John Cooper Clarke on cancel culture
Poet John Cooper Clarke: "I don't find any subjects forbidden to me"
"I don't think it's helpful to know the political worldview of any artist," says poet John Cooper Clarke, "I don't think it helps you... to enjoy their work."
Speaking to HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur, John Cooper Clarke said: "if you can think it, you can say it, within reason."
He says while "I don't find any subjects forbidden to me", his aim was to perform poetry people will like and says "popularity is very important".
He calls writing poetry an act of imagination that involves inhabiting characters different from himself: "If you're a poet, you're an adopter of positions. And sometimes extreme positions that aren't necessarily coming from your heart."
John Cooper Clarke found fame in the late 1970s performing on the punk scene with bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Of his long career as a performance poet he says: "I've dragged this art form into... many places where it hasn't existed before."
His poem I Wanna Be Yours was set to music by the band the Arctic Monkeys and has been downloaded over a billion times on Spotify.
John Cooper Clarke continues to perform and is currently on tour in the UK.
