TWO months short of collecting his bus-pass, “Johnny Clarke” meandered onto The Bridport Arts Centre stage, A4 notebooks in hand and launched into a poem listing the names on the (imaginary) guest list.

Painfully drawn and skinny, sporting trademark birds-nest black hair and dark glasses, this was to be no normal poetry reading.

In four decades as a performer he has seen it all, supporting such diverse acts as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Be Bop Deluxe and New Order.

‘The Bard of Salford’, has featured on TV in a chip advert, The Sopranos and in the BBC documentary ‘Evidently… John Cooper Clarke’. For the last twenty years he has been touring the world, following ten years lost to addiction.

The current tour is a curious mix of poetry and stand-up comedy. We were treated to many old favourite poems, performed at break-neck staccato pace, such as ‘Beasley Street’ (and the up-dated version, ‘Beasley Boulevard’), ‘Monster from Outer Space’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown’.

There were also a few new pieces, including my favourite ‘I’ve Fallen in Love with My Wife’. Meanwhile, each poem was introduced with a rambling, often hilarious, perfectly timed anecdote.

Cooper Clarke and his support on the current tour, Mancunian poet Mike Garry – very much in the JCC mould and definitely worth catching in his own right – are unlikely to be on the short list for Poet Laureate.

They do, however, have the power to attract an audience that would be turned off by the likes of Wordsworth, Hughes and Duffy, and that has to be good.