Only twice in the pages of his abundantly entertaining and consistently educational memoir is ‘punk poet’, Sugar Puffs spokesmodel and self-styled ‘Bargain-basement Baudelaire’ John Cooper Clarke moved to something like anger. The second time is by the memory of the director who (Clarke says) went against his wishes to secure Arts Council funding for his 1982 film portrait Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt. ‘I wouldn’t go to anything that had been financed from the public purse…’, Clarke insists. ‘Find some other patsy. Put it this way, if I had a pound for every Ken Loach film I’ve ever seen, I’d start watching them.’

He’s against state subsidy of the arts, then, but very much for a robust interrogation of the inequities of capitalism. The first object of Clarke’s full-blown ire, cropping up a few years earlier in his picaresque odyssey, is the rigid ideological framework underpinning the hippy lifestyle of his first wife’s friends in early seventies Plymouth. ‘There were more fucking rules in their fucking Godless pagan fucking arcadia than in any of the Abrahamic faiths,’ he recalls pungently. ‘[…] We’ve only got Ten Commandments.’

It was a faintly remembered Marxist injunction against ‘the idiocy of rural life’ that had led him to forsake the bucolic idyll of his early married years – working in rural Dorset in his first job after completing his apprenticeship as a letterpress printer – for the (relatively) bright lights of Sir Francis Drake’s departure point, only to find his every foray into dialectical materialism being shot down in flames by a cabal of middle-class flower-children. ‘The application of a class analysis to any topical situation was met with disapproval,’ Clarke remembers, ‘usually expressed in a disappointed tone of voice, as if they had expected better of me, followed by a reminder that the class system was all in my head.’

Of course, it wasn’t. Clarke’s dad—an electrical engineer at Metropolitan-Vickers in Trafford Park—had fought Mosley’s blackshirts in pitched battles in Ancoats in the thirties, and bought The Daily Mirror and The Daily Worker (‘or The Morning Star as it became in 1966′, Clarke qualifies with an eye for detail that is one of this book’s great assets) in the week, with The News of the World and the Sunday Express at weekends for the superior sports coverage. ‘You didn’t have to do much to be left wing then,’ he remembers, in as close as he gets to full-blown Hovis ad-style nostalgia. ‘It was simply a default position that was more to do with economic fairness than reinventing reality.’

As a former member of the Young Communist League himself, Clarke was required to answer the Royal Naval Dockyard’s enquiry as to whether he was now or had ever been a member of the communist party (‘the full Joe McCarthy schtick’) in the affirmative, and accordingly wasn’t allowed near any nuclear submarines. Instead, he joined the Transport and General Workers Union, savoured the high quality of the pasties in the canteen, and took advantage of a working environment perfectly suited to the requirements of a self-styled flaneur with a yen for literary immortality—’If anybody asked how many people worked there, the answer was always the same: about ten percent’—to complete his grounding in the works of Sartre and Camus.

Popular among his workmates then for his unusual propensity for turning down overtime—being ‘tired out from reading Being and Nothingness next to a welder all day’—Clarke has come out the other side of decades of debilitating heroin addiction to delight 21st century readers with the ultimate primer of what you might call dockyard existentialism. It’s not to underplay the differences between the two men to say that I Wanna Be Yours is the book Clarke’s friend and fellow maverick Salford poet Mark E. Smith’s memoir Renegade could have been if he’d bothered to write it himself rather than dictating it in the pub – an addictively readable set-text of drug-fuelled working-class autodidacticism.

‘Literacy was the solution to every problem at home,’ Clarke avers of his 1950s childhood, extolling the virtues of Gilberton Company Inc’s ‘Classics Illustrated’—64-page comic book versions of the seafaring yarn end of the literary canon—as a basis for later explorations of Poe and Huysmans. Throw in the bout of childhood TB which necessitated a recuperative sojourn in Rhyl and established his taste for opiates at an impressionable age, and his ultimate destiny as a conspicuous consumptive was virtually assured.

Stylistically, I Wanna Be Yours is an unadulterated joy. Clarke’s prose expands the snappy turn of phrase of his performance poetry into a written form built around very long sentences in which not a word is out of place. See how the rococo flourish of Clarke’s quill in the following extravagant description of his family’s Higher Broughton home —’Our apartment was contained in a villa built in the Italianate style befitting the taste of the affluent Victorian high bourgeoisie: a mock Palladian edifice notable for the crumbling splendour of its applied ornamentation and the flaking stucco of its lavishly fenestrated façade’—skilfully softens you up for the killer blow: ‘slums to anyone who didn’t live in them, perhaps, but grandiose nevertheless.’

The word ‘forensic’ has fallen into disrepute lately, so let’s say instead that Clarke’s eye for architectural and sartorial particularities has the sharpness of a hungry kestrel. Here he is on the uniforms of the Rialto cinema: ‘The livery was a rather attractive, though even then slightly anachronistic 1940s boogie-woogie style blouse in cream parachute silk with ballooning diaphanous sleeves that gathered at the waist, a style popularised by Stewart Grainger in the movie Scaramouche.’ And the mythic terrain of pre-lapsarian Lancashire leisure could not have wished for a more enticing epitaph than this description of the Belle Vue Gardens leisure complex: ‘The Coney Island of the North, a stately pleasure dome dedicated to overstimulation in every sensory department, home to the notorious Bobs, the biggest roller-coaster in the nation outside of Blackpool. It was made out of wood!’

An apocryphal element sometimes makes itself felt in Clarke’s storytelling, but this in no way diminishes the allure of characters like ill-fated wrestler turned alleged member of The Quality Street Gang Bill ‘Man Mountain’ Benny, renowned among other colourful endeavours for having tried to bring Elvis Presley to Britain for a charity concert. ‘He flew to the states with a million pounds [and] organised a meeting with Colonel Parker who said “That’s fine for me. What about for Elvis?”’

Such is the precision of language and cultural references throughout that you wouldn’t begrudge this book one more run through by a first-rate copy editor before it goes into paperback – to investigate the possibility that Blind Gary Davis might somehow have got mixed up with Blind Boy Fuller, and that surely chops are learned rather than earned. Otherwise, from the triumph of Italian style, masterfully depicted via the wholesale décor adjustments  of local barbers Sid and Aubrey Silverstein, to the shock tactics of the movement which gave him a poetic platform  (‘Punk subverted all the aesthetic ideals – everything ugly was beautiful’) John Cooper Clarke makes a wonderfully sure-footed guide to Britain’s cultural evolution in the thirty years after the birth of rock ’n’ roll.