John Cooper Clarke —
A digital space for an analogue icon.
Building a site that encapsulates the pulpy cut and paste world of his books and captures the feeling of seeing the man perform. The Bard of Salford, online.
An analogue soul, embracing friction.
At the heart of John Cooper Clarke’s work is the rejection of the slick and the machine made. We wanted to build a website that felt like him as much as it was about him. So rather than design from a digital blank canvas, we worked backwards from his physical artefacts, treating the screen as something to be cut and layered.
Our way in was Directory (1979). We took the book’s own visual language, the illustrations, the black strips cut and laid over a phone-book layout, and lifted it straight into the interface.
Button hovers are drawn from the book’s cover. The highlight on the show listings borrows the directory’s marks, so finding a date to see him feels like highlighting a number in a phone book. His signature is written on as the site loads and layered textures sit beneath the sections to evoke the feeling of being something physical.
Built for a man with no phone.
The heart of the challenge was that John Cooper Clarke doesn’t own a phone or email address and is gloriously offline. How do you build a website for someone who would never visit one? The answer was to stop apologising for the medium and embrace it to make something that feels a little ragged and unusual. Every tactile, hand-made mark is a homage to a man the internet never quite got its hands on.
That ethos is sharpest in the easter egg we hid on the homepage. On one section, the homepage button is replaced by a chicken, a nod to Evidently Chickentown. Clicking it takes you to a whiteboard, where you can leave a word for John. It’s the digital equivalent of scrawling something on a wall and hoping he walks past, which is exactly the right way to reach him.
How we created feeling
We set out to bottle one specific sensation: the feeling of being in the room when John Cooper Clarke performs. Everything served that. The directory-derived details root the site in his actual published work rather than a generic “punk” pastiche. The event photography supplies the environment. And the playful gestures, the chicken, the whiteboard, the deliberate friction, supply the soul of a man defined by staying off the grid.
