John Cooper Clarke Album

"Christ I need a wank" muttered Colin
Wafting farts with a back issue of Jaynus
The bed-sit was ten foot by three foot six
And housed three bachelors of diverse, taste, age and conduct
It was littered with old football programmes
The only window was always shut owing to it's being stuck by layer upon layer of gloss paint
The smell of rancid brown ale pungent chip wrappings and overflowing ash-trays
Fused with the natural secretions of the three into a nauseous corporate
He's always fucking her on the floor discovered Kevin
As tiny avalanches of plaster peppered his ice cream
“Maybe they're having a scrap” said Burt
The smart one
And as the mopeds - rasped off to the seaside
Yvonne looked to the trees
And her stomach turned.”

I was on my way from a fairly dull orgy last good friday, where I got friendly with a bisexual nurse and her rather overbearing partner. A fuck was out of the question so they wanked me off six times on the trot.

It was ten years since I had come and my balls ached for the relief of orgasm. The bus conductress was fifty-five. To cut a long story short, my right hand explored the slippery precincts of her vulva and gallons upon gallons of hot jism streamed past the satin creases of her handbag.

An X-film extra's extra
I exit when I'm ex'd
I get it in the neck
I get my check
But i don't get what comes next

I got my break in the 'frisco quake
Clark Gable got the lead
They said 'make like a piece of steak...
Lay on that plate and bleed'

Swine herds and hunch backs
Led to bigger things
I was Pontius Pilate's punch bag
You remember king of king's

Understudy studies scripts
And stunt men dice with doom
You found me in a gothic crypt
Or in some squalid room

Where Clint Eastwood kicks my teeth in
Several times a day
I'm the best dead body in the business
I don't have much to say

Except... aaahhh, ooohhh, ahh, ohh, uhh, ahh, uhhh
And ohh, ahh, nhhh, ahh ohh and thank you lord
What can you say on the end of a sword
You just run out of breath

I carried seven ceasars
Around seven cities of gold
I was the one who didn't whip Jesus
In the greatest story ever told

Fake snakes, mock crocks
And killers cut my throat
That's me in the pine box
I know all about boats

I was on the titanic
I did what was required
And i was the first to panic
On the day the earth caught fire

Hacksaw blades and hand grenades
Dum dum bullets and darts
When pagans raid the stockade
I get mangled by their carts

I fall from trains and torture dames
Just to keep in trim
I get slain on memory lane
And the people say 'oh it's him'

It was in this third rate thriller
I actually got to talk
Saying 'look... the killer gorillas,
They're eating up New York'

I ride this phony pony
In a place a bit like the world
In the eyes of adults only
I never get the girl

Tarantulas invade my bed
Ohh it's wonderful
I'm a talking head... full of lead
Blublblublblublblublblub

I scream all the way to the chair
I scream in the face of tanks
I take the stairway to the stairs
and I scream all the way to the banks

Photogenic passion
Impales me on it's knife
Hero's made from fashion
But dying's a job for life

Fasten your seatbelts says a voice
Inside the plane you can't hear no noise
Engines made by Rolls Royce
Take your choice
...make mine Majorca

Check out the parachutes
Can't be found
Alert those passengers
They'll be drowned
A friendly mug says "settle down"
When i came round i was gagged and bound
...for Majorca

And the eyes caress
The neat hostess
Her unapproachable flip finesse
I found the meaning of the word excess
They've got little bags if you wanna make a mess
I fancied Cuba but it cost me less
...to Majorca

(Whose blonde sand fondly kisses the cool fathoms of the blue mediteranean)

They packed us into the white hotel
You could still smell the polycell
Wet white paint in the air-conditioned cells
The waiter smelled of fake Chanel
Gauloises... garlic as well
says if i like... i can call him "Miguel"
...well really

I got drunk with another fella
Who'd just brought up a previous paella
He wanted a fight but said they were yella'
...in Majorca

The guitars rang and the castinets clicked
The dancer's stamped and the dancer's kicked
It's likely if you sang in the street you'd be nicked
The Double Diamond flowed like sick
Mother's Pride, tortilla and chips
Pneumatic drills when you try to kip
...in Majorca

A stomach infection put me in the shade
Must have been something in the lemonade
But by the balls of Franco i paid
Had to pawn my bucket and spade
Next year I'll take the international brigade
...to Majorca

Give him scars and khaki to wear
Remove his balls, he'll go anywhere
He doesn't speak, he doesn't dare
Death sneaks, he isn't scared
Minus balls, he doesn't care
Jacks beware, action man.
He can ack-ack Ackrington, bomb Berlin
Reduce your car to a heap of tin
Wage war, what's more - win
Punctured skin means nothing to him
The human grenade minus pin
That's him, action man

A chin with a thin Kirk Douglas cleft
Squad by the bleeding left
Don't shout he's deaf
Head over heels in love with death
Beware of the wrath of the man bereft
No marriage plans for action man

Outside the take-away, Saturday night
A bald adolescent, asks me out for a fight
He was no bigger than a two-penny fart
He was a deft exponent of the martial art
He gave me three warnings:
Trod on me toes, stuck his fingers in my eyes
And kicked me in the nose
A rabbit punch made me eyes explode
My head went dead, I fell in the road

I pleaded for mercy
I wriggled on the ground
He kicked me in the balls
And said something profound
Gave my face the millimetre tread
Stole me chop suey and left me for dead

Through rivers of blood and splintered bones
I crawled half a mile to the public telephone
Pulled the corpse out the call box, held back the bile
And with a broken index finger, I proceeded to dial

I couldn't get an ambulance
The phone was screwed
The receiver fell in half
It had been kung fu'd

A black belt karate cop opened up the door
Demanding information about the stiff on the floor
He looked like an extra from Yang Shang Po
He said "What's all this then
Ah so, ah so, ah so."
He wore a bamboo mask
He was gen'ned on zen
He finished his devotions and he beat me up again

Thanks to that embryonic Bruce Lee
I'm a shadow of the person that I used to be
I can't go back to Salford
The cops have got me marked
Enter the Dragon
Exit Johnny Clarke

More on the sick
Down in the dumps
I went to the clinic
What about these lumps
Do you wear tight knickers
Have you ever had the mumps
Can't give it a rest
Break out the Lucozade
Make it the best
I'm engaged to my
Sperm test

The clinical arrangement
No phony bon-amie
Gleaming apparatus
Complete autonomy
Cynical estrangements don't bother me
Germ breed, negative mess
The rubber gloves called cold caress
Tells me I'm in love with my
Sperm test

Silence breaking into metre at seven forty-five
A game of squash with a rubber cosh is a bit like being alive

Walking in and out of rooms I've made it my career
I'm with it, white, well to do, what've I got to fear

Dance routines with chicken queens give me square-bashed feet
I like my music military, I like my women neat

I like my arians well defined, I'd like to make that clear
I'm white, with it, well to do, what've I got to fear

Soap suds, soap operas, hard lines, makes babies sick
Why can't life be run on the lines of an Edgar Lustgarden flick

An ideal home where raincoats appear and disappear
You think you're in the pink, you say you're in the clear

Missing persons passed me by, nothing to do with me
We don't see eye to eye, we get from A to B

I'm not an ex-spick, wop or jew, no dago nigger queer
I stay with it, white, well, wouldn't you, what have I got to fear

The hungry man needs a filthy bad mouth, practice in malarcky
I say how sorry I am and blame an indies darkey

From the man in the street, the man in the know, man in the iron mask
Need I answer your questions, need you fucking ask

You want someone to shit on you, please let me volunteer
I'm with it, white, well to do, what have I got to fear

And my voice echoes Nuremburg, every time I speak
I'm a curiosity, an atrocity, an antique

Watch it brother midnight, my blacklist makes it clear
If you're not with it, white, well to do, there's nothing for you here

I told you once - don't trust men
They'll do you down - and they'll do it again
When all the dead body heavyness splits your spine
What's your game - what's his line
Late home - no TV
Walk with the zombies - talk to the sea
Sand in your shoes - money in your jeans
It's no good crying over - spilt beans

All the fancy Dan's at the Palais de Dance
Offer you assistance in the firm's vans
With the stupid stories and the bad dream lovers
Clean socks - love their mothers
And the ghost train trashed the tunnel of love
Fingers bleed - better wear your gloves
And wave on wave of Germoline
Says no good crying over - spilt beans

In the mindless misfits mohair sweaters
Poison pens and begging letters
Finger bells - ding ding ding
Like they was in some sort of sling
Paidback - with just one look
A prayer wheel and a big fat book
Tells you not to be clever but clean
And close to the real meaning of the beans

The Three Stooges - the four just men
The Magnificent Seven - the terrible ten
Lord Rockinghams Eleven and the Famous Five
Three Men in a Boat - the good lady wives
Twelve apostles and the iddlers three
Ten Green Bottles and the Three Degrees
And all the oval teenage beauty queens
Crying about everything but - spilt beans

The ring of fear - that's the key
To the anorexia housemaid's knee
Who made groovy gravy oh mother of meat
Since we've wed all I do is eat
Too fat to fuck - sorry about that
I got a scrotum fitted with a thermostat
Switch in the kitchen - giggle and scream
Don't let me hear you - spilt beans

No chance in a bank
So it's driving a tank
Stout as a brick
Thick as a plank
It's needlework instead of maths
When the dumb row laughs

Give him a gun
See 'em go
Where they go is a no-no
As welcome as a turd in a swimming baths
The dumb row laughs

No niggers or yids or wops or nips
No wogs or kites or krauts or spicks
No micks or jocks or taffs
When the dumb row laughs

In the isle of man there are no louts
They're all down the dungeons dishing it out
Think them tough but tender
With a bunch of twigs
And a young offender

Old men with purple necks
Who tell you sport is better than sex
Rejuvenare an old pudenda
With a bunch of twigs and a young offender

Sweet little fifteen on a summer hike
Vandal maimed, vandal spite
Vandals sent to up above
A punishment meted out with love

Let's face it
You either like trains
Or you don't
And if you do
There seems to be no risk you wouldn't take
No authority you wouldn't challege
Just to take a closer look
You'd think they have something better to do with their brushes and paint
Just because you want to watch the trains go by at close quarters
But remember
Trespassers will be prosecuted
You cannot be bribed

A lovely day for Bill to drive to work
Simply not the kind of day an accident could happen
Help... Help... I've cut meself and can't stop the blood
I'm sorry, I'll have a help
I'll get help
No... No.. No Don't go
Whoo whooh... choo choo
That man could have cut an artery and bled to death before Bill could get help
Don't you be like Bill
Join the St. John Ambulance Reserve

Hey Jimmy, gimme the gimmix
Another day - another fad
Funk, yes, even for a minute.
They're not bad - dad
From the barmy days of the hoola hoop craze
To the skate board panic of today
Amused, amazed, aghast we gaze
We don't get in the way
Tune in the idle chatter
Turn a blind eye to the scream
At the shatter proof heart of the matter
Things are as they seem
Mahatma Gandhi's loin cloth
The cosa nostra kiss
Cola cans and coin-op cops
Amphetamine psychosis
Sick, sick, sick, or something
Talk is cheap and loud
Dying of consumption
Join the lonely crowd

Look inside the freezer
Watch the pop up toaster pop
The blinking Mona Lisa
Is blinking at me non stop
Beauty aids, commodity art
And things that are for things
Tea's Maids, cushions that fart
The Lord of the Rings

Let's hear both sides of the story
Please don't put me on
Trial by Juke Box Jury
They send me, I'm gone

Chicken runs will sort out
The sheep from the proverbial goats
Speed's in, Sport's out
We will not be approached
Caught in the metal of a straight career
Wn a bent assembly line
Looking younger than last year
Marching men mark time
Boy next door seeks girlfriend
Outdoor type seeks fun
Swim, sing, cycle and swing
No matter what time of the month
Stereotypical playmates
Supplied and not get bored
With impotent anxiety states
Collectively called the norm

In ideal homes where missing persons
Appear and disappear
The sound of iron curtains
Cuts the atmosphere
What's going on behind the green door
The war, the watusi, or what
The condition of admission is a haircut
A Tony Curtis or a Cooper Clar-ar-ar-ar-ar

Make a date with the brassy brides of Britain
The altogether ruder readers' wives
Who put down their needles and their knitting
At the doorway to our dismal daily lives

The fablon top scenarios of passion
Nipples peep through holes in leatherette
They seem to be saying in their fashion
'I'm freezing Charlie - haven't ya finished yet?'

Cold flesh the colour of potatoes
In an Instamatic living room of sin
All the required apparatus
Too bad they couldn't fit her head in

In latex pyjamas with bananas going ape
Their identities are cunningly disguised
By a six-inch strip of insulation tape
Strategically stuck across their eyes

Wives from Inverness to inner London
Prettiness and pimples co-exist
Pictorially wife-swapping with someone
Who's happily married to his wrist

This is the first part of my life story.
Again.
Take a look at me now.
Genius or a madman.
All the answers are forth... the answers are forthcoming in the following chapters.

Ten years in an open neck shirt.
The real story.
From slums to stardom.
Well, not even slums.
Not even... I used to dream of living in...
The Gyp... Gypsies used to come 'round and complain about me.
No, wait a minute, that's their version.
See, I've written a censored version for the "News of the World".
Don't want to offend anybody, do I?

Right then.
John C. Clarke, that's me.
Right?

The bastard offspring of Count Otto Drechstrasse (the Lard Mogul) and Tracy.
Wait a minute - I've got it written.
The Lard Mogul and Tracy.

The Count died of self-inflicted stab wounds three weeks before his birth.
And Tracy, four months later perished along with her sapphires the victim of a mau-mau hit squad.
Leaving Jack with the one thing money can't buy: poverty.

A kindly aunt mailed, mailed the hapless child to a friend in Canada.
But he was erroneously delivered to the Eros Luxury Club, a converted charabang in the bowels of Manchester sub-terrain.

The proprietor produced a pearl-handled flick knife and opened the parcel with psychotic expertise.
Jack gazed into the face of this his first stranger and what he saw was pure malevolence.

More later.
More after the holidays.
Yes, it's holiday time.
Arriba, arriba.
Carumba
Arivaderci Roma
Major...
What did he say?
Objections about my hair?

I was once married to a creature from another planet.
Her name was it and this is tale of our great ?

Falling victim to intergalactic racism wherever it rears its ugly head.
They are the enemies, I point the fingers.
Jack, you say

Allow me to inform you of the contents of my dustbin.
I enjoy talking, don't you?

This is just a book of shirt designs.
You've got to have your finger in more than one pie in this day and age.
That's what they say.

Something is but nothing
Something it is not
Nil plus nil is nothing
Nothings what I got
Nothing on the tele
Nothing going on
Nothing to get worked up about
Nothing by the ton
Nothing times a million
Nothing minus ten
Don't say nothing to no one
It's nothing to do with them
Come all the way from nowhere
And now I'm nowhere else
Where nothing is out of place
No one lives
And nothing smells
Talking to no one
It's like talking to the wall
I give you what I get
I give you bugger all

The milky way she walks around
All feet firmly off the ground
Two worlds collide, two worlds collide
Here comes the future bride
Gimme a lift to the lunar base
I wanna marry a monster from outer space

I fell in love with an alien being
Whose skin was jelly - whose teeth were green
She had the big bug eyes and the death-ray glare
Feet like water wings - purple hair
I was over the moon - I asked her back to my place
Then I married the monster - from outer space

The days were numbered - the nights were spent
In a rent free furnished oxygen tent
When a cyborg chef served up moon beams
Done super rapid on a laser beam
I needed nutrition to keep up the pace
When I married the monster from outer space

We walked out - tentacle in hand
You could sense that the earthlings would not understand
They'd go.. nudge nudge ...when we got off the bus
Saying it's extra-terrestial - not like us
And it's bad enough with another race
But fuck me... a monster ...from outer space

In a cybernetic fit of rage
She pissed off to another age
She lives in 1999
With her new boyfriend - a blob of slime
Each time I see her translucent face
I remember the monster from outer space

Where were we in the uh...
Not tour-de-force I call an autobiography?
Ah yes, I think we were up to "poverty" weren't we?
He was delivered to the Eros Luxury Club, right, in the bowels of the Manchester sub-terrain.

Well, his complete barbar..., his complete reversion to barbarism was prevented when he was adopted by Sheba and Rex who were a pair of Alsatians.
Who started life as Christmas presents to be abandoned by for roller skates
And, they took him home
Home being an art-deco cocktail cabinet on a wooly range bomb site

Decadent lot, you know what I mean.
See like, you know, that's why I know things like mass aldusia
'Cause I've had, you know, a tasteful upbringing.
You know, you've heard about a tasteful upbringing.
You know about these standard things as well.
Which I don't blame you.
I look forward to a time when all you low life peasants are equal to the likes of me.
But I haven't always had it, I haven't always had it easy as you will hear in the ensuing paragraph.

Discarded chips and chewing gum were the day-to-day diet of the sub-savage dog boy.
Whose reversion to a pathetic barbarism was prevented only by the spiritual guidance of Sheba and Rex who were devout Catholics.

Four years later, it was arranged for him to attend the School of Our Lady of the Seven Robes of Gold by the Garden of Sorrows in the Vale of Tears.
School motto: "Behold, his precious blood".
It was run with Spartan efficiency by the little daughters of the sick under the benevolent tyranny of Sister Scourge.

Sister Scourge was everything in the world that stank to Jack.
The hideous rip in her malevolent mask she called a face.
Her cheesy breath steaming up his glasses.
Her eyes like prickly ball bearings - leaving a mechanical taste in the mouth.

"How do you feel?" asked Sister Scourge.
And Otto replied, in his native tongue, "Ruff".

I've seen the poison letters of the horrible hacks
About the yellow peril and the reds and the blacks
And the TUC and its treacherous acts
Kremlin money - All right Jack
I've seen how democracy is under duress
But I've never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

I've seen the suede jack boot the verbal cosh
Whitehouse Whitelaw whitewash
Blood uptown where the vandals rule
Classroom mafia scandal school
They accuse - I confess
I've never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

Angry columns scream in pain
Love in vain domestic strain
Divorce disease it eats away
The family structure day by day
In the grim pursuit of happiness
I've never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

This paper's boring mindless mean
Full of pornography the kind that's clean
Where William Hickey meets Michael Caine
Again and again and again and again
I've seen millionaires on the DHSS
But I've never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

Yes, where did we get up to then?
Third and last part of the serial for this week.
The Catholic education, this is, right?
Oh, and also, it's self education back at the art-deco cocktail cabinet, you will remember, which he lived in.

The world of language proved hyper-accessible to Otto who even then was no stranger to the written word.
There had been days at home when a high wind would festoon him with random information:
Bus tickets and timetables
Bankrupt magazines
Yesterday's papers
Wrappers and bottles
Obsolete menus

Ingredients:
Soy bean protein
Monosodium glutamate
Hydrolyzed milk solids
Saccharin
Lecithin
Niacin
Thiamine
Emulsifier

Important:
Bend
Do not bend
Caution: exposure to heat could cause drowsiness
Open other end
Keep in a cool place
Do not bend

Cans, cartons, glove box
Comics, comics, comics
Writ with the gordiite pornography of physical pain
Wild with the language of shrapnel their pages had burned his eyes
Wizzz, bat, bat
Justice trapped the guilty
Boom splat banzai kill kill
Pkoocha dang dang pkoocha
The game's up Malloy
Crack crack pkoocha dang
Freeze
Splat

Twin jets bleep
Twin jets of death
He was God's assassin
A mindless angel of vengeance
Who knew the jagged truth of the broken window and the wordless poetry of spite punctured the music of chimes

At the age of seven Jack had been educated by accident
Well ?
Play it well

I was walking down oxford road
Dressed in what they call the mode
I could hear them spinning all their smash hits
At the mecca of the modern dance, the Ritz

My feet foxtrotted
My shoulders did the shimmy
The bouncer on the door said "a gimme, gimme, gimme"
I gave 'em the tickets, they gave me the shits
No healthy arguments... in the Ritz

Standing by the cig' machine, who did i see
In lurex and terylene, she hypnotised me
I asked her name, she said it's...
"Salome Maloney, queen of the Ritz"

Lacquered in a beehive
Her barnet didn't budge
Wet-look lips, she smiled as sweet as fudge
She had a number on her back
And sequins on her tits
The sartorial requirements
For females in the Ritz

A man making like Fred Astaire
Complete with spats and tails
A Douglas Fairbanks moustache
Dirty fingernails
Whose snide innuendo was as subtle as the blitz
Waltzed off with Salome in his greasy little mitts

Standing in the dandruff light
Trying to get pissed
Amongst the head-lice, old spice, Brut and body mist
How can she be seen dead
Dancing with that tit
Her being Salome, el supremo of the Ritz

Tables flew, bottles broke
The bouncers shouted "lumber"
The dummy got too chummy
In a Bing Crosby number
The bouncers said it's suicide
Trying to get your mitts
On Salome Maloney, the queen of the Ritz

When the ambulances came,
She was lying on the deck
She'd fell off her stiletto heels
And broke her fucking neck
The band threw down their instruments
The management threw fits
She's dead. she don't bring the business to the Ritz

The over twenty-one's night said it was a shame
The divorcee club will never be the same
Joe Loss killed himself and Vic Sylvester quit
When the death dance drama did away with the Ritz

When the last waltz withered
And the quickstep stopped
The ladies excuse me was permanently blocked
And mecca make a living
Selling little bits
Of Salome Maloney
In the wreckage of the Ritz

This disc concerns those those pouting prima-donnas
Found within the swelling J. Arthur Ranks of the sexational psycle sluts
Those nubile nihilists of the North Circular
The lean leonine leatherette lovelies of the Leeds intersection
Luftwaffe angels locked in a pagan paradise

No cash
A passion for trash
The tough madonna whose cro-magnon face and crab nebular curves haunt the highways of the UK
Whose harsh credo captures the collective libido like lariats
Their lips pushed in a neon-arc of dodgems
Delightfully disciplined, dumb but deluxe
Deliciously deliciously deranged

Twin-wheeled existentialists steeped in the sterile excrements of a doomed democracy
Whose post-nietzschean sensibilities reject the bovine gregariousness of a senile oligarchy
Whose god is below zero, whose hero is a dead boy
Condemned to drift like forgotten sputniks in the fool's orbit bound for a victim's future
In the pleasure dromes and ersatz bodega bars of the free world
The mechanics of love grind like organs of iron to a standstill

Hands behind your backs
In a noxious gas of cheek to cheek totalitarianism
Hail the psycle sluts

Go go the gland gringos
For the gonad a-go-go age of compulsory cunnilingusa