Credit: Far Out / ATG / Press

John Cooper Clarke’s favourite Bob Dylan songs

Sun 5 November 2023 21:30, UK

Alex Turner once said, “There is always that one band that comes along when you are 14 or 15 years old that manages to hit you in just the right way and changes your whole perception on things.” Well, John Cooper Clarke was that for the Arctic Monkeys frontman, and, in turn, Bob Dylan was one of the forces that pushed Johnny towards the stalling engine of wealth that is poetry.

“Well, yeah, he’s made a big impact there,” Clarke recently told me while he travelled the States, honouring one of his many American heroes. ”Although I would say that I haven’t got all of his records, simply because there’s thousands of them. How many albums has he done, three thousand? And I like just about all of them.” And those that he loves have provided perpetual influence for the doctor of punk poetry.

With his impact asserted, Clarke then began to rattle off his favourite Dylan tunes. “I like that ride a mail train one on Highway 61 Revisited, ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’. He always has these arcane titles,“ he says before happily crooning the first two verses of the song down the phone in his dulcet, newly Americanised tones. ”And ‘Queen Jane Approximately’. I think that’s my favourite album, all told, Highway 61 Revisited.”

In the past, he has also cited a love for his more recent works. “I’m a sucker for the Great American Songbook. There is a jazz dimension to it, but it’s as much to do with musical theatre. It features Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and Jule Styne. I never get sick of hearing those songs. In Bob’s version of the songs, his voice is slightly weathered, but all the better for it,” John Cooper Clarke told the Guardian. As Dylan said of the record himself: “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough.” Yet it is a mark of Dylan’s individualism that Cooper adores them.

In this regard, Clarke’s appraisal remains off the beaten track and sticks to the songs where Dylan shines through in his most characterful guise. “I’ve got to have more than one song,” he says, having already named two. ”His body of work is so immense, you can’t whittle it down to one favourite, that’s unnatural.” He doesn’t have to consider that sacred discography for long before other favourites come flying forth, nearly every time with an accompanying acapella serenade of the choice. “’Romance in Durango’ from that magnificent album Desire.“

He continues: “I like those ones that seem to be set in a border town. He does that real well. I think that’s what got him the part in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, he looked dead right in that. He seems to write a lot about Spanish-speaking chicks, and Spanish leather, he seems to have this thing about it, the Catholic world of Mexico, all that fatalism. And the Aztec ruins. ‘Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people, Hoofbeats like castanets on stone,’” he sings. ”It’s a great number!”

“’Spanish is the Loving Tongue’ is another one. Be-you-tiful. It’s got a kind of tango beat, it changes time signature halfway through and becomes a tango. Wow. Check that. A beautiful song,” he says. It’s this capacity to be characterful and dynamic that is always a trait that attracts the Bard. Not only in Dylan, but in his other heroes, Charles Baudelaire, the Ramones, and Nico.

However, it is not a total love-in when it comes to Dylan. The punk poet once penned a piece in the Ramones fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, about the emerging pioneers in which he opined: “I love Bob Dylan but I hold him responsible for two bad ideas: a) the extended running time of the popular song and b) the lyric sheet. Both fine for Bob who usually occupied the extra time in agreeably entertaining ways. The rot, however, set in between 1968 and 1975 when the airwaves were clogged with over-manned combos of cheesecloth-shirted with names like Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum… the end is listless.”

In short, such is the way with most great boundary-pushing art; it usually results in sorry imitators clinging to the lowest common denominator of the feat—Dylan’s progress became dreary prog. Clarke has always preferred something a little more visceral than that.