It was September 1978 and I was visiting an old school friend in Manchester. We'd arranged to meet up with a uni friend of mine, who lived in Manchester and some of his friends with very peripheral (friend of a friend things) connection to some faces on the Manchester scene.
It was a great evening, as I hazily recall.I met lots of lovely and interesting people - one of those happy times when two sides of your life come together and people all get on. Much drink was taken, and on an adjacent table, vaguely known to one of the ladies in our party was a Dylan lookalike in shades.
"That's John Cooper Clarke", she says.
"Who?", we reply.
"Punk poet", we're told, and at that point his friend produced a saxophone and, passing the hat round the pub, gives us a rendition of Devo's Mongoloid. What a brush with fame!
Within a couple of months, Disguise In Love would be released and Cooper Clarke would be a star (sort of...), but it would be another thirty-five years before he was a national treasure.
We saw him in Canterbury about seven years ago, and I'm afraid I was disappointed. The poetry was fantastic, the stand-up, which made up 50% of the show, much less so.
This 'Best Of' spans the years from 1978-1982, opening with Monster From Outer Space (apparently his ex-wife?), then into the fantastic I Don't Want To Be Nice, the dreary Valley Of The Long Lost Women and the bouncy Post-War Glamour Girls. Obviously best ofs are subjective, but from Disguise In Love - no Salome Maloney or Readers' Wives?
There's a cluster of unaccompanied poems next - personal favourite Kung Fu International ("I can't go back to Salford, the cops have got me marked. Enter the dragon, exit Johnny Clarke") followed by Psycle Sluts, the hilarious Twat and the joyous Majorca ("Here I come, Caramba") - then the hit single (no 39) Gimmix, not for me one of his best, taking us up to the peak of the album, the classic Beasley Street followed by Evidently Chickentown (the 'bloody' version).
But following that, it seems to go downhill. Of the final nine tracks the only ones making an impression are the lovely I Wanna Be Yours, a fantastic poem, let down in this setting by a limp accompaniment, and much more frantic The Day My Pad Went Mad, well presented, but to my ears inferior to the delivery of the 'Massed John Cooper Clarkes Of Carnaby Street' on Ou Est La Maison De Fromage? Listen below.
There's a lot to love on this compilation, a lot that seems to be missing (Gabardine Angus, Split Beans in addition to those mentioned) and much that is ordinary. But he's still a National Treasure and A Good Thing.
3* - Lots to love, lots that's merely OK
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