Evidently Chickentown

Background and description

The poem uses repeated profanity to convey a sense of futility and exasperation. Featured on Clarke's 1980 album Snap, Crackle & Bop, the realism of its lyrics is married with haunting, edgy arrangements.

The poem bears a resemblance to a 1952 work titled "The Bloody Orkneys", written by Andrew James Fraser Blair, author and journalist, under the pseudonym Captain Hamish Blair. In 2009 Clarke said he "didn't consciously copy it. But I must have heard that poem, years ago. It's terrific."

In film and television

"Evidently Chickentown" appears on the soundtrack of a number of films, including:

• Danny Boyle's 2001 film Strumpet, in which Christopher Eccleston recites the poem
• Anton Corbijn's 2007 film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control, in which Clarke appears as himself reciting the poem
• Jacques Audiard's 2012 film Rust and Bone

It also turns up on television, including:

• at the end of "Stage 5", a 2007 episode of the American television drama The Sopranos, leading Sean O'Neal of The A.V. Club to write 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"
• in the 2021 two-part documentary HBO miniseries about Tiger Woods, Tiger
• in Danny Boyle's 2022 biopic miniseries Pistol

References

References

1. Bennun, David. (2006). "British as a Second Language". [[Ebury Press]].
2. Mills, Peter. (2003). "The Rough Guide to Rock". [[Rough Guides]].
3. Blair, Hamish. "The Bloody Orkneys".
4. 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]].
5. (19 January 2011). "Evidently Chicken Town".
6. Boyle, Danny. (10 August 2001). "The Friday interview: Danny Boyle".
7. Smith, Rupert. (2011). "Danny Boyle: Interviews". [[University Press of Mississippi]].
8. Murphy, Robert. (17 February 2009). "The British Cinema Book". [[British Film Institute]].
9. Mault, DW. (31 October 2012). "Rust And Bone – Reviewed". The Double Negative.
10. Clarke, John Cooper. "John Cooper Clarke in Conversation with ZANI".
11. (2008). "Happy Birthday John Cooper Clarke: Revisiting a Classic Interview".
12. O'Neal, Sean. (6 March 2015). "A British punk captured the feelings of a Sopranos mobster".
13. (9 January 2021). "HBO documentary shows the Tiger Woods we knew so little about".
14. {{youtube. MFEUEweFpLQ. ''Tiger'' (Pt. 1, 2021 HBO documentary) - "Evidently Chickentown", 19 January 2021.
15. (11 January 2023). "Pistol Season 1".
16. (31 May 2022). "Pistol".