John Cooper Clarke is talking about the dentist. He’s recalling a childhood memory of scent and living above a pharmacy, and the redolence of a certain illicit drug as an anaesthetic. “It smelled like a dentist’s. And in those days, dentists actually used cocaine [as an anaesthetic], rather than novocaine. So, the smell of a pharmacy really takes me back home.”
WHEN POETRY MET PERFUME
IN CONVERSATION WITH
John Cooper Clarke
There’s always something better to do than write a poem. There’s always something more beneficial, or useful. I think it’s the defining feature of all art, uselessness.
DR. JOHN COOPER CLARKE
POET
I look to the team behind the cameras. We can’t possibly use that in writing. Yet here it is. It’s entirely indicative of the self-proclaimed punk poet’s ability to hold court on pretty much any topic he chooses, weaving in the outrageous, irreverent and downright comedic with more earnest reflections of his craft and 40-plus years in the business – if you can call poetry a business, that is (“There’s always something better to do than write a poem. There’s always something more beneficial, or useful.”). Born in 1949 in Salford, Greater Manchester, Cooper Clarke is one of those personalities that you can say with some degree of certainty has seen it all. There were the 1960s Mod days: “The go-to cologne for men around about then was Acqua di Selva. Blue, sort of glass bottle. That and Old Spice”, in case you were wondering. Working the poetry scene around Manchester. Appearances alongside Joy Division, the Sex Pistols and The Fall. Tours, books, TV comedy quiz shows. And that Arctic Monkeys’ song, a swooning, indie-fied version of Cooper Clarke’s synonymous 1982 poem. Which, funnily enough, turns out to be a red thread connecting our collaborators: perfumer Carla Chabert – herself something of a multihyphenate, with interests in film and photography – is a huge Arctic Monkeys fan and pitches up on set in one of their T-shirts from their last tour.
And the music doesn’t stop there. Cooper Clarke and Chabert spend time between verbal wanders through their respective crafts, memories of the summer, the coast and the power of scent leaning in and discussing obscure French singers and favourite albums. In these moments, if you didn’t know any better, you’d say they’d known each other for years – even when Carla admits she only bought one of Cooper Clarke’s books a couple of days prior. “It’s very beautiful, poetic,” she says. “I didn’t know you then, but I could hear you saying these lines. What I love about your poetry is that it’s a play on words, it’s very rhythmical, it has rhyme and it’s beautiful.” There doesn’t seem to be much that causes the wordsmith to pause his words, but here – just for a split second – he does.
IN CONVERSATION WITH DR. JOHN COOPER CLARKE AND CARLA CHABERT
ON COASTAL CYPRESS & SEA FENNEL
John Cooper Clarke: I’m getting the tropical section of the botanical gardens at some seaside resort. There’s a coastal resonance there. What do you think Carla?
Carla: The idea was coastal sea hitting on a cliff, a red cliff. With a cypress tree on top of that. I constructed the fragrance around the colour blue. So I used cold elements, and spicy cold elements, and everything that reminded me of the colour blue.
John: It’s certainly got, as I say, the big sky. And then of course, the ‘herbiage’ you just referenced there. I wasn’t a million miles away with the botanical gardens of a coastal resort. Just saying.
Carla: Not being very fond of marine fragrances – because I often find that they are harsh – I tried to go round that. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to construct something around the colour blue.’ And that was my idea. I have fresh spices, cold spices – what we call cold spices. On the contrary to cinnamon. It’s cardamom, things like that. And then when [Molton Brown] received the first trial, they liked it, and they said, “Add a bit of marine.” So I added a bit of marine. Step by step, we worked hand in hand together.
John: Yes, I’m getting the marine vibe. It’s transporting me to the seaside, a place of fun and relaxation, but most of all, idleness. The very raison d’être of the coast anywhere. And I welcome that state of being, and anything that remotely evokes it is automatically attractive to me. That’s a delicious fragrance.
ON INTERPRETING THE FRAGRANCE
John: I had a very difficult thing. I wrote a poem around this very perfume, and of course I’d never been called upon to put it down in words.
Carla: I’m very eager to hear it.
John: It’s amazing how ill-served the world of fragrance is by language. I didn’t want to list the ingredients. You’ve done that very eloquently without any help from me, but I figured I had to get real flaky about it all. At the same time, quite specific. It was a tough brief, somebody’s got to do it. Thank God it was me!
Carla: And it’s quite abstract also.
John: As abstract as it gets. Chimeric.
ON MEMORY & SCENT
John: Certain smells transporting you into another time and place. For me, it was bicycle shops, and the interior of a classic car. Leather, and the residual ethers of petrol. That’s a very evocative thing for me, because it meant that I was in a car, going somewhere. Hopefully, the seaside! We went there every year to some resort in the British Isles, usually in the North West, Blackpool. North Wales, occasionally. We went to Scarborough once.
Carla: And now Saint-Nazaire?
John: Saint-Nazaire now. I’m one of the international jet set. Half of my family are French, and yes, I am a bit of a commuter in that regard. But no, I have great memories of the seaside. Fantastical. In fact, a holiday wasn’t a holiday if it wasn’t on the coast, for me.
Carla: I loved being in a car in the summer, when there was no air conditioning. The windows are down, your hair is kind of, you know...
John: I’m getting a mid-century Panhard, American styling.
Carla: And just being there, relaxed, listening to good music. And the smell. I have memories like that, you know, when you’re in the Mediterranean, and you have all the maquis smells of immortelle, jasmine. And that, for me, it’s a nice smell in the sense it smells good, plus it’s a nice smell because it’s evocative of good memories, summer vibes.
John: Well, it’s literally transportive. The interior of a petrol vehicle. Sensational. Nobody in my family ever had a car, apart from one uncle. The teetotaller, we called him. And if you were in that car, you were going somewhere nice.
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF IDLENESS
John: For a man in my profession really, idleness is a minimum requirement.
Carla: You need to have your mind wander.
John: Well, that’s it. But you know, it looks like idleness. Sometimes it weighs heavy upon you, doesn’t it? Idleness. Do you find this?
Carla: Nowadays, everything has to be quick and efficient.
John: You have to try very hard to lead an idle life.
Carla: Exactly, I agree. It’s an art form.
John: It certainly is. And especially if you’re pervious to public opinion. I’d hate to get the impression of being a skiver. But then I do go around the world declaiming my stuff, and I suppose that could be described as work.
Carla: When everything is quiet and there’s nobody around and the day’s over, more or less, that’s usually when I get my ideas.
John: It’s contemplative.
Carla: I think it’s really important to have moments of calm and being alone, and just let your spirit wander. And that’s when the ideas pop up, usually. Sometimes I’m thinking about just a name for a fragrance I’m working on, and I need that time, that space of wandering, spirit wandering.
ON CREATIVITY & TECHNIQUE
John: I don’t know about you Carla, but I work outside of the digital world. For me, technology is always a distraction, apart from the TV. I don’t really deal with it. Like anyone else in my position, I fall prey to the thousand daily punishments visited upon the analogue community. How about you Carla, you must work independently of that world, surely?
Carla: Well, I rely on my nose, so it’s like you. But I do work with a computer. But my nose is doing most of the job. And my mind!
John: Precisely. You can’t replicate that with any machinery. But I guess you use the media for the business side of things?
Carla: No, I actually write formulas on a computer. It’s like a recipe. It calculates the price, all the technical things. I do rely on that. But the thinking I have to do, and the nose does its job of smelling and fine tuning. Do you have a technique or something?
John: Oh yeah, I’m all technique. That’s my main concern in all of this. Style over content, I think they call it – dismissively. But that’s where the craft of it comes in. A nice rhyme scheme. The manufacturer of any kind of poetry requires at some stage a kind of magic that I don’t think stands up to any kind of analysis. It’s a common almost a superstition I share with many of the artists that I know.
Carla: What I like in creating fragrances is when I have a frame. So when I have a brief, as soon as I have a few elements – it can be a colour, anything basically – it triggers my imagination, and that’s a starting point. I know that colours and everything have a very big importance for me.
ON POETRY, PERFUMERY & USELESSNESS
John: The main thing about what I do, it’s got to sound good. That’s the best way you can receive poetry, really, is to hear it. Unfortunately, I’m sure the world is full of poets far superior to I, but they haven’t got the vocal skills of myself. It’s a tragedy, but I always say, why don’t they hire the services of one of our many unemployed actors? Just saying. I hope they don’t! I like being top dog.
Carla: I go to work, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’m just having fun. Well, sometimes, not always. Sometimes when it gets technical and I can’t go round the problem, solve it, it bothers me. But most of the time I’m just having fun, picking ideas, working on them. I feel very privileged to have that type of job.
John: Indeed, privileged. But in my case, there’s always something better to do than write a poem. There’s always something more beneficial, or useful. In fact, I’ll say it again: I think it’s the defining feature of all art, uselessness.
Carla: Exactly. I totally agree. But that’s the essential – who cares about breathing right? The salt of life is basically everything that’s not necessary. You don’t remember waking up, taking showers…
John: Who would care if nobody wrote another poem ever again? Who would care? I bet you haven’t read all the poetry that’s still around. I bet you any money, you can’t recite to me the entire catalogue of Alfred Lord Tennyson. There’s plenty to be going on with. Who would care if nobody ever wrote another poem? The world would still turn.
Carla: Yeah, but that’s what makes it interesting.
John: It’s useless. The icing on the cake. The things that poetry deals with should be the eternal things. They should be more than just relevant. There’s too much relevance around. It’s useless, poetry.