Back in May 2024, Clare Symons, BACP’s Head of Research, told me that she was giving a talk at the BACP’s Research Conference posters and awards ceremony about how I’d plagiarised my research findings book from Duran Duran song lyrics—brilliant! Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the conference but I heard it had the audience in stitches and, to be honest, I was incredibly touched and honoured that Clare had spent the time on my research book and me. Clare very kindly agreed to let me reprint her talk, and slides, below.
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Birmingham is the home of many rock legends such as Ozzy Osborne, Led Zepellin, Judas Priest, ELO, etc.
This got me thinking, who would we consider to be the rockstars of counselling and psychotherapy research?
John McLeod, certainly. I have seen him in a mosh pit and he’s pretty hard core.
What about Mick Cooper? Maybe. But I’ve always seen him as more New Romantic than rock – which got me wondering so I did a bit of searching and, funnily enough, this is what I turned up:
As you can see, a very fetching photo there on the left of Simon le Bon from Duran Duran – another Birmingham band - and on the right our very own Mick Cooper. I think you’ll agree that the resemblance is uncanny.
But we’re researchers, we don’t draw conclusions based on coincidence, we look at evidence. So I wondered, what evidence there might be for a connection between Mick and Duran Duran. Let me tell you, I was amazed at what I discovered.
A source at Sage very kindly shared this with me:
This is what the cover of Mick’s important book, The Facts are Friendly looked like with its original title which, as you can say, includes a blatant Duran Duran quote.
Unfortunately, the entire print run of the book had to be pulped when royalties costs were found to be too costly to include that in the title. A terrible loss, I am sure you’ll agree.
Let’s revisit where we got to with this Mick Cooper – New romantic – Duran Duran connection. As I said, I wanted to see what evidence there was for this apparent link between Mick le Bon and Simon Cooper. I decided to have a really good look through the Facts are Friendly and… you won’t believe what I found. Let me read you an extract from the book:
This comes from the conclusion where Mick is arguing strongly that students of counselling and psychotherapy should look to the evidence base for inspiration of what to research rather than simply to follow their own idiosyncratic ideas.
Now I don’t know whether any of that sounds in any way familiar to any of you who were around in the 80s but after conducting a systematic and rigorous analysis of the text (using a highlighter), here’s what I found:
These highlighted sections here show something surprising. Mick Cooper, esteemed professor of counselling psychology has been blatantly sneaking Duran Duran lyrics into one of his most widely-read works.
What else might we find if we dig a little deeper?
Here’s something interesting from chapter 2 which is about outcomes research:
Look closely. As you can probably see, there are no Duran Duran lyrics there so perhaps this is a dead end.
However, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with rickrolling – it’s the unexpected appearance of a video of a song by Rick Astley when you click on a link. But it’s actually become so much more than that. There are now very many examples of serious academics finding ways of rickrolling in their research papers. There’s even a published paper looking at how many instances there are in the academic literature.
Now, if we look closely at the section I just read to you…
We can see that we have been well and truly rickolled by Mick Cooper.
Mickrolled, if you will!!