you had a look which was unique, but what you didn't have — which a lot of the punk music bands had — you didn't appear to be driven by a massive amount of anger. your poems at that time — and ever since, really — have had far too much sort of human warmth to them to be seen as punk and destructive. i guess so, yeah.

and it is considered. but then, there was a general interest in the lyrics in the early days of punk, you know? yeah. you know, they do read like poetry. if you read strummer and jones and matlock and rotten, you know, their lyrics, they were very important. but i'm just — were you angry at that time? you're a young man, you're trying to make it, it's difficult, you're from manchester... anger... ..and i wonder whether you felt...? no, anger wasn't really my default setting. no... i can't remember... ..it doesn't seem so. i've always been — like you say, i was ill as a kid, so it introduced in me a kind of languid character, i suppose. and what you were also doing was writing poems which — and we'll talk about this later — poems which have stood the test of time. i'm going to you, if you wouldn't mind, john, to give us a reading from one of your best—known poems which i think she wrote in the early

�*80s, i wanna be yours. uh-huh. yeah, sure. this is — yeah, it's a valentine poem. kind of a love poem? yeah, yeah. started life as a — i wrote it for the feast of saint valentine, the annual celebration of courtly romance, and my version goes like this. let me be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust. let be your morris marina, i will never rust. if you like your coffee hot, let me be your coffee pot. you call the shots. i wanna be yours. let me be your raincoat for those frequent rainy days. let me be that dreamboat when you wanna sail away. let me be your teddy bear, take me with you anywhere. i don't care. i wanna be yours. let me be your electric meter, i will never run out. let me be the electric heater you'd get pneumonia without. let me be that setting lotion that grips your skull with deep devotion. deep as the deep atlantic ocean — that's how deep is my devotion. a deep, deep, deep,

deep, d—deep, deep. i don't want to be hers, i wanna to be yours. oh, my god. you've still got it. directly from my heart. what is so striking about that — and i've heard it many times before but i love hearing it every time — it's... thank you. ..it�*s the rhyme, it's the rhythm, it's the energy, it's the drive. and it really works best when you are performing it. oh, that's nice — thank you. you know, when we think of poetry, we think of the artist in his garret, writing this stuff things down, but for you, are you always thinking, "what will this sound like?" 0h, absolutely. yeah, it is a sonic medium. very intelligent observation. i think more than anything, poetry really should be heard — even if you're reading somebody, you know, the poetry of somebody from the last century, you know, you've got to hear it, you know? you have to hear it. if it doesn't sound

any good, it's no good. that poem, and many others, turned you from being this lad in manchester to a national and an internationalfigure — one of the most famous poets of your generation — and it seems to me you found fame quite hard to deal with and you did turn to drugs, and ijust wonder whether it was the fame that encouraged you into addiction? possibly. but i was... no, i was using drugs before i became famous — i got to be honest — but i don't think anybody can handle fame. you'd have to be a monster. you'd have to have a voice inside your head telling you that you deserve all this. so, i think anybody — everybody cracks up in some way about it. it ain't natural. it's against nature. but then, you know, people have always accused me of being in showbiz,

even when i wasn't. mmm. not so many in showbiz, though, go to the extent you did. i mean, the heroin use... yeah... ..was so bad that... i think you've been very honest in the memoir and other places, saying that on more than one occasion, you actually came close to losing your life. oh, yeah, absolutely. it goes with the territory, with that stuff, innit? but... happy ending, in my case. but i wouldn't recommend it as a course of action to anybody else. no. it ain't a club very many people leave. it's not... whenever i'm talking about this subject, i like to establish that fact, you know. it's weird... there used to be a tiresome saying in the hippy era that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. well, when it comes to narcotics, you know, i really am no expert.

i'm not part of the solution. i am definitely part of that problem, or used to be. clean for a long time now, touch wood, thank god. thank god, thank god almighty, but don't try this at home, kids. but the reason i hate talking about it really is because it kind of pushes you into a position where you've got to have some kind of wisdom about it all, or something, but it's too complex, really. i do understand... it's too complex to deal with in the time allotted, really. and even if you gave me all the time in the world, i'm no wiser about it. but the good news is, you did get through it... i did, that's the good news... ..and it didn't stop you creating, didn't stop you writing. no, it did. no, but i mean, it did for a while... for a while, for a decade. a lost decade, but... for a decade, yeah. but then, you found the urge and the ability... yeah. ..to go back to it. yeah. i really thought i'd lost it. it's possible, you know. it is possible, it could happen at any time, that's why i'm such a grafter now. you know...

a grafter in the sense you now try to write, what, every day? i put office hours in. do you? i don't always come up with million dollar goods, but, you know, it's what i do, so i do it. what better thing would i be doing? that is one way in which... just tell me if this sounds ridiculous, but one way in which i see you as quite a small—c conservative sort of guy. you're committed to hard work, earning your money, and also, when you reflect on, for example, as we've already discussed, the way you were educated, the very traditional way... 0h, old—school. michael gove style! yeah. it seems to me you are quite... you're quite conservative in that way. maybe. socially conservative with a small c, perhaps. i guess, yeah. i'm not, by nature, a radical kind of guy, i guess. i mean, if you look at kids today and everything they're exposed to online and the internet that goes alongside their school education... i'm utterly ignorant of that world. utterly ignorant of that social media world. you mean for yourself?

for myself. yeah, i know i'm on it, i know i've had over a billion hits for my lyrics. your work is on it. you know, i'm not complaining about it. it's just too late for me now with that world. do you think it would be good for our young generation, the next generation of kids, to actually be exposed to poetry in the way you were, to be told, "look, kids, believe me, "it's well worth spending the time to read this stuff"? sure, why not? and reading it aloud as well. that was a very big part of the way we... like you say, learning it off by heart and being able to recite it aloud. and, yeah... didn't do me any harm. one of the twists of fate to your colourful career is that your poems are now on the english school curriculum. that's right, yeah. i couldn't be happier about that. does that really mean something? yeah, great. with any luck, they'll be learning it off by heart

in the old school fashion. like you say, i don't know why poetry is regarded as such a minority thing because my theory is that everybody in the world's attempted to write a poem at some particular time, whether for the set pieces of life, such as... well, st valentine's day, for a start, or... you know what i mean? wherever poetry is called for, wherever, you know, a succinct... a succinctly expressed idea is called for, then there's poetry for you and unlike all the other arts, you know, oil paint is very expensive, and you might not be any good. musical instruments are very expensive and you might not be any good. you know, tap dancing lessons are expensive and you might not be... you see where i'm going with this! i'm with you. there's nothing cheaper than a paper and a pencil. precisely. precisely, yeah. it's there for everyone. people talk about my

poetry being accessible, but all poetry is accessible. we, on hardtalk, we talk to quite a number of artists in different fields, from film to theatre to painting and it's a pleasure to talk to a poet. there is, i think, a sense that right now, within the arts, this is a very political time. there are a lot of pressures on creatives and artists, in terms of what is deemed to be acceptable, what is deemed to be, in some cases, unacceptable, even cancelled at times. do you, as a writer and artist, feel societal pressures on you? not in that way, no. i feel absolutely outside of all that because... i don't think it's helpful to know the political world view of any artist. i don't think it helps you to understand their work or to enjoy... more like, to enjoy their work. i don't believe it's helpful.

what if people were to look at some of your work over, you know, the five or six decades...? they might be able to find some favourable ideas, by today's standards... i was going to say, and some might want to censor you. some might want to say, "that poem, with that reference, "is not acceptable." well, i think, if you can think it, you can say it. most of the... within reason. you know, i'm not here to upset people, but i'm also known for being a bit edgy here and there, so... no, i don't find any subject forbidden to me, no. and the thing about poetry is that people have to understand... like it said in there, all my life, i wanted to be a professional poet, right? so, that means that i want money for it and if i want money for it, if i want to sell tickets, it has to be poetry that people are going to like or enjoy, in some sort of way. i can't know exactly how, but,

you know, there's got to be something about you that you can't find anywhere else. so, to take all that kind of thing into account, it's just like a millstone round your neck, but what i always say is, don't look for me... i don't write poetry for any kind of therapy. or to make anybody a better person. or to teach anybody. it's not a didactic exercise. i've dragged this art form into a place where it might not have... many places where it hasn't existed before. and that's the strength of what i do, you know what i mean? i actually... you know, popularity is very important about it to me, so... but what you have to understand that because i don't use it as a kind of... ..cathartic self—therapy, or to get stuff off my chest, that's not the reason i write poetry... but popularity is important. that is important.

and i want to just talk about... but what i was going to say... forgive me for talking overyou, stephen. when you read my poems, i need an angle on things. you've got to get an angle on things and in order to do that, what i do is, very often, don't look for me in these poems all the time, because most of the time, 80% of the time, they're works of imagination. i've heard a conversation somewhere, i'm inhabiting that... the mind that i imagine belongs to somebody else, who is nothing like me. i can think of a million examples of that in my work, you know, where i'm... if you're a poet, you're an adopter of positions. i just want to... and sometimes, extreme positions, that aren't necessarily coming from your heart, you know what i mean? it's just observations. i do and what strikes me is that once you've written the poem, you release it into the world

and you don't necessarily control how it gets used. not at all. and one of the interesting things for you is that in the last few years, the poem that i got you to read earlier, i wanna be yours, has in a sense taken on a life of its own. absolutely. firstly, because the very, very popular band arctic monkeys used the lyrics... i can't thank them enough for this. and now, partly because of arctic monkeys and others who've also loved the poem and used it as a way to do tiktok videos and other things, it has taken off to the point where it has been downloaded more than a billion times on spotify. that's an eighth of the population of the world, eh, that's familiar with my lyrics. and this lad from north manchester now, his poem, this one, i wanna be yours, is one of the most popular in the united states, indonesia, brazil, a host of other countries. ijust wonder, for you, the creator of this, what does that mean? well, i think that without a doubt, you quite rightly mentioned the arctic monkeys, i think they put wheels underneath that poem and, as you say, it's gone

across all the frontiers. i couldn't be happier about that. so, amazing, that's what poetry will do. do you worry about people getting the right message from it? orare you... you've put it out there, you don't really care quite how people use it? not really. no, i don't care. i can't control it, and i am a control freak. if i could, i would, but i can't, so i don't! you have said you will never stop writing poetry. you're on another international tour. uh-huh. i just wonder whether you have changed, changed the way... what, since the early days? yeah. since the wilderness years and my second... you're known as the punk poet and, let's face it, punk lived and died in the 1970s... it lasted for two years. yeah. and you can't be called a punk at my age! there's no such thing

as a punk at my age. by its very nature, it means a kid, doesn't it? a naive or inept teenager. but i suppose... but you can't fight mythology and the punk poet merit is... but is there... what's the point in... ..any part of you that wants to remain, and there's a terrible word that sometimes is used in the arts, relevant to today's younger generation? no, i don't think i'm that relevant to the it people. i'm an analogue guy in a digital world, without a doubt. man out of time. it's a very... i wouldn't have it any other way. it's actually... my position is very... i compare it to the... baudelaire, you know, he was like a... he was a modern guy, an urban poet, in mid—19th century paris, and yet he was kind of... there was a kind of melancholy

for things that had been lost. and i think, you know, you have to have that in your back pocket, as a poet. usually on this programme, we normally end with, you know, one final question and answer, i actually am going to ask you if we can end today's programme with you reading from... i think a poem that sums up the way you are today. you've called it the luckiest guy alive... that's right, yeah. yeah, yeah. but for how long? let's end on it and then decide. right, then. so, here it is. the titular poem to my latest anthology, the luckiest guy alive. "nothing matters and what if it did? "there's more than one way to make a quid. "you'll be farting through silk if you stick with me, kid "i'm the luckiest guy alive. "life is one big happy skive. "the luckiest guy alive. "just waiting for the trouble to arrive. "on the fairway, i'm under par.

"at the boat club, they call me the commissar. "with a monogrammed tankard a—hanging in the bar. "i'm the luckiest guy alive. "i got a kick—ass drag boat i ain't allowed to drive. "the luckiest guy alive. "just waiting for the trouble to arrive. "time was, it was the whole of the law. "that put my feet on the literal floor. "but gravity ain't my friend no more. "oh, no, that's for sure. "but i'm the luckiest guy alive. "i got a facial tattoo saying please revive. "the luckiest guy alive. "just waiting for the trouble to arrive." john cooper clarke, thank you so much... pleasure, stephen. ..for being in hardtalk. thank you.

hello there. very few places on monday had a completely dry day and temperatures struggled to get into double figures. we've seen the colder air down from the arctic move down across the whole of the uk. that's firmly in place right now. there are some weather fronts trying to push up from the south—west, but most of the showers that we had earlier on are getting drawn away into the north sea as that low pressure heads towards scandinavia. so as the showers die away, skies are clearing, and with the winds lighter, temperatures are falling quite sharply. it'll be a cold start to tuesday. lowest temperatures, scotland and northern ireland, “i! or —5 celsius. so, a frosty start for much of the country on tuesday. but it should be a bright and sunny one. as is quite typical for this time of the year, through the morning, as temperatures rise, the cloud will bubble up. in the afternoon, it spreads out and it becomes increasingly cloudy. very few showers around,

mind you, most of them in the north of scotland — again, a touch wintry over the hills — but the winds are a lot lighter here and we'll have light winds elsewhere as well. those temperatures ranging from 7 degrees in northern scotland to only 12 celsius in the south—east of england. so colder weather is in place, these weather fronts trying to move up from the south—west, making very little progress. we are going to see more cloud coming in overnight into wednesday, so the frost is going to be more limited to scotland and northern england. and here, there may well be some sunshine for a while on wednesday, so too northern ireland, but again the cloud will build up, we'll see a few more showers breaking out, mainly across northern england. further south, wales, the midlands and southern england look pretty cloudy. quite a dull day. bit misty over the hills in the south—west, and the clouds thick enough to give a few spots of light rain or drizzle. and those temperatures not really changing very much into wednesday. there is some milder air, as i say, trying to come in from the south—west, but it's making very slow progress, pushing away that cold air that we've drawn down from the arctic. and it looks like whilst

there could be some sunshine around for a while across northern areas, again, the cloud will increase and it's looking pretty dull further south. the cloud thickening in the south—west to bring with it some outbreaks of rain, into south—west england and south wales. those temperatures creeping up but only by a degree or two. it will be a cold start to this week, a chilly week ahead, certainly, with those early frosts around, before the cloud comes in, limiting the frost, lifting the temperatures just a little bit, but bringing with it later in the week the chance of some rain.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm mari oiko. the headlines. signs of a ceasefire in sudan, as the crisis spills into its second week. those on the ground though, describe terrifying scenes. they were running along here and they were shooting, chasing people along the street. we were locking all the doors and we go right in the middle of the house. tucker carlson exits fox news. for years he's been one of america's most—watched, most—profitbale, and most—controversial personalities. the who and other health agencies have launched a campaign to reverse a dangerous decline in vaccination levels among children due to covid.

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