Manchester Letter/John Fleming: There is a stick insect of a man about to walk on stage from the wings. His cheap travel bag is full of jottings in bargain-shop notebooks. A poet whose only vitamins are invective and the violent couplet, he takes the microphone after the June sun has fallen from a hot sky and brings his versioned vaudeville to his native city's sunburnt populace.
When he opens his mouth as a support act to legendary local band The Fall in the New Century Hall, real Manchester comes out: a rasping steam train from a tunnel.
For days, Manchester has basked in package-holiday heat. Outdoor crowds prostrate themselves before giant TV screens on which World Cup matches kick along. England face Paraguay in their opening game and shaven-headed males draped in Albion flags roar themselves hoarse by half-time.
There are pedestrianised streets; glass-fronted shops; and trams purring past, every six or seven minutes, to take you wherever you damn want.
A gang of Hari Krishnas make a mild racket at Piccadilly Gardens; scantily-clad Mancunians don't notice as they sizzle in the sun. It's like the 1976 heatwave, or a B-movie where the idyll goes all wrong as sun rays get hotter and cause terminal human meltdown at the foot of warped buildings.
But the mood remains mild: bedazzled by overexposed flesh as I cross tram tracks, my 'noggin' clunks dully against a skinhead's skull. His apology is polite and effusive.
Football, music, spikey TV drama: these are ready identifiers for Manchester, king of northern towns. But where is the stunning squalor, the Victorian grimness, the bedraggled, low-lit poverty?
This city is a cheat: it is efficient, handsome and like something that has slipped secretly down to the south. Lyme Regis in disguise.
Ten years ago, on June 15th, a 1,500kg IRA bomb blew much of Manchester city centre sky-high. The bomb devastated 50,000sq m of retail space and another 25,000sq m of offices. The blast was audible 13km away.
Fortunately, while 206 people were injured, no one died. But that terrorist act cleared the decaying city's decks and facilitated a massive programme of urban regeneration.
Proud again, Manchester successfully staged the Commonwealth Games in 2002. Thanks to the bomb.
It's high time for glasses of Dick Turpin and - very inappropriately - Gunpowder ale in the Britain's Protector pub by the slick G-Mex centre.
All around, glass buildings stab the sky. You'd swear everyone was now running publishing houses from modest dual-function dwellings.
The city's canal waters lap languidly and unpollutedly, channels less for bursting barges and more for bustling quaysides flanked by restaurants and bars. There are still disused warehouses, bricked-up bars and rat-infested wastelands, but they come across as emblematic of the industrial past, as theme museums in the making. Bye-bye days of yore.
But our entertainer is still on stage, referencing Bernard Manning, Gene Vincent and brushes with the law: "My friend is in prison for something he did not do. He didn't run away from the scene of the crime when the filth arrived."
A self-mocking cod sociologist from punk's performance heyday, this man wrote Beasley Street in 1978. The poem has since been placed on the GCSE English syllabus:
"Where a light bulb bursts like a blister, The only form of heat. Where a fellow sells his sister, Down the river on Beasley Street . . . The rats have all got rickets, They spit through broken teeth. The name of the game is not cricket, Caught out on Beasley Street."
But tonight John Cooper Clarke delivers an update on urban squalor. While the ageing audience yearned for the sepia bleakness of their youth, he gave them his vivid junk culture revamp.
He described a reborn city of poodle parlours and problems with off-street parking; where Manchester's post-war poverty informed the original, the new version was layered with luxury and opulence.
Jousting with his poem and moving it with the Manchester that spawned it, he recited a kaleidoscopic new work with the same scansion and rhyming schemes. And it hit the rusty industrial nail on the head with its brand-new name: Beasley Boulevard.