The soundtrack to your life

If, like me, you have a large, unalphabetised and long-unvisited collection of vinyl, the Ion USB is like an instant time machine that will transport the soundtrack to your teenage life onto your iPod within minutes. Turn the past into the future, goes the marketing spiel. And it does. The turntable comes bundled with Audacity software (good for PCs or Macs) and Bias Soundsoap 2 which irons out some of the worst cracks and splutters of those much-abused discs. My own time journey is so far incomplete but an unexpected rediscovery were several of John Cooper Clarke's idiosyncratic works or oeuvres as I feel they should be called. Like Morrissey but funnier and darker, the sardonic Cooper Clarke still pounds the circuit in his black drainpipes, big hair and outsized sunglasses. The bard of Salford delivers his bleak vision through devastating puns in a flat Northern monotone against what are often trite tunes.  His first LP – Où est la maison de fromage? – was released in 1978 just as the Sex Pistols were shaming glam rockers into retirement. More recently The Arctic Monkeys cite Cooper Clarke as a major influence. It is difficult to convey the full effect through quoted lyrics but here are a few lines from Beasley Street:

The boys are on the wagon

The girls are on the shelf

Their common problem is

...That they're not someone else

If you want to, you can trace his verse back through a very British tradition - to Betjeman and Noel Coward - of small quotidian life and something nasty in the woodshed. Here he is in rare, romantic mode with I wanna be yours:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

If you like your coffee hot

Let me be your coffee pot

You call the shots

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

I wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

Let me be your teddy bear

take me with you everywhere

I don't care

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter

I will not run out

I wanna be the electric heater

You'll get cold without

I wanna be your setting lotion

Hold your hair in deep devotion

Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean

That's how deep is my devotion