‘A billion listens? Is that a lot?’ John Cooper Clarke on penning possibly the world’s favourite poem
I Wanna Be Yours, a love poem that rhymes Ford Cortina with vacuum cleaner, has been a school text and a wedding staple. But now, thanks to TikTok and Arctic Monkeys, it has gone spectacularly global. So who was it written for?
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Monday 20 March 2023
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 will clock up its billionth stream on Spotify this week, 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.
“Is that a lot?” says 74-year-old Clarke, when I tell him about the billion streams milestone. “An American billion is different to a British billion – and I don’t know what either of them is. But it’s a fuck of a lot of listens.”
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: imagine Roy Orbison if he was from Salford and had lost the will to sing. “That wasn’t my idea, I gotta be honest,” he says of his musical backings. “But I couldn’t think of an argument against it. ‘Who plays spoken word records more than once?’ And I kind of believed that at the time.”
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!” He argues that it wasn’t born out of romantic feelings anyway, but graft. “Inspiration is for amateurs – I’ve got a living to make! It’s an actual nine-to-five job, though obviously it spills over into the evening if you’re on one. You’ve got to put the hours in.”
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. Then I thought, ‘What else is useful?’” The next line originally featured a Morris Marina. “I had a second-hand one at the time, but I thought, ‘Bit naff.’ It’s not got the clout of Cortina. Funny how some words are better than others.”
Later lines have Clarke offering to become a teddy bear, a coffee pot and an umbrella, and adding: “I wanna be your electric meter / I will not run out / I wanna be the electric heater / You’ll get cold without.” 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, like a man who’s rushed up to you with a fistful of petrol station daffodils. 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, “amid a load of really quite slushy readings. It’s the alternative for people who don’t want to be too Hallmark card.” Older couples tend towards saying stuff about soulmates and eternity, but Lawrence says that with younger people, “the everyday is a theme that comes up a lot, the mundanity. Sitting with somebody having a cup of tea, doing the big shop.” I Wanna Be Yours, a love poem pledging eternal devotion that’s full of mundane detail, ticks both boxes. 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.”
Wedding planner Linzi Barford says the poem fits into broader trends, too: the Monkeys link makes it popular amid a current craze for music-festival-style weddings, while couples facing a cost of living crisis are rejecting tradition. “There are barns where every weekend you can pay £35,000 and get the same wedding as everyone else, with the same readings. People don’t want to do that.” Or if you do have a traditional wedding, complete with meringue-y dress, I Wanna Be Yours can be a neat bit of iconoclasm. “In the wedding industry,” says Barford, “there’s a huge thing about ‘your wedding, your way’. But we all know what it’s like with parents! So a reading is a way to stamp your own personality.”
It is to weddings what Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is to humanist funerals
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: he’s touring sizeable UK venues this month. “I was never actually on the sausage” – rhyming slang for dole – “as this is what I do, this is my job, and sometimes I’m doing better business than others. But thanks to a great extent to the lads sticking me into the pop world again, everything has gone from strength to strength.”
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.”
He compares Turner to Chuck Berry in this regard, citing a line from Berry’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man. “‘Way back into history, 3,000 years in fact, ever since the world began’ – he doesn’t need to put ‘in fact’ in there. But Chuck couldn’t bear to leave that gap. It makes it just that bit more intimate and conversational. That ‘in fact’ should fuck it up, but it doesn’t.” Another example from the same song: “‘Milo Venus was a beautiful girl, she had the world in the palm of her hand / lost both her arms in a wrestling match to meet a brown eyed handsome man.’ You couldn’t get a Rizla in there. Every millisecond is spoken for. Fantastic!”
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.”
