John Cooper Clarke

catspring

I'm writing an essay on John Cooper Clarke at the minute. The question is "Write an introduction to the work of any contemporary poet you consider to be 'popular', outlining what you consider to be the reasons for his/her popularity".

I though JCC was a good choice here. I enjoy his poetry, and I think that it does reflect certain elements of modern society, Evidently Chickentown for example, sums up what it is like to live in a crappy town where there's nothing to do, where the clubs are rubish and the drugs are useless, where people get so bored that they go out and stab people for the craic, etc.

Now, the thing is that there is very little literature out there on JCC, I have scoured the book shops of Dublin (well, 3 or 4 of the the bigger ones anyways), so most of my referneces will be web-based. My lecturer suggested that I try message boards to try to get some insight in to what people think of JCC so I thought that boards.ie was the place to go.
So, what is your favourite JCC poem? What do you enjoy/dislike about his work? Anybody ever seen him performing? Or have you any thoughts on performance poetry as a genre?

thanks in advance!

catspring

here's a link to his poems:
http://www.cyberspike.com/clarke/poemlist.html
c'mon people, help meh!