POETRY in Performance: John Cooper Clarke/Mike Garry. I’ve been hooked on Cooper Clarke’s acerbic, melodic and riotously funny poetry since my teens, when he battled a hostile and baffled audience as the support act for Be Bop Deluxe.

Forty-three years later, his performance was as brilliantly shambolic as ever, peppered with jokes blending compassion and comic cruelty with the same energy and panache as his poems.

His obsessions are pop culture, urban decay and the absurdities of the human condition; his influences are rap, the American beats and the wordplay of Roger McGough.