orget TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Philip Larkin’s High Windows and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus. While those works may have more cultural heft, for sheer popularity no 20th-century British poem can touch John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours. In this love poem, to prove his devotion, an abject Clarke offers to metamorphose into everyday items: “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust/I wanna be your Ford Cortina, I will never rust.” 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
