Paul Cookson was at home in Nottinghamshire when I called his number on the lead-up to the publication of Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade, taking a breather between back-to-back school visits and social engagements, planning his next Pies, Peas and Performances event.

This Lancashire-born poet and performer, based in Retford ‘with his wife, two children, a dog and several ukuleles’, has visited thousands of schools since 1989, performing to hundreds of thousands of pupils and staff. And he was certainly on fine form when we swapped notes, discussing our mutual love of the Black Country’s Finest, football, pies, peas, performances, poetry, and much more.

Gaze at his impressive CV and you’ll see he’s also featured as poet in residence at the National Football Museum and Literacy Time Plus magazine, was the poet for the Everton Collection at Liverpool Library, a poetry ambassador for United Learning, and remains Slade’s poet laureate. and yes, you read that last bit right.

Down the years, he’s also stood in for John Cooper Clarke (who said of Paul, ‘if it’s laughter you’re after, you could do worse’) at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival, and for Andrew Motion at Warwick University Arts Centre with the European Chamber Orchestra.

And among Paul’s poems, chances are that you may recall ‘Let no-one steal your dreams’, latterly adopted by numerous schools for mission statements, school mottos and leavers’ poem, my interviewee having amassed vast experience leading workshops with all age groups and abilities. In fact, as I was updating this interview, he’d just spent a week in schools in Eccles, Greater Manchester, working alongside illustrator/author Liz Million.

His work has taken him all over the world, including visits to Argentina, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Uganda as well as mainland Europe. He’s also appeared on the BBC’s Match of the Day, Radio 5 Live, Radio 2, World Service and CBBC, as well as Sky Sports and Talksport Radio, and in his beloved Everton FC’s matchday programme. And as part of the National Year of Reading, he was nominated as a National Reading Hero, receiving his award at No.10 Downing Street.  

For his National Football Museum role, Paul wrote a set of commemorative poems for England’s 1966 World Cup winning team, going on to meet six of that legendary squad to present his works. As for his club affiliations, he’s written poems celebrating a variety of his Everton heroes – including Brian Labone (read by teammate Ian Callaghan at his funeral), Dixie Dean, Howard Kendall, Neville Southall, Alex Young, Joe Royle (who returned the compliment with the words, ‘Paul Cookson is my favourite poet’) and Graeme Sharp – and performed them at official events, with Duncan McKenzie using one in his autobiography.

But how did that National Football Museum post – going back to its days at the home of Preston North End FC – initially come along for Paul (seen above with his copy of the author’s Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade), brought up just eight miles south-west of Deepdale in the village setting of Walmer Bridge?

“Years ago, I did a book of football poems for Macmillan, and visiting the museum I asked if I could do a free book launch. They said yes, and education officer, Peter Evans – now retired, an ex-teacher – said he’d book me and pay me next time. I said, ‘Do you want to make it a regular thing?’ And it carried on when it moved to Manchester. I’m not used quite so extensively, but I’m still involved.”

That book Paul mentions was Give Us a Goal, sharing its name with a 1978 Slade single. Not their best song, but one that certainly sticks in my memory, not least its accompanying promo video, shot at Brighton and Hove Albion’s former Goldstone Ground home.

So how about that prestigious ‘poet laureate for Slade’ role for Paul, born in 1961 – was he a fan from an impressionable age?

“Yeah, I was aware of ‘Gudbuy t’ Jane’ and ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, but at 12, I was just interested in football. In fact, the first Top of the Pops I watched was in 1970, when England were at No.1 with ‘Back Home’… and I hated it because they were on last – I didn’t want to watch the other stuff!

“I was there with my dad, we got the tape recorder out so we could record it, and I didn’t realise – with the microphone pointing at the screen – it would pick up everything else. When we listened back, they’re singing and I’m saying, ‘There’s Nobby… Bobby Charlton… Martin Peters… Bobby Moore…,’ so I had my own commentary on it as well.

“It was ’73 when I got into music, really. ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ was the first song I liked… from the first band I liked.”

These days, Paul also features alongside good friend Les Glover, from not so far off Warrington, in Don Powell’s Occasional Flames, the pair having appeared on stage before the Slade drummer joined bandmate Jim Lea at a spoken word event at Wolverhampton Art Gallery last year.

In fact, as I was going to press, I was reminded that they’re about to bring out a new 12-track Christmas record, Never Mind the Baubles, 50 years after the release of another festive ditty you may recall… one Don refers to merely as ’that song’ these days.

But we didn’t get on to that. With good reason. Much of this interview came together in March, when I was writing, researching and editing Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade, for Spenwood Books, for which Paul made some cracking contributions, part of which is featured here.

Back to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, though.

“We did a poem with spoken verses and a sung chorus before they came on stage. Les is the same age, so we grew up watching Slade… then suddenly we’re supporting half of them! Don’s got loads of projects on, including his Danish band, Don and the Dreamers, and the Don Powell Band, with Steve Whalley now involved, the singer for a while in Slade II.”

For the few of you that didn’t know, Slade II was Dave Hill and Don Powell’s live band after the classic four-piece split in 1992, later rebranded simply as Slade, Steve Whalley involved until 2005 and Don until 2020.

“I only saw them once in those years, but it was great seeing Don drumming again. And Steve’s got a good voice. But if Noddy ain’t singing… err…

“But have you seen Slady, the all-female tribute band? They’re brilliant! Great musicians, and Danie – or Gobby Holder, as she likes to be called – has a real presence about her… and a little menace as well! There’s an element of sexism with Slade, of course… but not with her around.”

Paul also wrote a poem for Jim Lea’s legendary show leading a three-piece band at The Robin 2 in Bilston, in deepest Slade country, in 2002, performing it on stage as part of the warm-up.

And then he adds…

“I was also the last person to introduce them on stage. Me and a guy called Phil Gaston. There was a Slade convention for the 25^th anniversary at Walsall Town Hall in 1991, and we shared compere duties. They came on, borrowing instruments, and did ‘Johnny B. Goode’. That was the last time they ever played together.”

That must have been an honour for a childhood fan, thinking back to those seminal Top of the Pops appearances.

“Yes, and being in Walmer Bridge, growing up … when you’re 12 or 13 and from a Methodist church family, none of us took the bus into town to gigs until we were 16 or 17. We’d be playing football and stuff like that. So the only time we were aware of them was on Top of the Pops, or Crackerjack, or Runaround, or Supersonic, or Lift Off with Ayshea. Or as guests on The Bay City Rollers’ show, with the Arrows, or whatever. Because there was nothing on telly, you’d watch every music programme.

“The thing is, people today think we all dressed like them on Top of the Pops, but we were in browns and yellows. You couldn’t afford the clothing. I had a brown tank top with four stripes, which I thought was very glam, but I looked more like a liquorice allsort… and the fat one that you don’t like eating!”

Paul had to wait a little longer before he could catch Slade alive… in 1979.

“I saw them at a big disco place at Liverpool. Oscar’s. The stage wasn’t even 3ft high. A glitterball disco. They hadn’t yet come back into fashion. ‘We’ll Bring the House Down’ hadn’t come out, and they hadn’t done Reading {Festival}, but some of those songs they played at Reading [August 1980} they played that night, and there were loads of skinheads there, because they always had that following. The girl I was with had this handbag and they were sat around it, so I was a bit nervous, but then they were real gentlemen and said, ‘Here y’are, love!’ and handed it back.

“I remember them playing ‘Wheels Ain’t Coming Down’. There was loads of dry ice, then they suddenly stopped, as there were two skinheads knocking seven bells out of each other. Noddy said, ‘Will you effin’ stop your effin’ fighting! We’re have to have effin’ fun, for eff’s sake!’ So these two guys stopped, and he said, ‘Right, we’ll effin’ carry on! One-two-three …’ Ha!

”That was my first time. I was at college at Edge Hill in Ormskirk, and they played Liverpool once or twice over the next couple of years. And I once missed Noddy going into a record shop in Ormskirk, when that EP, ‘Six of the Best’ came out {1980}.

“I remember walking into Ormskirk, and on the way back I looked in the record shop, having gone a different way into town, and it said, ‘Noddy Holder,’ written on cardboard, ‘appearing at 10 o’clock today.’ And it was 12 o’clock, and he’d gone!

“I thought that might be my last chance, but I’ve met him several times since… most recently with a marrow!”

Well, I couldn’t not ask him more about that, could I?

“Matt and Dave from Preston band The Hellfire Preachers do a Beatles show, and {Noddy’s wife) Suzan did a show with us last year to publicise her Beatles book, Matt and Dave doing a show afterwards. She did her piece, then we had the pies, then it was their show, and it was great fun. Then she emailed me, said, ‘That was one of the nicest audiences, will you have us back?’ So we crowbarred that in, being late notice during half term. Hallowe’en, I think.

“When she came back, she came to set up and said, ‘Hiya Paul, hope it’s okay, I’ve brought a friend with me.’ And Nod walks in, says, ‘Hello, my man, how’re you doing?’ It was brilliant, and she was on great form. We had an American singer-songwriter, Brooks Williams, a blues guitarist, giving us the history of rock ’n’ roll, from Appalachian blues and so on, him and Nod talking backstage in this church hall about Big Mama Thornton and so on, bonding over that.

“We’d had a church fair that day and had two marrows among the prizes. So I’ve a photo of me and Noddy Holder, him holding a marrow! I also had my ukulele, so when someone said about having a photo with Noddy and the marrow, I said that sounded like a George Formby song, started playing the ukulele, and he started referencing the marrow. So yes, I’ve got a seven-second clip of me and Noddy duetting, me on ukulele and him holding a marrow, giggling!”

Regular social media visitors may have spotted Paul’s daily poems on Facebook, and the day after, he ‘wrote a George Formby-esque song’ called ‘Hello, Mrs Holder, have you seen me marrow?’

“That was then performed by Henry Priestman from The Christians, Les Glover and me at Pies and Peas. It was through Henry that I got to know Les. There’s another Slade connection that goes back even further. I know Miles Hunt, and his then-partner, Erica {Nockalls}, a violin player, is from a little place called Roote in Doncaster. They did a couple of gigs at the village hall there, one of which we had a Pies and Peas do in the pub afterwards, walking there from the hall.

“Miles of course is a big Slade fan and was very impressed that I knew the reference of ‘Size of a Cow’ related to the Arabian Nights from Banana Splits. His brother Russ was also there, another big Slade fan, their uncle, Bill Hunt, having been in Wizzard. And you’ll have to ask Miles this, but apparently Dave Hill once asked him to be the lead singer of Slade.

“His brother, Russ knew I played ukulele, and he knows Henry, sending me a clip of Henry playing ukulele in a school. So Henry and I messaged each other, started talking, and met at a Miles Hunt gig in Liverpool. I gave him a lift home, we kept in touch, and ended up working in a school in Hull, where he’s from. In fact, the other guy involved was Stan Cullimore, from The Housemartins. I’ve known him for years, and there’s a school in Hull that had the three of us in – a poet and two ex-pop stars! Great fun. And it was through Henry that I met Les, who started coming to Pies and Peas.”

As for the Don Powell connection…

“I emailed Don, said, ‘Would you come over?’ He did, and it was like This is Your Life. There were 130 people there, and he told lots of stories. Les did a couple of songs, and Don said, ‘Look, lads, that was really enjoyable, can I come back and do another one?’ So about a year later he came back. In the meantime, me and Les had written a couple of nostalgic ‘70s-based songs that referred to Slade, and we said, ‘If we record these, will you drum on them?’ We were thinking he’d say, ’Thanks for asking, lads, but it’s alright,’ but instead he said, ‘Of course I will!’

“He came over the day before my daughter went to university… so I was in trouble for that! We had two songs and borrowed a drum kit in this little studio, the size of a kitchen in Retford, played through them twice, and he nailed them straight away. It was midday, and he said, ‘Anything else?’ Les said, ‘We’ve got a couple of demos,’ and he said, ‘Well, let’s do them!’

“By about three o’clock, I said, ‘Bloody hell, that’s half an album … shall we do an album?’ Whereas the second one, the session for ‘Just My Cup of Tea’ was more fully formed, and Don wrote some of the lyrics. Before Noddy started writing lyrics, he wrote loads.”

He certainly did, some great ones too.

“We actually did a booklet of his lyrics for the first event, and I think he only uses the word ‘baby’ once…”

As opposed to three times at the start of Nod and Jim’s ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’.

“They’re not very rock ’n’ roll, or at least they’re not obvious rock ‘n’ roll lyrics. Anyway, he sent me this file over, and I thought they’d be verses and chorus style, but it was probably a hundred sheets of paper, some with phone numbers on, some with three lines on, and I just sat at my big dining room table, got them all out and started putting them all together, two or three songs coming together. There was one, ‘Rhythm of the Road’, about being on tour, but there were others I put together from different pieces, and added a few other bits.”

This is after all a poet who rewrote ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ for a Christmas book, under the pseudonym Neville Ambrose Xavier, including the line, ‘May sleigh daydreams be filled with hope, it’s Christmas.’

My introduction to Paul came from friends of this website The Amber List, their frontman, Mick Shepherd, having known the Lancashire born and bred poet and performer from past school visits, the pair bonding over music and football, going on to write songs together, Mick’s band appearing at Paul’s social events.

As a published poet with more than 60 titles for adults and children, Paul’s sold more than three-quarters of a million books (bestseller The Works shifting 200,000-plus copies alone), his poems appearing in more than 200 other publications. And he’s in many more as an editor.

Among the broadcasters and peers that have sung his praises are Simon Mayo (‘Everyday should have a Paul Cookson moment – keep him by your bedside for emergencies’), Mike Harding (‘Paul manages to capture that misty world of childhood in a way that nobody has succeeded yet and walks us through that door and into that garden many of us had forgotten’), Ian McMillan (‘Simple, direct and poetic. Caring, compassionate and funny’), and Mark Radcliffe (‘Wordsmithery of the highest order and wittiest bent’).

It’s not all about the big names, though, and on his website, Paul mentions Tarleton High School teacher, Mrs Graham, among his inspirations. And it turns out she’s not the only one who saw his talent early.

“I remember her lessons at secondary school being enjoyable, including writing stories. My mates had competitions to see who could write the longest or goriest.

“Also, I went to Little Hoole Primary School, Walmer Bridge, when they found out I was an ex-pupil, and was there for two days. At the end of the first day, I got an email saying, ‘Are you the Paul that was in my class in 1970?’ It was from my teacher, Mrs. Burton. She came in the next day, and we’re friends on Facebook now.

“She’ll go on my page, saying, ‘Great poem, Paul, I’m really proud of you.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’m 61 and still getting marks off the teacher!’ She also sent me a poem I wrote when I was 10, from a scrapbook she kept of pupils’ work.”

From Walmer Bridge and Tarleton, Paul went on to Hutton Grammar School, where sixth-form concerts made an impression.

“Monty Python sketches and daft stuff. The first time I performed. I remember doing a poem about our deputy head, who would use words like ‘convivial’, the first time I got laughs with a poem. He was big on geography and geology. I remember the first line, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud, cumulonimbus to be exact.’

From there, he studied for a social sciences degree at Edge Hill, planning to become a social worker. But then…

“Two weeks before I was due to leave, with a place to do a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work in Manchester, deferred for a year, I was asked, ‘Have you thought about teaching? I think you’d be rather good at it.”

Accordingly, he switched directions, his PGCE course seeing him stay on two more years, teaching ultimately leading to performance poetry and getting published, his latest works a two-parter, The Man Who Launched a Thousand Poems, out earlier this year.

The father of two had just had delivery of volume one when we spoke, volume two appearing soon after, a joint launch following at the end of April at St Saviour’s Community Centre in his adopted hometown of Retford, where he also launched I’ll Be Bernie, You Be Elton, Volumes 1 and 2, a double-CD of songs co-written with a host  of names, including the aforementioned Don Powell, Miles Hunt, Henry Priestman, Les Glover, Stan Cullimore, Brooks Williams, and Mick Shepherd, the launch night featuring Les, Mick’s band, The Amber List,  and fellow contributors Helen Turner, Darren Poyzer, and Sam Hill.

And why did he eave Lancashire for Nottinghamshire? Was it down to romance?

“Someone gave me a teaching job, so it was finance, not romance! Ha! When I was applying for jobs, I still had a girlfriend in the North-West. This was the only place I applied to outside the North-West, and they gave me the job. And for what I do now, in terms of travelling around different schools, within a couple of hours you’re in most areas of the country.”

Paul Cookson is among 300-plus contributors to Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade (Spenwood Books, 2023), available now from the publisher via this link, and also from Amazon, your local bookseller, and also via your local library.

Paul is set to visit The Venue, Penwortham, Lancashire this Friday, October 13^th (7pm), joining forces with close friend and fellow bestselling poet Stewart Henderson for Broadly Speaking. He’s then set to return to the same location on Saturday, October 28^th, hosting an event featuring aforementioned author Suzan Holder and recent Slade Fans Convention attendees, The Hellfire Preachers. For ticket details and information regarding both shows and others, not least Paul’s Pies, Peas and Performances, head to his Facebook page via this link.

For more about Paul, his many publications, and further details of I’ll Be Bernie, You Be Elton, head here. And for details of how to track down Don Powell’s Occasional Flames’ Never Mind the Baubles LP, head here.