“There are only three things that stop me sleeping: hunger, the odd bad dream and cramp in the arches of my feet - it's crippling, as if somebody's trying to tie your foot in a reef knot.”

English performance poet and comedian, associated with the punk era

John Cooper Clarke is an English performance poet and comedian, associated with the punk era and born in Salford. He is known as JCC and as “The Bard of Salford”. He was often described as a punk poet in the late 1970s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he released several albums and appeared on stage with punk and post-punk bands. He has continued to write and perform, and his first poetry anthology, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt, appeared in 1982; that title was also used for a documentary film about him the same year.