The punk poet's not dead

Is there anything John Cooper Clarke hasn’t done? The so-called “godfather of British performance poetry” has toured with the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello, released six albums, and published a poetry collection. But that was two decades ago. So where has he been for twenty years?   The Daily Telegraph reports on his disappearance from the punk poetry scene – and, more importantly, his recent return to the stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:

John Cooper Clarke appears like a man out of time. He is stick thin, dressed  in shiny black boots, tight black straights, sharp shirt and buttoned-up  Sixties jacket, topped off with impenetrable Raybans and an enormous, spiky,  dyed black barnet. At 61, Clarke is wrinkled, his lips have shrunk, and his  teeth are full of bits of gold, but otherwise he looks exactly the same as  when he was the poet laureate of punk, the self-styled bard of Salford, a  comic wordsmith with almost household name status . . .