Tom Rhodes Radio Smart Camp

The legendary punk rock poet John Cooper Clarke returns to TRR Smart Camp! One of the highlights of my trip to the UK was getting to spend the day with JCC at his house and record this conversation at the very table where he writes and is currently writing his memoirs. We discuss the difficulty of writing the story of your life when your life continues to move forward. If anyone has a life story worth retelling it is this man who has tasted the whip of unemployment, been a friend to the China man's night cap, pissed pure gold, operated in the world of degenerate gamblers, the fickleness of fame and the feeling of being an iconic live performer. He's under pressure to finish his memoir before his deadline but he tells me that the defining turning point in his life was when he could start picking out his own clothes and have the style of his own choosing. We talk about  the teacher who introduced the love of poetry into John's life, the 19th century romantic poets, how Poe knew how to drive people mad and how B