Forget TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Rudyard Kipling's If or Wordsworth's I wandered lonely as a cloud, for sheer popularity no 20th-century British poem can touch John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours. Not bad for a poem that rhymes vacuum cleaner with Ford Cortina!
The work became an irreverent favourite at weddings soon after being written in 1982, and its addition to the GCSE English syllabus in the 1990s brought it to a younger generation. One of those studying it was Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, who later said: “It made my ears prick up in the classroom, because it was nothing like anything I’d heard.” Turner eventually adapted it into the ballad that closes out the band’s most successful album.
Thanks in part to another new audience, teens finding it on TikTok, the band’s version of I Wanna Be Yours is now wildly, improbably popular: it has clocked up its billionth stream on Spotify. Spotify says the song is most popular in the US, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. It's also had over 300 million views on YouTube.
If it was previously Britain’s favourite wedding poem, it’s now quantifiably the world’s favourite British poem, full stop. It may not, arguably, have the cultural heft of the more established poems of the past, but for global reach in modern times, nothing comes close.
No doubt you'd like to hear the poem?! Below are two videos: the first is the Arctic Monkey's rendering to music and, if you want to hear the poem from the 'horse's mouth' there's also one below of John Cooper Clarke reading it himself.
And here's the man himself...
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