John Cooper Clarke Meets AI Poetry, and a New Generation, in Conversation with Gabi Garbutt

The anecdote arrives early in the Clash conversation, and it cuts straight to something quietly unnerving. John Cooper Clarke, the Salford poet whose deadpan rhyming and acerbic worldview rewired British verse, describes throwing a prompt at an AI: a poem about Elvis in the style of John Cooper Clarke. Within moments, the machine handed him a text that, by his own admission, made him wish he’d written it.

Clarke delivered this with the same unhurried drawl that has been his calling card since the late 1970s, the same era that first saw him share stages with punk bands and translate street-level wit into print. The confession was part of a feature pairing him with Gabi Garbutt, a lyrical alt-pop songwriter whose forthcoming third album, Radical Love, lands later this year. The meeting was organized to mark the arrival of Have It, Clarke’s new poetry book.

The pairing makes sense. Garbutt writes with a literary sharpness that owes a debt to the poetic tradition Clarke helped define, and the conversation ranged across AI, craft, performance, and what it means to keep words alive. Clarke’s sell-out at Co-op Live last year proved that his audience has only grown, while Garbutt navigates an industry where language often takes a backseat to production. Their exchange, published by Clash, is less a promotional stop than a genuine check-in between two artists who treat each line as deliberate currency.