Forget 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 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, 2013’s AM.
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 will clock up its billionth stream on Spotify this week, having spent months on the platform’s Top 50 songs chart, not in the UK but globally. This slow ballad, with Clarke’s poetry referencing setting lotion and electricity meters, sticks out a mile next to K-pop and Puerto Rican reggaeton. Spotify says the song is most popular in the US, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil; the band’s label Domino says the song’s popularity is particularly growing in India, the Philippines and Turkey. If it was previously Britain’s favourite wedding poem, it’s now quantifiably the world’s favourite British poem, full stop.
