I’d been halfway out the door when the proprietor told me that some young men in a band wanted a word because they’d done my poetry at school. But “thank God, thank God, thank Almighty God”, Johnny Clarke’s exit has been indefinitely postponed. The book is funny in places and I suppose written with a dry sense of humour, I would like to have learnt more about the last twenty years since he stopped taking hard drugs.

I genuinely feel that his lyricism and enunciation would be like having an every day conversation with John Cooper Clarke.In ‘Wanna Be Yours’, Clarke recounts his life from early years growing up in Salford, to dedicated follower of fashion, via failed attempts at a music career, through embryonic proto punk poetry to life as a household name, playing the London Palladium and residing in Colchester (of all places).

I think Mr Clarke was given too much freedom with this meandering diary with a tendency to show off. One of the greatest and coolest things I've always been able to tell people is that, not only do I live in the town where Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Humpty Dumpty were written, but that the captivating individual that is John Cooper Clarke lives here. His book choice was Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, his luxury item was a boulder of opium twice the size of his head and his favourite track was " How Great Thou Art" by Elvis Presley. Sewing binding for longer life, where the book block is actually sewn (smythe sewn/section sewn) with thread before binding which results in a more durable type of binding.Around this time, he performed on stage with several punk and post-punk bands and continues to perform regularly. All in all a very enjoyable and entertaining insight into the life and time of the phenomenon that is Dr John Cooper Clarke - just one that could have been significantly better by virtue of being more succinct.

There's so much downplay and side cracking, and an audible honesty to the mistakes, the byways and the bad (and good) decisions he made. I think this is because he details a lot of social history, particularly in Manchester in the 60s and the lists of significant people who some of us will never have heard of get tedious. From the "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman" to a hymn to the seductive properties of the pie—by way of hand-grenade haikus, machine-gun ballads and a meditation on the loss of Bono’s leather pants— The Luckiest Guy Alive collects stunning set pieces, tried-and-tested audience favorites and brand new poems to show Cooper Clarke still effortlessly at the top of his game.

I would love to do an essay on this poetry collection in comparison to Ten Years in an Open-Necked shirt. His sense of humor is biting and slightly dark, which suits me right down to the ground, and his way of playing with language is just.

They say about people in showbusiness, ‘They ain’t got something extra, they got something missing’.I especially enjoyed this section for the memories it brought back for me of those days in West Yorkshire! In October 1981 Clarke appeared in episode 2 of series 3 of The Innes Book of Records, reciting " Evidently Chickentown". but I get slated I believe anything really worth knowing can never be taught, and if I was educated I would be a fool.