John Cooper Clarke - Word of Mouth: The Very Best of John Cooper Clarke

Maybe John Cooper Clarke's brief window of fame passed with the demise of punk. But his poems are every bit as arch and funny now as they were in the '70s. There are sly wordplay, groaning puns, and also plenty of strong social observation. He essentially took the ethos of the Liverpool poets of the '60s, using common language and bringing in lots of humor, but made his mark through speech, not print. This collection, cherry-picked from his major-label work, is an absolute joy. Backed by the relatively all-star Invisible Girls (which included Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks), the Bard of Salford deadpans his way through the epic "Psycle Sluts (Parts 1 & 2)," "The Day My Pad Went Mad," and the piece that really gave him his first big exposure, "I Married a Monster From Outer Space." But in "Beasley Street" and "Postwar Glamour Girls" there's a more serious undercurrent happening, while "Kung Fu International," for all its lightheartedness, shows that little has changed in English street violence, and "Twat" remains as deliberately outrageous and hilarious as it was on its initial release. Culled from the four albums Cooper Clarke did for Epic, it shows that what was good then is still good. The world needs a Cooper Clarke for the new millennium. AllMusicGuide

    1 (I Married a) Monster from Outer Space
    2 I Don't Want to Be Nice
    3 Valley of the Lost Women
    4 Postwar Glamour Girls
    5 Kung Fu International
    6 Psycle Sluts
    7 Twat
    8 Marjorca
    9 Gimmix Play Loud
    10 Beasley Street
    11 Evidently Chickentown
    12 Conditional Discharge
    13 Limbo (Baby Limbo)
    14 The It Man
    15 Thirty Six Hours
    16 Midnight Shift
    17 I Wanna Be Yours
    18 The Day My Pad Went Mad
    19 A Heart Disease Called Love
    20 Night People