John Cooper Clarke’s 1980s poem has struck a chord with Generation Z on TikTok (Picture: Phil Bourne/Redferns)
John Cooper Clarke had the best response to being told his words have almost clocked one billion listens on Spotify.
The poem I Wanna Be Yours is the brainchild of punk performance poet John, and its words featured on his 1982 album Zip Style Method.
But in 2013 indie rockers the Arctic Monkeys adapted his verses for their AM album, and as often happens with TikTok, it is randomly popular again having spent months on Spotify’s Top 50 songs chart.
That’s not the only place you’ll find John’s irreverant poem though, which famously goes: ‘I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust / I wanna be your Ford Cortina, I will never rust’.
It’s also a hugely popular reading choice at weddings; presumably to add a touch of irreverence and a very British type of romance to modern day nuptials.
But it seems John hasn’t quite got his head around his words being listened to almost one billion times on Spotify via the Arctic Monkeys’ adaptation.
John still performs live readings of I Wanna Be Yours to appreciative crowds (Picture: Samir Hussein/WireImage)
Alex Turner took a shine to John’s poem while reading it in a GCSE class (Picture: Pablo Gallardo/Redferns)
‘Is that a lot?’ the 74-year-old asked when told of these incredible recent statistics in an interview with The Guardian.
‘An American billion is different to a British billion – and I don’t know what either of them is. But it’s a f*** of a lot of listens.’
On writing a poem about becoming useful household objects for the person you love, he said: ‘There were all kinds of new usurpers of the Hoover, so the term was already resident in the public imagination.
‘I tapped into that. Then I thought, “What else is useful?”‘
He added that the beloved poem is all about ‘elevating yourself to the level of a commodity for the person of your desire.
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‘When you’re in love with somebody, you want to be useful to them, indispensable even,’ he added.
The Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner was one of many to read John’s poem in GCSE English, and it had a lasting impact, as he once said: ‘It made my ears prick up in the classroom, because it was nothing like anything I’d heard.’
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This is classic.