Comedy review: John Cooper Clarke - HMV Picture House, Edinburgh

THE punk poet shtick of John Cooper Clarke, the bard of Salford, is at once dated and timeless.

It’s dated in that the wilful sentiment-bashing which he inspired in the alternative comedy scene of the 1980s seems try-hard and out of step now. And timeless because this former “domestic partner” of the Velvet Underground’s Nico was a mould-breaker in terms of the spoken-word slaughter of sacred cows.

Everyone from Jimmy Carr to Jerry Sadowitz owes him a debt, consciously or otherwise.

So, as the spindly 62-year-old with the pipe-cleaner black jeans pointed out himself, context is all when he speaks of his ambition being “to slap a hysterical woman” or “them Paralympic people… climbing Everest in wheelchairs”, while he’s not entitled to a disabled parking badge.

One unfavourable piece about “the pikeys on’t Dale Farm” inspired a boo from the crowd, and Clarke was forced to admit, “I don’t really mean it.”

One’s preference for the comedy of taboo-breaking will probably determine whether the response to him is love or hate. Yet his poems, of which there were too few in a hall which was probably a bit overwhelming for such a personal spoken-word event, remain gems of working class misanthropy and bitterness, from Beasley Street and its nouveau riche update Beasley Boulevard to the “Litany of profanity that has become my own personal anthem”, Evidently Chickentown.

After which, he informed us, we were invited to “a shrimp event at the Sky Lounge around the corner”.

Rating: ***