JOHN Cooper Clarke is a performance poet, comedian, punk rock survivor, radio presenter, social and cultural commentator and advertising ambassador for McCain chips. Just don't call him a national treasure if you meet him at Fibbers in York on Sunday night.

"Public enemy number one, more like. That's more appropriate," he retorts with a nasal snort. "The world's your oyster, but you paint yourself into a corner if you're a 'national treasure', plus if you're called that, you'll have cancer by next Wednesday."

Still as skinny as his ties, Cooper Clarke is the Salford streak of pith who made his name dodging the spit when opening punk gigs in the Seventies with his round-of-gunfire bursts of poetry and is still filling his notebooks with acerbic literary acumen. While he may decline the national treasure status, like punk laureate and butter salesman Johnny Rotten, he has graduated to the advert circuit, as the voice of McCain oven chips, and been taken to the bosom of TV panel shows such as Have I Got News For You. Meanwhile, Sheffield's hip Arctic Monkeys have adapted John's wedding ceremony favourite, I Wanna Be Yours, as a vital cog in their live shows.

Time, he says, to bring out a new poetry collection: "I've got enough for five books. I've had publishing offers and I just want to get a realistic figure on the table and we can start haggling, as I'm now bigger than I've ever been."

What do you put that down to, John? "Staying alive. That helps." John Cooper Clarke turned 66 last month and has never treated his body as a temple in pursuit of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, yet in the Keith Richard tradition, he has been indestructible, forever the Salford stick insect with the tousled black hair, drainpipe trousers and Cuban-heeled boots. "I thank God every day that I'm alive as the possibility of an early death has always been more likely," he says, dry as dehydration.

Does the man with the quips and the chips have any health tips for longevity? "No, I don't, but I say 'don't listen to experts' – and I'm an expert. I knew about butter being good all along. I've never eaten margerine knowingly. If it isn't butter, what is it? Well, it ain't butter.

"These food fads are more about taking things away and what isn't there. It's morbid. Why eat tofu? It's a flavour repellant, though tasting of nothing can be a plus. Like bread: if you want to soak up some gravy, nothing's better than bread. But tofu...it slides off like tiles. That surface is designed to repel all comers, including Mr Flavour."

From the writer of Health Fanatic, Beasley Street, Kung Fu International, I Married A Monster From Outer Space and Evidently Chickentown comes a promise of "loads of new pieces". "I can guarantee that; I write ever more prolifically, more so than ever," he says. Why's that? "I'm running out of time, maybe."

John Cooper Clarke plays Fibbers, York, Sunday, 7.30pm; Frazer Theatre, Knaresborough, March 18, 8pm. Box office: York, 0844 477 1000 or fibbers.co.uk; Knaresborough, 01423 866658 or frazertheatre.co.uk