John Cooper Clarke, the poet and performer who became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s, has said he didn’t want to quit taking heroin and weaned himself off the drug for the sake of society rather than for his own health.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Clarke recalled the addiction which dominated much of his life in the 1980s, when he was living in a flat in Brixton, south London, with Nico, the late singer and muse of the Velvet Underground.

“When I quit I felt really badly done to,” he said. “I didn’t want to quit. I don’t think anybody does. You feel you’re doing it for society. I thought I was doing everybody a favour. Everybody was worried about me; what can I say? No one wants to be a source of anxiety to everybody they know. You’re just trouble.”

Clarke said that the explosion of punk music chimed with his own poetic ambitions, and that he felt a kinship with the likes of the Sex Pistols. But Clarke says that when the 1980s began his addiction drove him to work for financial incentives.

“Every drug addict is virtually the same person. There’s not really much point in dwelling on it. I needed money more than ever, so I had to work. The glamour was flaking off with every new job. I really felt like I was selling my sorry ass.”

Clarke added: “It was a tedious saying among hippies: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I was very much part of the problem.”

Last year Clarke responded to an Observer reader who asked him whether he had believed he could ever stop using the drug.

He said: “It can be done, clearly, but it ain’t easy. I like to say I did it in two ways: gradually, and suddenly. The fact is you need help, though. My message is always the same: don’t even do it once.

“I think it is dangerous to think it is anything to do with having an ‘addictive personality’ or any of that bollocks. Anyone would dig it. Anybody. Why? Because it is fabulous the first time. Don’t ever do it.”