John Cooper Clarke (born 25 January 1949), also known as JCC and "The Bard of Salford" is an English performance poet and comedian who styled himself as a "punk poet" in the late 1970s. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he released several albums and performed on stage with punk and post-punk bands. He continues to perform regularly.

His recorded output has mainly relied on musical backing from the Invisible Girls, which featured Martin Hannett, Steve Hopkins, Pete Shelley, Bill Nelson, and Paul Burgess.

John Cooper Clarke was born in Salford, Lancashire, on 25 January 1949. "Cooper" is his middle name, and Clarke his surname.

Growing up in Salford, Clarke had a bout of tuberculosis as a child. He disliked being outdoors, and read a lot.

He lived in the Higher Broughton area of Salford, and attended the local secondary modern Catholic school. He became interested in poetry after being inspired by his English teacher, John Malone, and later reported that he wrote his first poem in his final year at school, about a priest who farted during a service. One of his early inspirations was the poet Sir Henry Newbolt. During an April 2018 episode of Steve Jones's radio show Jonesy's Jukebox, he revealed Newbolt as one of his early inspirations, reciting from memory a portion of "Vitaï Lampada".

He left school at 15, obtaining brief stints of employment as an apprentice motor mechanic, window cleaner, and fire-watcher at the docks, before spending two years as a laboratory technician at Salford Tech. ("It sounds very technical, but all I did was hand out chisels").

During the late 1960s he played bass in a few local psychedelic bands but found rock music getting tedious in the mid-70s.

Clarke began his performance career in Manchester folk clubs, where he began working with Rick Goldstraw and his band the Ferrets. He gave up his lab technician job when he achieved some success in performing his poetry in the late 1970s.