John Cooper Clarke, beloved Bard of Salford: ‘If you gave me access to the internet, you’d find me dead in six weeks under pizza boxes’

He was the toast of the punk scene in the 1970s, touring his performance poetry with the Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash. Fifty years on, he’s still going, with a new tour, a new collection, and a fan base that includes the Arctic Monkeys. John Cooper Clarke talks to Fiona Sturges about giving up heroin, why writing poetry should never be mistaken for therapy, and why he’ll never own a computer or a smartphone

‘I looked at Ronnie Wood and thought, “He looks good,” so I modelled my style on him,’ says poet John Cooper Clarke (Paul Wolfgang Webster)

When the young John Cooper Clarke told his family he was going to be a professional poet, they were aghast. “For them it was a worst-case scenario: I was going to die in the gutter,” he says. “Poetry has never been regarded as a reliable engine of wealth, so I was advised against this course of action by everybody who meant well.”

But while Clarke has endured some career troughs, there have been enough peaks to keep him in business for 50 years. He is the man who invented punk poetry and who incorporated everyday life – tracksuits, bedsits, trips to the seaside, how you never see a nipple in the Daily Express – into spleen-venting, often hilarious verse. He has toured with Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Fall, Joy Division, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and grazed the top 40 singles chart with his 1978 spoken-word single “Gimmix! (Play Loud)”.

Now, at 75, the man known as “the Bard of Salford” (he has always preferred “the bargain-basement Baudelaire”) has never been so in demand. Next month he performs a series of live dates in the archly titled Get Him While He’s Still Alive! tour – “I like to think it has a note of urgency about it,” he cackles. Meanwhile this week sees the release of a new poetry collection, What, his fourth book. He has even found favour with a new generation, thanks in part to the band Arctic Monkeys who turned his poem “I Wanna Be Yours” – “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust/ I wanna be your Ford Cortina, I will never rust” – into the closing ballad on their 2013 album AM. The song recently reached 1.7 billion streams on Spotify. “I don’t know what that means but it ain’t nothing,” Clarke grins.