Evidently Chickentown

"Evidently Chickentown" is a poem by the English performance poet John Cooper Clarke. The poem uses repeated profanity to convey a sense of futility and exasperation.[1] Featured on Clarke's 1980 album Snap, Crackle & Bop, the realism of its lyrics is married with haunting, edgy arrangements.[2]

John Cooper Clarke in 1979

The poem bears a resemblance to an earlier work titled "The Bloody Orkneys", written by Andrew James Fraser Blair, author and journalist, under the pseudonym Captain Hamish Blair.[3][4][5] In 2009 Clarke said he "didn't consciously copy it. But I must have heard that poem, years ago. It's terrific."[6]

"Evidently Chickentown" appears in Danny Boyle's 2001 film Strumpet,[7] in Jacques Audiard's 2012 film Rust and Bone,[8] and during the transition between the subject matter of parts 1 and 2 in the 2021 two-part documentary Tiger. Clarke appears as himself reciting the poem in the 2007 British film Control, directed by Anton Corbijn.[9] It was also used at the end of "Stage 5", a 2007 episode of the American television drama The Sopranos. Sean O'Neal of The A.V. Club wrote that the poem "ranks as one of the show's sharpest and most effective musical moments, somehow capturing the vexation of a New York mafia guy with the words of a British punk who's complaining about flat beer and cold chips."[10]

References
  1. Bennun, David (2006). British as a Second Language. London: Ebury Press.
  2. Mills, Peter (2003). "John Cooper Clarke". In Buckley, Peter (ed.). The Rough Guide to Rock. London: Rough Guides. p. 202.
  3. Blair, Hamish (1958) [First published 1952]. "The Bloody Orkneys". In Silcock, Arnold (ed.). Verse and Worse (2nd ed.). Faber and Faber Limited. p. 251. ISBN 978-0-5710-5132-8.
  4. Blair, Hamish (2005). "The Bloody Orkneys". In McGovern, Una (ed.). Chambers Dictionary of Quotations. Pseudonym of Andrew James Fraser Blair 1872–1935. Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. p. 132. ISBN 0550-10085-7.
  5. Blair, Hamish. "The Bloody Orkneys". Snap Dragon: Poetry Corner. Archived from the original on 2018-08-20. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  6. Chalmers, Robert (8 November 2009). "A life of rhyme: John Cooper Clarke, the 'punk Poet Laureate', grants Robert Chalmers his first major interview in more than 20 years". The Independent. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  7. Smith, Rupert (2011). "Back from the Beach". In Dunham, Brent (ed.). Danny Boyle: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 68.
  8. Mault, DW (31 October 2012). "Rust And Bone – Reviewed". The Double Negative. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
  9. Murphy, Robert (17 February 2009). The British Cinema Book (3rd ed.). British Film Institute. p. 405.
  10. O'Neal, Sean (6 March 2015). "A British punk captured the feelings of a Sopranos mobster". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 28 August 2017.


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