John Cooper Clarke and our favourite poem

Thanks to TikTok and the Arctic Monkeys, John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours could lay claim to be the world’s favourite poem. How did it come to pass?

Forget TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Philip Larkin’s High Windows and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus. While those works may have more cultural heft, for sheer popularity no 20th-century British poem can touch John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours. In this love poem, to prove his devotion, an abject Clarke offers to metamorphose into everyday items: “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust / I wanna be your Ford Cortina, I will never rust.” The work became an irreverent favourite at weddings soon after being written in 1982, and its addition to the GCSE English syllabus in the 1990s brought it to a younger generation. One of those studying it was Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, who later said: “It made my ears prick up in the classroom, because it was nothing like anything I’d heard.” Turner eventually adapted it into the ballad that closes out the band’s most successful album, 2013’s AM.

Thanks in part to another new audience, teens finding it on TikTok, the band’s version of I Wanna Be Yours is now wildly, improbably popular: it is poised to clock up its billionth stream on Spotify, having spent months on the platform’s Top 50 songs chart, not in the UK but globally. This slow ballad, with Clarke’s poetry referencing setting lotion and electricity meters, sticks out a mile next to K-pop and Puerto Rican reggaeton. Spotify says the song is most popular in the US, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil; the band’s label Domino says the song’s popularity is particularly growing in India, the Philippines and Turkey. If it was previously Britain’s favourite wedding poem, it’s now quantifiably the world’s favourite British poem, full stop.

I Wanna Be Yours was written as a “sweet counterpoint” to the punkier stuff Clarke had made his name with, some of which even hit the UK Top 40 in the late 70s: surrealist beat poetry, withering character studies, pissed-off social commentary. The poem appeared on his album Zip Style Method, recited over an echo-heavy, neo-doo-wop backing.

He says I Wanna Be Yours is a “deeply felt romantic Valentine poem” and that he’s a natural romantic “to a sadistic degree”. But he splutters nervously when I ask about the woman it was written for: “There have been so many!”

The vacuum cleaner line opens the poem. “There were all kinds of new usurpers of the Hoover, so the term was already resident in the public imagination. I tapped into that.” Later lines have Clarke offering to become a teddy bear, a coffee pot and an umbrella. It is about, he says, “elevating yourself to the level of a commodity for the person of your desire. When you’re in love with somebody, you want to be useful to them, indispensable even.”

I Wanna Be Yours is perhaps so loved because it’s the polar opposite of playing hard to get – a feeling heightened by Clarke’s live readings of it, delivered with a relentless drive. This is why it works at weddings, too: it’s the one place, particularly in eye-rolling, cynical Britain, where you can get away with saying this stuff – as wedding celebrant Claire Lawrence explains.

“If you Google ‘wedding reading inspiration’, I Wanna Be Yours comes up every single time,” says Lawrence. But, she warns, “it’s a hard one to read well. You’ve got John Cooper Clarke or Arctic Monkeys in the back of your head. You can’t just get your Uncle Philip to have a go at it – you need someone with chutzpah.”

Clarke says that when he stays in a hotel where there’s a wedding going on, quite often the couple will rush over and say they’ve just read his poem out. Occasionally he delivers it at weddings himself, for friends: “I get a dinner out of it. It is to weddings what Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is to humanist funerals.”

You probably wouldn’t play Arctic Monkeys’ version for your first dance though – it’s more funereal than marital. Turner’s steady delivery is very different to Clarke’s and he tweaks and adds lyrics – there’s a killer bit of changed emphasis when he sings “let me be the portable heater”, suggesting a love rival that isn’t there in the poem. Clarke is utterly in love with the band’s version. On a prosaic level, it has made him “a lot of PRS”, referring to royalties, and has substantially boosted his profile. More

profoundly, Clarke sees Turner (who couldn’t contribute to this article while on tour in Asia) as a kindred wordsmith, and goes off on some fascinating songwriting analysis. On I Wanna Be Yours, the previously smooth Turner deliberately stumbles as he sings the wordy line “at least as deep as the Pacific Ocean”. Clarke says it’s the “humanising” moment of the song, one that shows you “nobody’s perfect” – and Turner does it through the rhythm and musicality of the words themselves, rather than with his singing voice.

“When you use this MO, of putting too many words per line, you’re actually depriving yourself of the opportunity to inject soulfulness in the vocal delivery – your main concern is getting the language out there, making it fit,” Clarke says. “So there’s no extraneous baring of the soul.”

When Arctic Monkeys played Earl’s Court for the release of AM, they invited Clarke along, and teed up their encore with I Wanna Be Yours. “Balloons falling from the ceiling: the big finish,” Clarke wistfully remembers. “And I was reading an interview in one of the papers with” – he says this next name with the reverence of a monk addressing a newly canonised saint – “Abbey Clancy, who was very enthusiastic about Arctic Monkeys’ new album, mentioning I Wanna Be Yours as her favourite track. It was a revelation that she was a fan of my work, without necessarily knowing about it. I was thrilled.”

The biggest thrill, though, is that I Wanna Be Yours has helped to lift up poetry itself. “Any work of art,” says Clarke, “that has any lasting, transcendent value – a painting that haunts you through life – you say it’s ‘poetic’. Unlike all the other arts, poetry is the one everyone gives a go. I believe everyone’s written a poem at some point. It’s the easiest, most accessible – a pen and a piece of paper and off you go. You don’t even have to be literate – you could record something. But it’s perceived as a minority of a minority who are interested in poetry. I don’t know why it’s got that reputation. Songs aren’t that far from poetry – as Alex has pointed out.”