Mar 24, 2023

by Stephen Chapman “An American billion is different to a British billion – and I don’t know what either of them is. “But it’s a f*%! of a lot of listens.” That was John Cooper Clarke’s response to the Guardian when told that his poem, I Wanna Be Yours was set to reach 1bn streams this week. The poem, which originally appeared on his 1982 album, Zip Style Method, was given a makeover in 2013, when Arctic Monkeys set the lyrics to music on their AM LP. And then through social media, mainly TikTok, it’s taken on a life of its own, hence reaching the 1bn plays. Spotify said that it had spent months in its Top 50 songs chart and has received its most plays in US, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys explained that he’d been inspired to create a song around the poem having studied it at GCSE - it became part of the English syllabus in the 90s.