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John Cooper Clarke: ‘I read Kerouac at 12 and figured I could improve on it’
The punk poet on finally getting JD Salinger, why he rereads the Bible, and growing up with Rupert Bear and Batman
My earliest reading memory My earliest memories are of reading Rupert Bear, American comic books – Batman, Superman, Weird Planets, Creepy Worlds, Sinister Tales, Mad magazine, Kid Montana, Kid Colt: Outlaw and also Dick Tracy. My favourite book growing up The Buffalo Bill Annual, which contained the potted biographies of all the big hitters of the old west, including the titular figure himself plus Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse and Frank James, the Reno brothers, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid and more. The book that changed me as a teenager Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse, borrowed from my local library, with its story of a lower‑middle-class Yorkshire lad with a flamboyant imagination.
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