My first appearance as Attila the Stockbroker was on September 8th, 1980 at Bush Fair Playbarn, Harlow, Essex, supporting the De-Fex, the Condemmed - two ‘m’s - and the Unborn Dead. (Cheers for the gig, Little Dave!) It wasn’t the first one ever though, not by a very long way. That was aged nine - in 1967, at Manor Hall Primary School in Southwick, near Brighton, where I grew up and where, after a long time away, I returned to meet Robina, the other half of me.

As it says in the poem dedicated to him at the front of this book, when I was born, my dad, Bill, was 59 years old. He was born in Brixton, South London, in 1899: I’ve always found it amazing that I have a direct link with the century before last. His dad was an upholsterer and he grew up in Sidney Road, Stockwell, next door to the atmospheric Grosvenor community pub where, over a hundred years later, I did quite a few gigs until it sadly closed in 2014 due to the baleful impact of ‘gentrification’. When I went there the first time to play I was disappointed to find that the terrace my dad lived in was knocked down some time after my grandad died in 1953 and is now a park. Bill volunteered with the Civil Service Rifles aged 18 and fought in the First World War. He was at the Somme, and one fateful day in 1918 he was kept behind the lines by the medical officer with a temperature (‘Pyrexia of Unknown Origin’). The rest of his company was sent over the top. Every single one of them was killed or taken prisoner.

As I write this in 2014, the centenary year of the start of the war, odious Tory minister Michael Gove is prattling on about how that four year long orgy of pointless, senseless carnage caused by a squabble between various (related) branches of the European ruling royal families was ‘a just war’. Even by the rock-bottom standards of your average Tory politician, that is mind-boggling, cretinously offensive stuff. My father saw the war at first hand, was deeply scarred by his experiences and hardly, if ever, shared them with others, but they were there in his favourite poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. And, yes, he read me Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

My father loved poetry, from the desperate genius of the war poets to the great Sussex rhymester and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, whose work became a huge influence on me. Bill wrote loads himself, in a whimsical, Bellocian style, but his abilities weren’t recognised beyond the Home Guard (being in his forties during World War Two he was in Dad’s Army) and Civil Service magazines and by my mum, for whom he wrote some very touching love poems. He had left school at 15, joined the civil service as a boy clerk, and, apart from his army stints, worked there until retirement: his generation were taught obedience and they were taught it by rote. He had two children, Don and Audrey, by his previous marriage and when I was born they were already in their mid twenties. I was born an uncle. At 57, I’m now a great-great uncle: my great-nephews Ben and Jamie Smithson are house music producers, which officially makes me an old punk rock git.

Mum Muriel’s family can be traced back generations in my harbour town home of Southwick, working on the docks and at the gasworks which was replaced by our modern-day power station. Her dad, a printer by trade, was born in the now-demolished Adur Terrace a couple of hundred yards from our house. But Mum came into the world in a council house in Sun Lane, Gravesend, Kent – the graves of the victims stretched all the way there at the end of the Great Plague, and that’s where they finished, hence the name of the town. Her parents had met there when her father, who also fought in the First World War, was wounded and came back to be cared for at a hospital in Gravesend where he met her mother, a nurse. Mum was academically bright, won a scholarship to the local county grammar school and after matriculation was called up to aid the war effort working as one of the hundreds of shift typists on the Enigma decoding project at Bletchley Park. She then worked as a receptionist in Bateman’s Opticians in West London till she met my dad, who was 25 years her senior.

Mum was a talented pianist – if she’d been from a more privileged background and the war hadn’t intervened, she could well have made music her career. It was certainly her first love, as words were my dad’s, and they met at a music appreciation class in Notting Hill, West London, near mum’s lodgings. At the time, my father was living in a Civil Service hostel, having left his first wife – an alcoholic - because of her cruelty. He ended up making legal history as the first man to get a divorce because of his wife’s mental cruelty and occasional physical violence towards him: it was a huge media story at the time. My mother and father married in 1953. The divorce left him totally skint: I remember them telling me they started off married life with orange boxes as furniture. None left by the time I came along, though….

Thanks to my parents I grew up with Belloc’s classic Cautionary Tales, the amusingly naff lyricism of the likes of Flanders and Swann (‘The Gasman Cometh’) and loads of classical music that I enjoyed but could never identify. I still enjoy it and still can’t, for the most part, identify it, to my wife Robina’s disappointment, although I am trying harder these days! One thing is for sure: I inherited words from my dad, and music from my mum, and once grown was determined that I would do what they had never been able to and make words and music my life’s work. And I didn’t just inherit a love of words from my father, but a love of football too. He took me to my first Brighton game when I was about six, and I was hooked: Brighton till I die! You’ll find a fair few mentions of the Seagulls in these pages, and what a story there is to tell.

I was born John Charles Baine (named after a famous footballer or a classical conductor, depending on whom my parents were talking to) in West Middlesex Hospital on October 21st 1957: an only child to my mother and father, though they would have loved to have had more. We lived for my first three years in West London where my parents had met - no real memories remain of that for me – then came back to mum’s family roots, next door to my great aunt ‘Aunty Rose’ in Southwick, the port town of Shoreham Harbour, 5 miles west of Brighton. The house we moved into, a Victorian semi then divided into upstairs and downstairs flats, had been built in 1897 and had been home to various family members for most of its existence – at that time we had the top flat and another family, the Martindales, lived in the bottom half, and when they moved out my maternal grandmother came from Gravesend to live there instead. It was sold in 1974 by my mother and stepfather, but amazingly came on the market again just as Robina and I were getting married in 2000 – we bought it back and it is our home today.

Inspired by my father and Mr. Belloc I started to write little poems at primary school and would perform my efforts with no prompting whatsoever. I loved being the centre of attention. Now there’s a surprise.

I enjoyed Manor Hall Infants and the adjacent Manor Hall Primary School, was quite popular, and the bullies who tried to pick on me found that, atypically for a ‘swot’, I was a loud, stroppy fighter as well. The headmaster, George Young, was very impressed with my academic efforts and one day not long after the aforementioned first gig (a spine-chilling performance of cautionary verses by Hilaire Belloc and Heinrich Hoffman at a school Christmas concert) he asked my parents in for a meeting. Something to do with the forthcoming 11 plus exam, which I was entering a year early, and ‘going to hospital’, as my parents explained to me one winter evening in front of the fire. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with me – and I don’t want to go to hospital, I want to go to school here with my friends!’ I really didn’t understand what they were going on about, and forgot about it. Little did I know what was in store for me…

In my last year at Manor Hall, the early spring of 1968, we went on a school trip to Blankenberge in Belgium. I had to share a bed with Chris, who kicked me all night – I kicked him back - and I single-handedly wrecked part of the model village at Walcheren chasing a frog…but I had a great time. When I got off the bus at the parents’ meeting point outside our school I saw Poppy, as I called my dad, coming towards me, and although he was smiling as he nearly always was, something wasn’t right. He was dragging his left foot, and looked really ill.

And that’s when my war began.

Day by day, slowly but inexorably, my father’s condition worsened. The whole of the left side of his body became paralysed: he was moved into the living room and my mother and I were his carers, helped by sympathetic neighbours and the occasional visit from social services. He had sporadic fits: his paralysed leg and arm would suddenly spring into life and jerk frenziedly, dementedly, and at those moments he seemed possessed by some ghastly demon. He became doubly incontinent. Sometimes my mum had to go out, and when she wasn’t there, and I pulled back the cover and saw the mess, I cleaned him up. I saw things a ten year old should never have seen, no doubt of that.

The father I adored was disintegrating in front of my eyes, but he was still conscious, still my dad: urged on by him, I threw myself into my schoolwork and the 11 plus exam, which for some reason was now especially important to him. If I’d known what would happen as the result of my efforts I would have spent more time doing the things I loved - fishing in the harbour, looking for the reptiles, amphibians and insects which have always fascinated me, playing football and chess with my friends - and less time trying to be the cleverest kid in the county. But I didn’t know, and I put my heart and soul into it for him. One day I was told that my 11 plus results were among the very best in Sussex and I had won a West Sussex County Council scholarship to this mysterious hospital. A few days later it was my father who was taken into hospital, and his condition deteriorated further, to the point where I wasn’t allowed to go and visit him any more: ridiculous, given what I had seen already. On June 26, 1968, our primary school sports day, he died, aged 69. The autopsy revealed a massive brain tumour.

‘It was Poppy’s dying wish, John. He was so happy when he heard you’d won the scholarship. You’ve got to go. It’s a wonderful opportunity, the kind your father and I couldn’t even have dreamed about…’

‘But Mum, I want to stay here with you, and go down the road to school with my friends! I don’t want to go to hospital!’

Mum didn’t want me to go either - it was the last thing in the world she wanted, or so she told me years later. I wish she’d done so at the time! I didn’t need anyone’s charity, or special treatment because I was academically bright. I just wanted to be a normal kid, moving up to secondary school with my friends from my local primary. But my parents were incredibly aspirational, as so many intelligent people from working-class backgrounds were in that generation, and in any case it was her beloved husband’s final wish. If ‘respected’ people ‘in authority’ said something was good, and that their much-loved son would benefit from it, that was that. So off we went to an open day, the week after my father’s funeral. Hospital (full name Christ’s Hospital) was a huge, strange, forbidding estate, twenty miles from home, populated by boys in ridiculous frocks. In the quadrangle, as I later found it was called, there was a pond. I saw a frog and, for a moment, the familiar excitement of the chase took the pain and fear away, but it soon returned.

‘That boy looks very sad’ said another prospective victim’s mother.

‘His father died two weeks ago’ said my mum.

That September, still aged ten, I started as a boarder there: a charitable educational institution in West Sussex set up by the rich to educate the bright sons of the ‘deserving poor’ (how kind!) with my education paid for by a scholarship. I can still remember the day my mother left me there, tears streaming down both our faces. I was obviously still devastated by my father’s death, and by what I had seen happen to him as he was dying, and I was desperate to stay at home in familiar surroundings: this new school was even more alien and unsuitable than I could have imagined. Stupid clothes and traditions, quasi-militaristic conformity, bullying - and despite the reputation which had so dazzled my primary school headmaster, some of the education on offer in my early years there seemed to me to be astonishingly bad. Far too many teachers seemed incompetent timeservers in comparison with the ones I had had at primary school and, even worse, there was a paedophile scandal (a teacher ‘left’ while I was there). I got the impression that quite a few of them would not have lasted five minutes at my local school. I remember being taught English, my favourite subject, by rote.

Most pupils started off there like awestruck little fish out of water. Nearly all of above average intelligence, the majority from London, most from low income and/or single parent backgrounds as mine had become, a few from places like Barnardo’s, a few very damaged indeed. That did very much seem to be the school’s raison d’etre, at least when I was there - to take kids from families in difficult circumstances and try to turn them into grateful conformist Tories. Most seemed to wallow in the narrative about the ‘great opportunity’ which they had been given. Very early on, we were asked to write an English essay about our first impressions: most wrote sycophantic paeans of praise. I poured out my loathing, my homesickness and my contempt. Everyone was shocked. ‘Don’t you realise how fortunate you are…?’

No, I didn’t. Still grieving for my father, dragged away from my mother, my home, my friends, the sea I loved to fish in and my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion FC. Stuck in a ludicrous uniform. Taught by rote. And, the ultimate insult – on the grounds that I had curly hair (yes, I had hair once, a long, long time ago!) the bullies tried to have a go, led by a particularly obnoxious individual, bigger and older than me. ‘Basil Brush! Basil Brush!’ One day I crept up and hit him as hard as I could. That was that: end of bullying. The pain, the homesickness, the sadness turned to bloody-minded determination: I vowed to myself that no-one, anywhere, under any circumstances, would ever push me around again. And no-one has done, from that day to this.

In honour of my late father’s wishes I was there for over six years. My older self has sometimes reproached my ten/eleven/twelve year old one for having accepted the received wisdoms of my parents and primary school teachers that I had won some kind of incredibly sought after academic ‘prize’ of which I should be proud, for not having simply said ‘No, Mum, I hate it here!’ and refused to go back rather than sticking it out. But I was stubborn, then as now, and my stubbornness manifested itself in stroppy unhappiness – which, once I was a few years older, turned to defiance. I discovered rock music: Marc Bolan and T. Rex (still my second favourite band of all time after The Clash) Mott The Hoople, Bowie, The Velvet Underground and John Cale, to name but a few. And my friend John Lashbrooke and I discovered alcohol. Anything strong and cheap: Gold Label barley wine, VP sherry, the unspeakable ClanDew mix of awful cheap wine and awful cheap whisky, home brew drunk long before it was ready, you name it. No real ale fussiness in those days! Having had violin lessons since primary school I gave them up, to everyone’s horror, and taught myself to play the bass guitar.

Then in my last couple of years there I finally got two really good teachers, Peter Farrar and Tom Jeffers, who not only cemented and developed my instinctive interest in foreign languages but in Peter’s case took me under his wing, becoming a father figure of sorts and helping me to sort out the alienation and frustration I was feeling. I’m still in touch with him today: thanks Peter. And thanks John, too. You helped me a lot. See you soon for some decent beer - no more ClanDew!

But overall the experience was completely wrong for me. Not long ago I was contacted and asked if I would submit something for an exhibition about former pupils ‘now working in the arts’. I told them that everything I have ever done in my life is despite, not because of, my time there. I am aware that things have moved on in terms of the way the place is run (there are girls there for a start) and that most of the kids who go there are still from poor backgrounds and many benefit from the experience. Personally, however, I don’t believe that ‘charity’ based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘need’ is any more of a justification for selective education than parental wealth: I don’t believe in selective education, full stop. They say that school days are the happiest days of your life – well, I guess it’s a testimony both to the nature of my schooldays, and to the happy and fulfilling life I have led since I left, that my first few years at Christ’s Hospital were definitely by far the unhappiest time of mine.

 

During the short and victorious miners’ strike of 1972 (three day week, power cuts - some readers will be old enough to remember!) I was sure their cause was right. Hearing that pompous git Ted Heath and his upper class cronies whining about the miners ‘holding the country to ransom’ made me very angry. The Tory government sounded just like the kind of mean spirited, authoritarian conformists I was up against at school, and I knew that miners were people who did a very dangerous job, earned low pay, and produced the fuel which was the cornerstone of our daily lives. Given that my mum and I had very little money - just her widow’s pension - I was naturally on the side of the underdog in any case, and roughly at the same time as the miners’ strike there was a terrible murder in a deprived area of Brighton that brought about my earliest attempts to write a directly political poem. Some time not long afterwards I resolved to make my first radical contacts, and wandering down Gloucester Road in Brighton one day in my school holidays, I came across something that proclaimed itself in large letters to be ‘The Brighton Workers’ Bookstore’.

I went inside, and sure enough, there were loads of books. Books by Karl Marx (I’d heard of him!) Lenin (him too) Stalin (him too, but wasn’t he supposed to be a bit nasty?) Mao (ah, the Little Red Book, I knew about that) and some bloke called Enver Hoxha (who?) A large pamphlet proudly proclaimed ‘Albania – The Only Socialist Country In Europe!’ I’d never heard of Albania, and certainly wasn’t aware that it was in Europe. I knew a song called ‘The Misty Coast of Albany’ by Tyrannosaurus Rex, but given Marc Bolan’s hippy-bollocks lyrical bent I doubted very much that there was any likelihood of a connection with revolutionary Marxism. Characteristically, even at that early age, I took the bull by the horns. ‘Where’s Albania?’ I asked the bloke in charge. ‘And why is it the only socialist country in Europe? What about Russia and places like that?’

When I walked into that shop I had never heard the word ‘revisionist’ before. By the time I left, some two hours later, clutching a handful of pamphlets and copies of The Worker (Weekly Paper of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)) I had heard the word ‘revisionist’ many, many times. More times than I would ever have believed possible. I now knew that Albania stood alone as a beacon of socialism in Europe, and that it was allied to the People’s Republic of China. Even if I still didn’t know where it was. And I knew that the Soviet Union and its allies were revisionists. Even if – despite listening very hard, and concentrating very hard too – I had, if I am honest, still very little idea what ‘revisionist’ meant. But I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to be.

I went home and got out a map. Soon I knew exactly where Albania was. At the age of fourteen and three quarters, I started to read about Comrade Enver Hoxha, how he led the Albanian communist partisans to victory against the Nazis, and about his battles with the Yugoslav revisionist plotters (if you were a revisionist you were always a plotter - it went with the territory). I started listening to Radio Tirana. And I began to understand the importance of efficient tractor production, something that really hadn’t occurred to me before.

 

At school I distributed some leaflets and jammed on the bass guitar with a few friends, but for the most part I kept my developing political, lyrical and musical ideas to myself: my attempts to communicate them fell mostly on deaf ears. I concentrated on my A levels and then with a leap and a song in my heart (‘Children Of The Revolution’ by T. Rex, to be precise) it was over. By this time my mum had remarried: my stepfather and I didn’t see eye to eye at all and I knew that it was time to get away from home, to find my first proper band and to start to try and change the world.

Although 1975 wasn’t quite 1968 in student radical terms, there were still plenty of options. Most people choose their place of further education by looking at the various prospectuses. I studied newspaper reports of riots, sit-ins and demonstrations and decided to go to the one with the stroppiest, bolshiest, most left wing student population, the one most reviled in the right wing press at the time: Kent University. I worked in a clothing warehouse for a bit (flares, wide lapels and bell bottoms, it was 1975, remember) and then went to Canterbury, just before my 18th birthday. On a full grant, which in those days was easily enough to live on. I know that sounds incredible to anyone under 30 reading this, but it’s true.

For the first time since my father died, I was free.

I loved university. Of course, the ‘student radical’ is a justifiably easy target (less easy now than it was, since it is an endangered species) and I do wonder just how many of the wild-eyed revolutionaries of Kent University circa 1977 are now pillars of their local Conservative Association: I certainly meet very few of my erstwhile fellow activists at political events or gigs these days. But I learnt a lot, very quickly. For the first time I encountered the rigours of serious ideological debate, and soon realised that my hardline pro-Albanian Stalinism put me, erm, rather out on a limb: I took my (ice) pick of the alternatives, did a 180 degree turn and joined the Trots in the Socialist Workers’ Party. If Comrade Enver Hoxha had known about this act of apostasy I would, of course, have been shot, but fortunately his influence didn’t extend to Darwin College bar at Kent Uni. I was studying two of my favourite subjects – politics and French – and, for a while at least, managed to do a reasonable amount of work in between the debates, demos and drinking sessions – and of course the music.

Bizarrely, it was thanks to Comrade Enver that I found my first proper band. The main Kent branch of the Albania-adorers wasn’t based at the university at all, but in my mum’s old hometown of Gravesend, some miles away, and there I met party member Tony Stevens, a really good songwriter who needed a bass player. I leapt at the chance. He and his band were all at least ten years older than me, and his songs were sharp, intelligent and highly political (very unusual then) in a theatrical, mid-Seventies kind of way. When I arrived the band was called Cadre Dorne (a bit oblique unless you were a card carrying activist) and after a bit of discussion it was changed to English Disease - at the time, that’s what industrial disputes were called in the likes of the Daily Telegraph. Pretty soon I was a fully-fledged member (bass, fiddle, mandolin) contributing some musical and lyrical ideas of my own. The fact that it wasn’t ‘a student band’ but was full of grown-ups with proper jobs made me feel really good, and Tony didn’t even throw me out when I announced that I was ditching Comrade Stalin and crossing over to the receiving end of the ice pick, as it were. I felt completely in my element.

 

And then everything changed.

Punk happened.

People who weren’t born then, and people who were too old to care, won’t understand how we felt. Seventies mullet headed disco kids (‘Look at the state of that!’) and long-haired, kaftan-smothered prog rock fans (‘That’s not proper music – it’s only got three chords…’) didn’t. For me, who had grown up with the likes of T. Rex, Mott The Hoople and the Velvet Underground, punk rock was musically the most logical thing in the world, and lyrically everything I had been waiting for. Like thousands of others, it inspired me, and when I saw Joe Strummer and the Clash for the first time, at London’s Rainbow Theatre on May 9th 1977, my whole world changed - simple as that. Twenty-six years later, shortly after his tragically early death in 2002, I wrote this song in tribute.

Thanks, Joe. I never did meet you: I could have done, many times, but back then I didn’t want to be just another pissed punk burbling admiration in your direction, I preferred to admire from afar. That makes me very sad now.

As ever, the university circuit was one of the first places you could see the new punk bands (in the wonderfully exciting ‘get up there and do it’ atmosphere of the early days, a band would form one week, get a record deal and a music press feature a week later and be on tour within the month) and I got on to our Student Union Entertainments Committee at Kent University and helped with the shows.

A very early Damned gig, supporting Eddie & the Hot Rods. 999, with ex Clash drummer Terry Chimes (aka Tory Crimes). The Damned, back again, supported by The Adverts – years later, singer TV Smith would become a great friend. The Stranglers and The Jam, still more or less unknown, promoted by Kent Students’ Union at Canterbury Odeon. One-minute wonders like Tanya Hyde And The Tormentors. The Tom Robinson Band – many times: we followed them round South East England for a while. My mates and I would turn up at their gigs, get rat-arsed, pogo furiously and shout ‘The National Front is a Nazi Front! Smash the National Front!’ over and over again, which really pissed Tom off. ‘Shut up, John! Start your own band!’

And Tom was right. For me it wasn’t enough just to hump gear, do security or pogo down the front at gigs. From the moment I saw The Clash I knew I had to form, or join, a punk band, and very soon I did. Not at university, though, but back home in Brighton. We only ever did one gig, but it is one I’ll never forget…

 

The seismic impact of punk rock had spread quickly all over the country, and by 1977 my home town had its own thriving scene, based in The Vault. This was, as the name suggested, an old 19th century burial vault, situated in North Road under Brighton Resources Centre, which was the headquarters of the local punk/anarchist/squatter movement. The Vault was simultaneously a rehearsal space and a gig venue, and all the early Brighton punk bands played there. On regular visits home from university to visit my mum and my friends and to watch my beloved Brighton and Hove Albion I had already seen three of Brighton’s first bands – Joby & The Hooligans, Wrist Action and the legendary Piranhas (whose legacy I would one day help to revive – but that was nearly 30 years later…) Now it was time to heed Strummer’s call and get up there myself. Together with two Albion-supporting mates, Max Cooter (vocals) and Miles Baigent (guitar) we formed Brighton Riot Squad, and tried to find a drummer.

But drummers were in very short supply. Then as now! Even punk drummers were in short supply. You didn’t need to be able to play the drums very well, but you still needed to own or have access to a kit. In desperation, we stuck an advert in the local paper, and we got a call from Frank.

Frank claimed to be a drummer, and he did have a kit. He also had that other essential rock ‘n’ roll prerequisite – a car to drive his kit around in. Hooray! But when we met up for our first rehearsal, our glee was soon tempered by the realisation that having Frank in the band had three major disadvantages.

One: even by the more or less non-existent standards of punk in 1977, he couldn’t play the drums. A dead turbot had a better sense of rhythm.

Two: he had very dodgy right-wing views: his parents were refugees from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the very sight of a red flag or the mention of the word ‘socialism’ made him go nuts.

Three: he was a Teddy Boy.

The rivalry between Teds and punks in 1977 was media-created and of course blown up out of all proportion, but it did exist. Local Teds used to hang about outside the Vault looking for punks to beat up (for the painful results, listen to ‘Intensive Care’ by Brighton’s legendary Peter and the Test Tube Babies) and some punks were happy to return the compliment when the opportunity arose. Soon word of our unorthodox line-up got around, and one of Brighton Riot Squad’s rehearsals in the Vault was noisily invaded by another punk band - the very young, very drunk, more or less all girl Molesters. Plus their hangers-on.

‘See – I told you! Brighton Riot Squad have a TED DRUMMER! You WANKERS! You should be BEATING HIM UP, not letting him play in your BAND! And where are your BONDAGE TROUSERS? You’re wearing FLARES!!! You’re HIPPIES!’ (For the record: we weren’t wearing flares. But we weren’t wearing bondage trousers either. We didn’t think putting ridiculous amounts of money in Vivienne Westwood’s pocket buying overpriced rubbish which The Sun had told you was the right thing to wear had anything to do with punk rock.)

Frank’s politics were far more of a problem for us than his dress sense – we liked being different, that was what punk was supposed to be about, and having a Ted drummer certainly was different! Moreover, once we started to practise, we soon realised that what we had perceived to be his biggest drawback of all (the fact that he couldn’t play the drums) wasn’t going to matter one bit. Max, our singer, was more or less tone deaf. Miles could play the required three chords, but he couldn’t get them in the right order much of the time, and I was a complete disaster as a bass player, my self indulgent flashy style totally crap in a punk band. That is in retrospect, of course. I thought the exact opposite at the time…

Somehow, however, we got a set together, or we thought we did: a few of my earliest compositions like ‘Your Days Are Numbered’ and ‘Son of Sam’ plus covers of ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’ by the collective heroes of three quarters of the band, the Velvet Underground. (I say three quarters: the fourth member had never heard of them and thought Elvis was The King. I wonder if you can guess which one that was?) Joby Visigoth of Joby & The Hooligans designed a great poster for us. ‘BRIGHTON…RIOT SQUAD!’ it proclaimed at the top, above a large and brilliantly executed drawing of a riot policeman, truncheon raised menacingly above his head. We booked the Vault, plastered posters all over Brighton and waited with bated breath for our first gig. I asked Vi Subversa of the legendary Poison Girls, who at the time were based in Brighton, if we could use their PA system. ‘As long as nothing gets broken!’ she eventually agreed, with an understandable mixture of reluctance and suspicion.

The big day came. The Vault was packed: our posters really did look good, and we had plastered them everywhere. Joby & The Hooligans supported us, and they were really good, too.

We weren’t. We were absolutely awful.

We were worse than Crystal Palace.

(If you don’t understand the utterly, terminally damning nature of this statement, you will by the time you’ve finished this book, don’t worry.)

We didn’t manage to get the required three chords in the right order very much, and, thanks to Frank, were also completely out of time with each other. But we stuck to our guns and carried on. Vi Subversa stood at the front all the way through our set like a concerned mother hen, worried that the crowd were going to attack us – and therefore her PA - because we were so crap. But Vi needn’t have worried. It was a 1977 punk rock gig: the crowd were used to seeing bands that couldn’t play, and they didn’t attack us. Rather the opposite, in fact. They paid us the ultimate mid-1977 punk rock compliment.

They gobbed at us from start to finish.

That was our one and only gig, which itself is pretty punk rock, I reckon. I’m still friendly with both Max and Miles, 38 years later. As for Frank – he’s probably an Elvis impersonator. In Hungary. I’m sure his parents came from Hungary.

Wherever he is, I doubt very much that he’s a drummer…

 

It won’t surprise you to learn that the local emergent punk scene managed to survive the demise of Brighton Riot Squad: it went from strength to strength (The Depressions, Nicky & the Dots, Devil’s Dykes, Peter & the Test Tube Babies, The Dodgems, Smeggy & the Cheesy Bits, who became King Kurt… to name but a few of the other early bands) and on my visits home from university I turned up at the gigs whenever I could and sometimes helped out on the door or by putting up posters. But there was a developing problem. Before the punks had been let loose there, walls had been constructed in front of the actual burial chambers: the vibrations from rehearsals and gigs, plus general vandalism, caused breaches in them, and pretty soon skulls, bones and bits of coffin started turning up. Someone arrived at a gig with a skull they had found in a local telephone box.

Then whole coffins started to appear with still legible inscriptions, many with French names and plaques dating from the mid 1800s. Hugenot refugees, some having succumbed to some kind of plague - I distinctly remember one inscription ‘victime de la peste’. This worried me! One evening I had volunteered to take the money on the door and on arrival the first thing I saw was a little baby’s lead coffin, about a foot long, with the bones still inside. With due deference I moved the bones to one end and used the rest as a cashbox. If all this had happened ten years later I guess the Vault would have become the most popular Goth or death metal venue in the world – surely this was the very definition of death metal, or at the very least death punk - but there weren’t any Goths or death metallers then and many of us were actually rather uneasy about the whole thing. Not just because it seemed a bit disrespectful: I remember sitting in the Three Jolly Butchers over the road having a discussion about exactly how long a plague bacillus could survive…

Eventually, with skeletons quite literally coming out of the closet all the time, as it were, things got too much: the local council took action and the Vault’s doors closed for good. When a ‘mysterious’ (fascist-perpetrated) fire burned down the Resources Centre above, that colourful chapter in Brighton’s musical history came to an end, though it is preserved for posterity on two compilation albums, ‘Vaultage 78’ and ‘Vaultage 79’ on Brighton’s seminal Attrix record label. By then, however, I was playing bass in a punk rock band on the other side of the Channel, having met them through what was perhaps punk’s greatest achievement in the 1970s – the multicultural and truly international Rock Against Racism movement.

 

RAR and its sister organisation, the Anti Nazi League, came about as a result of four main factors. These were the punk explosion and the resultant politicisation of the music scene: the powerful links between punk and reggae epitomised by the likes of the Clash, the Ruts and Misty in Roots: the massive growth in support for the fascist National Front in the late Seventies: and the obscenely stupid behaviour of two members of what was by then seen as music’s ‘old guard’.

In 1976 David Bowie had given a magazine interview saying he was sympathetic to fascism and had later made a Nazi salute at Victoria Station on arrival back from a tour. Even more astonishingly, given that he was/is a blues guitarist and had just revived his career with a cover of Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’, Eric Clapton interrupted a concert in Birmingham to make an infamous speech supporting the racist Tory MP, Enoch Powell. All this in a year when the National Front was at its political zenith, achieving 200,000 votes across the country in local elections. What absolute cretins.

The impact on many music fans, and especially people involved in the developing punk scene, was enormous. I had never had any time for Eric Clapton, but I loved Bowie’s early stuff, and his references to ‘supermen’ and the ‘homo superior’ - which at the time I had passed off as arty, sci-fi posturing – now took on a new, sinister meaning. The National Front of course tried to cash in, and for a time after this I hated Bowie with a vengeance. There is no doubt that both he and Clapton soon realised how contemptible their behaviour had been and recanted, but the damage had been done, and to their immense credit, some people responded straight away.

Photographer Red Saunders (of whom more later), Roger Huddle and Dave Widgery, among others, orchestrated a host of letters to the music press in protest. They then started putting on concerts under the banner of Rock Against Racism, the first of which was at the Royal College of Art in December 1976 and featured reggae band Matumbi and singer Carol Grimes. Allied as it was with the developing punk scene, the RAR movement quickly spread all over the country.

At Kent University we took up the cause with gusto by mid 1977, ordering loads of copies of the RAR fanzine ‘Temporary Hoarding’, plus badges and stickers, and a group of us started planning gigs, using RAR’s format and inviting all kinds of bands (mainly punk and reggae) to play side by side. As the slogan went: ‘Reggae, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, funk, punk – our music!’ Our sporadic events were incredibly successful, even though many just featured Brighton and Kent coast bands (The Depressions, The Provokers, The Infested among others) and lesser known reggae bands like The Enchanters (from the legendary Ruts/Misty In Roots ‘People Unite’ collective in Southall). At these gigs I met RAR activists from other areas and went to the events they were organising elsewhere: as a white 19 year old from the Sussex coast I learned a lot, very quickly. Rastas and punks joined together at the gigs – People Unite indeed!

It was a heady time. I immersed myself in the new music and learned an awful lot about organising gigs, which would stand me in very good stead a few years later, when I needed to promote my own. Our Brighton Riot Squad gig happened that summer. Then, on 13 August 1977, Max and I, along with Joby & the Hooligans and members of various other Brighton punk bands, travelled to South East London to join thousands of others opposing a huge National Front march at what came to be known as ‘The Battle Of Lewisham’. It was a defining moment in modern British anti-fascist history: the Front had never been stronger, and they came to Lewisham boasting that they would control the streets of London and, in the words of wannabe Fuhrers John Tyndall and Martin Webster, ‘kick their way into the headlines’ …

‘Black and white, unite and fight! Smash the National Front!’

‘Punks and teds and natty dreads, smash the Front and join the Reds!’

Multicultural Britain turned up to stop the fascists in their tracks.

At Clifton Rise bricks rained down on the ‘master race’ from all directions and when a wedge of anti fascists split their so called ‘Honour Guard’ from the rest of the march, leaving the coachloads of bigots who had travelled down from NF strongholds like Leicester confused and isolated, the result was never in doubt. They got battered. Mainly, I am happy to say, by locals who were angry beyond belief that scum like that had dared to set foot there in the first place.

In the aftermath of Lewisham the Anti-Nazi League was formed, to play the same role in everyday political life that RAR did in the music scene, and all kinds of local ANL groups were set up: Teachers Against the Nazis, Football Fans Against Nazis (I was in there!), Left Handed Vegetarians against the Nazis….

Then came the huge RAR/ANL Carnivals. The first one took place on 30 April 1978 at Victoria Park in East London: The Clash, Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex and my soon to be mentor Patrik Fitzgerald (plus the Ruts and Misty in Roots playing on a flatbed truck – I remember that very well) with more than 80,000 people there to listen and celebrate. We marched to Victoria Park from Trafalgar Square, some 6 miles, and when we arrived they told us people were still leaving the departure point. The second one was on 24 September 1978, at Brockwell Park in South London: Aswad, Misty, Elvis Costello and Sham 69, and even more people!

RAR and the ANL, plus Thatcher appropriating the Front’s rhetoric at the 1979 General Election (‘we are being swamped by an alien culture’) saw to it that the NF would never again be the electoral force they had been – although the fascists didn’t go away, far from it. On the very day of the second Carnival they organised a march through the East End of London which we didn’t even hear about till afterwards, because the Carnival organisers took the decision not to tell us: this caused serious and lasting divisions in the anti-racist movement. Fascists were already causing trouble at RAR gigs, especially in London, and as the British Movement took over from the National Front as the main rallying point for the boneheads, Nazi violence at gigs would become a real problem.

By this time I was absolutely determined that one way or the other, music and words would be my living as well as my life. My academic work suffered enormously because of all my other activities – including standing unsuccessfully for Union President - but in the summer of 1978, in between the two RAR carnivals, I did my final exams at university and, somehow, got a degree. A Desmond.

 

So what next? English Disease had faded away as punk exploded, Brighton Riot Squad had been a gloriously catastrophic one gig wonder. By now, as well as the bass guitar and violin, I had mastered the mandolin (chosen because it tunes the same as the violin: I have never learned to play the guitar) and was beginning to make some serious attempts at writing songs. My head was full of lyrics. I needed a new band.

One of the Rock Against Racism gigs I had organized at university had featured a feisty Harlow punk/R&B outfit called Pete The Meat & the Boys, whose guitarist Richard Holgarth I’d met while staying in nearby Roydon with the Poulter family - Max, Pat, Rachel, Nick and my school friend Tony - who had provided me with a regular and very welcoming bolthole from my battles with my stepfather since I was about fifteen. I visited the Poulters and Richard in Harlow for a few days after my final exams in early June 1978, and one evening was having a beer with a few of the local punks in their hangout which at the time, rather, bizarrely, was the foyer bar of the Playhouse (the local theatre). A long-haired bloke in a Ramones T-shirt turned up, handing out leaflets for a gig he was doing that weekend with his new band at the Triad club in Bishop’s Stortford, supporting the Poison Girls.

‘Poison Girls?’ I said. ‘I know them – they’re from Brighton. I’ll come! What’s your band called?’

‘Newtown Neurotics. It’s our second gig. I’m Steve, by the way.’

Newtown Neurotics - what an absolutely brilliant name, I thought. We had a good chat, I turned up as promised and the band were as good as their name: for a second ever gig, it was great, and I made a mental note to check them out again the next time I had the chance. Then I went back to my mother’s in Southwick and pondered my next move. I did some summer work as a ‘guide’ for a local language school - I was supposed to show students the cultural treasures of Brighton, so I took them to gigs, to the football and down the pub - and one of the students was Eric from Brussels, a wannabe punk guitarist who said he was getting a band together when he got home and invited me to the Belgian capital to play bass.

I knew I had to get away from the poisonous atmosphere at my mother’s and liked the idea of spending a bit of time in Brussels: Eric told me there was a good punk scene developing there, and going abroad to a French-speaking country with the promise of a band to play in seemed a good idea. But I was going to need to support myself, so I told him to hang on for a few months while I earned some money. Richard Holgarth told me that if I wanted quick dosh there were some well paid Christmas seasonal jobs going at the Gilbeys alcohol distribution depot in Harlow and he could fix me up with a bed at his mate Chris’s house. So off I went to Essex to work night shifts, pushing boxes full of various types of booze on and off a conveyor belt and, in common with my fellow workers, taking full advantage of the ‘breakages’!

I thought I’d be in Harlow for a couple of months.

Little did I know then that I’d eventually be based there, on and off, for more than twelve years…

Harlow is a new town situated 20 miles north of London, one of several built at the end of the Second World War as a result of the incoming Labour Government’s ‘Country Fit For Heroes’ determination to improve conditions for working class people returning from the war and made homeless by bombs or stuck in sub-standard housing. There’s no doubt that for those who moved there in the fifties and sixties this goal was achieved, but by the late seventies, although reasonably prosperous, Harlow had a reputation elsewhere as a pretty grey place to live, a mass of roundabouts set in the Essex green belt.

However, you can’t judge by appearances: musically, at least, there was loads going on, probably because - as everyone said - there was bugger all else to do. In the true spirit of punk, the Harlow scene was about to start its own record label, Stortbeat, run by members of local outfits The Gangsters and The Sods (just as the River Mersey runs through Liverpool, so the River Stort runs through Harlow). Given extra encouragement by the prospect of a record release, more bands were forming, and even though at that time there were few gig opportunities in Harlow itself, there were regular punk nights featuring Harlow bands at the aforementioned Triad club in Bishop’s Stortford, a few miles away.

My 21st birthday was due while I was working in Harlow, and as luck would have it, October 21st 1978 fell on a Saturday night, so I organised a party in a local venue, booked Pete the Meat & the Boys (who had asked me to be their manager) and the Newtown Neurotics to play and invited everyone I knew. I had a fair amount of experience of organizing events by now and was confident that everything would run smoothly. Loads of the ‘Harlow Front Line’ punks turned up, the Poulters turned up, the Newtown Neurotics turned up, Richard Holgarth turned up…but the rest of Pete the Meat & the Boys didn’t. They’d spent the afternoon in the pub and were all paralytic. And I was supposed to be their manager! But the Newtown Neurotics saved the day with a storming set, and afterwards Steve and I had a good chat. I told him I was going off to Brussels in a few weeks and if things worked out, I’d try and set up a gig for them over there. I’m sure he thought ‘yeah, right’ but we said we’d keep in touch.

It was getting near Christmas, more and more retailers wanted extra booze and my overtime became longer and longer – I didn’t get to many more gigs. Over the festive period I went back to my mum’s for a short visit and, as ever, to see the football. Through all my years away from Sussex – I finally returned in 1991 - I followed my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion home and away whenever possible, and the Seagulls were doing very well, challenging for a place in the old First Division for the first time in history. But it was time to leave England for a while. In early 1979 I phoned Eric in Brussels and told him I was on my way.

 

A few days later I was at Eric’s place, feeling rather let down. I’d never been to Brussels before, which was part of the appeal, as was the pleasure of speaking French on a day to day basis, and, of course, the prospect of large quantities of Belgian beer. Principally, though, I wanted to explore a different music scene and, at first, I trusted Eric to show it to me: sadly, he wasn’t any use at all. He didn’t have a proper drummer or singer for his ‘band’, and despite what he said, he didn’t seem to know anyone in the Brussels punk scene, or indeed anyone outside his own bedroom. Within a couple of days I realised I was going to have to sort things out for myself.

I’d got a contact number for the newly formed Brussels branch of Rock Against Racism, so I gave them a call, introduced myself as an activist from England, and immediately (literally an hour or two later) was in a bar in the pleasantly seedy area of the Rue de la Samaritaine, near Brussels’ famous Grande Place, having a beer or twenty with some of the local punk musicians and would-be RAR activists. It was there I met another Eric, but this one was the real McCoy – Eric Lemaitre.

When I told him I was a bass player, he smiled. ‘We’ve got a band, Contingent, and we need a bassist – come and rehearse with us.’

I couldn’t believe my luck.

A couple of days later I turned up at a Contingent (pronounced Con-Tan-Jhon) rehearsal and immediately knew this was the band for me. Powerful, melodic songs, interesting political lyrics, great musicians…and they liked my bass playing. I was in, and not just in the band – they had a punk commune in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels, and they invited me to come and live there with them. It was amazing that things had worked out so quickly: I needed no second invitation.

I went back to the other Eric’s place, picked up my stuff, thanked him, apologised for leaving (though he couldn’t have expected anything else) and moved in with Contingent. Looking back, they weren’t just the best band I ever played the bass in: they were – and now are again, as you’ll discover - one of the best ‘unknown’ (outside Belgium) punk bands I’ve ever heard, and I can say this without any self aggrandisement since I only co-wrote a few of their songs and had left before they recorded their one EP.

Everything about the band was striking. Bob Seytor, the singer, was a Black guy from Guadeloupe in the French–speaking West Indies, with an incredible accent, unmistakable vocal style and real stage presence. He wrote the lyrics, and they were apocalyptic: he was the only Black punk in Brussels, was constantly harassed by the police, and poured out his venom on stage. Eric, originally from Mons in southern Belgium, was one of those rare guitarists who manage to combine extreme power and real musicality. The drummer, Jo Fontainhas from Portugal, was equally technically proficient and explosive. And for the first time, the melodic bass runs, which had always been my stock in trade, actually suited the stuff we were playing. Four musicians, four nationalities: musically, think Magazine meets Motorhead in French. Well, sort of.

We soon did our first gig together, went down very well indeed, and I met loads more people from the Brussels scene: Spermicide, Phallus Band, the legendary Mad Virgins and many others. Quite a few people weren’t just punk musicians or fans, but activists as well, some involved in a radical group called ‘Pour le socialisme’ and its weekly newspaper POUR, others part of the anarchist movement ‘22 mars’ (March 22nd). Many were keen to get involved with the newly formed Rock Against Racism branch, and we started planning a major RAR punk festival.

Before that, however, we were involved with an event that was to provide the late, great John Peel with what he always claimed to be his favourite record of all time.

 

The Counter-Eurovision Festival was organised at the Cirque Royal in Brussels on 31st March and 1st April 1979 by the weekly newspaper POUR (see above) to coincide, obviously, with the annual Eurovision abomination itself, which that year was taking place in Israel. Headlining ‘Contre-Eurovision’ were Misty In Roots, whom I’d seen already at the big RAR carnivals in London and contacted with a view to them doing a show for RAR in Canterbury, although they never did in the end. Many local musicians and RAR activists were involved in the planning and stewarding: I helped with publicity and did a stint taking money on the door.

I can remember how good Misty were, and I remember the gig was being recorded: it later became the now legendary LP ‘Misty In Roots Live at the Counter-Eurovision’. A few years later, when I got to meet John Peel during my first session for his show, he was amused to hear that I’d witnessed and played a tiny part in the creation of his favourite record.

 

Belgium boring? No way! Brussels, then and now, is one of my favourite cities, ancient and atmospheric, and when you leave the administrative centre and the tourist traps around the Grande Place and head for areas like La Samaritaine and Schaerbeek you’re in a different world. We used to hang out in a punk bar called ‘La Limace Mystique’ (The Mystical Slug) in La Samaritaine, near the so-called ‘cafes tuberculoses’ which, as the name suggests, were full of people suffering from that awful disease, and in a really grotty café by Schaerbeek station in which, as far as I could work out, we were the only customers. We lived in the commune in a nearby street, Rue Anatole France, rehearsing in the cellar.

Agony and ecstacy in three days, both from afar. I was very happy to be away from it all in Brussels on 3 May, 1979, when Thatcher was elected Prime Minister for the first time. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’. I remember her picture on the front page of the paper I bought, and I felt sick. You brought discord, error, doubt and despair, Thatcher, and those were the good bits. Rot in hell.

But I was very sad that I simply couldn’t afford to travel across the Channel and all the way up to Newcastle on 5 May, when Brighton won their final game of the season to secure promotion to the old First Division for the first time. The rest of Contingent were rehearsing, I was glued to a radio with awful reception, and once we’d done it, I drank most of the Leffe in Brussels. None of the others could understand what the fuss was about. They weren’t interested in football.

Contingent gigs were very well received but sporadic, and though we pooled every centime we got, there was no way the band was going to provide any of us with anything approaching a living. So every day I got out my violin, made my way to the tourist crammed streets around the Grande Place and started busking, playing cod-Irish jigs and all the well-known tunes I could think of. At first my efforts just about provided me with enough money to eat, then a young Arab punk I knew suggested he held my violin case and we went round the restaurants and bars and tried to put on a bit of a show.

I painted my violin gold (don’t worry, it was a mass produced Chinese job) and got hold of a top hat and tailcoat from somewhere. Mounir, who looked young and baby-faced enough to begin with, stuck a dummy in his mouth and assumed a plaintive ‘please help us’ expression, and we were an instant hit, wandering round the open air restaurants in the ancient, narrow streets of the city centre, serenading the diners, gone before the proprietors could throw us out. The violin case always ended up full. Ok, I had to play snatches of light opera over and over again for hours and I looked a complete idiot, but no matter - that was my first experience of earning reasonable money playing music, and I was very pleased indeed.

Contingent started to get more gigs outside Brussels, occasionally even venturing into the Flemish parts of Belgium (perpetual petty linguistic bickering and mutual incomprehension between the Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons is, then as now, part and parcel of Belgian life). We got Brussels Rock Against Racism well and truly organised and put on a very successful two-day festival with twelve of the new Belgian bands. Encouraged by this, we booked a central Brussels music venue for another gig and, true to my word, I phoned Steve Drewett of the Newtown Neurotics and invited them and fellow Harlowites Urban Decay to come and play a RAR alldayer alongside Contingent, Spermicide and Phallus Band.

Then an unlikely and incredible turn of events took place which would propel the Brussels punk scene onto the news pages of daily papers right across Europe and even merit a half page story in the New Musical Express, hardly noted for its coverage of all things Belgian. We, of course, were right in the middle of it. That August, Belgium wasn’t boring - I can promise you!

 

In 1979, the city of Brussels was officially a thousand years old, and, of course, many events were held in celebration, including a series of open-air summer concerts. One of these, in July, featured the great reggae singer Peter ‘Legalise It’ Tosh, and, needless to say, many people in the huge crowd took the opportunity to openly enjoy large quantities of the substance in question. But dope had certainly NOT been legalised in Belgium, and in those days the police took a very hard line: given their attitude, it’s obviously incredible that the authorities didn’t realise that an open air Peter Tosh gig was a confrontation waiting to happen, but they didn’t.

When the ganja clouds started to form, the police waded in and started arresting people (who were doing nothing more than getting peacefully stoned and enjoying the music) in an arbitrary and brutal fashion, which of course provoked the crowd, and there was a fair bit of trouble. Afterwards, the concert area looked like a battlefield, albeit one strewn with the remains of a thousand spliffs. And if the police action was stupid, unprovoked and heavy-handed, what happened next defied belief.

Following the predictable headlines in the respectable Belgian press, the mayor, van Haelteren, immediately cancelled all the remaining summer rock events planned by the city council in a fit of rage - and, incredibly, announced that ALL rock music events everywhere were banned and that henceforth the live performance of rock music was illegal in Brussels. He was plainly a senile old git off his rocker, and such a measure was obviously unworkable, but to the massed ranks of punks, reds and anarchists of the city, especially those still nursing bruises inflicted by the police at the Peter Tosh gig, it was a declaration of war. And the gauntlet was picked up with gusto.

There was no way we were going to cancel the Rock Against Racism gig we were planning with the Newtown Neurotics, for starters: we went to the venue and they assured us that they thought the mayor was an idiot and were 100% behind us. Then it was decided that on August 3rd, the day before our gig, there would be a free ‘anti mayor’ punk festival on the official summer stage that had been erected right in the middle of the Place de la Monnaie in the city centre…

It couldn’t have been more provocative: the mayor declares rock music illegal, so a bunch of punks declare their intention to gate-crash the official municipal stage in one of the most famous squares in Brussels at 6pm in the middle of the tourist season! To put the icing on the cake, large posters appeared everywhere. ‘Millenaire Bruxelles, tous les mille ans la fete’, ‘La violence des flics est gratuite, ce concert l’est aussi’, ‘Bruxelles, ville de merde’ (‘Brussels’ millennium, every thousand years there’s a party’, ‘The violence of the pigs is gratuitous, this concert’s free too’, ‘Brussels, shit town!’)

Everyone knew there wouldn’t actually be a proper gig, because the main stage P.A. equipment would most certainly not be made available by the city council. But, given the track record of the Brussels police and the fact that their main headquarters was very close, everyone was pretty sure that there WOULD be a riot.

Into this maelstrom walked a Transit van load of punk rockers from Harlow.

‘Hi, you lot! Good to see you! Had a good trip? The gig starts at 3pm tomorrow: sound check’s about one. And tonight we’ve a special treat planned for you. A riot.’

‘A what?’

‘A riot.’

‘A RIOT?’

Yes, that’s right, a riot. The riot starts at six o’clock. We’ve got time for a beer first…’

Everyone in Brussels with the slightest rebel streak made their way to the Place de la Monnaie that evening: it’s a big square, but it was completely packed. And, sure enough, many of the side streets were also packed – with riot police.

At precisely six o’clock, a few punks climbed up on the big stage with acoustic guitars, to huge cheers, and started to strum and shout. Not exactly a terminal menace to society as we know it, to be honest.

At precisely one minute past six, the riot police charged.

All hell broke loose. If the police had just stayed where they were, I don’t think very much would have happened: certainly, there was nothing going on to merit such a response. But ‘softly, softly’ just wasn’t in the vocabulary of the Belgian police in 1979: heads were cracked and batons flew. Some of the assembled throng fought back, others fled in anger and panic through the shopping areas nearby, smashing windows as they went. Battles raged all around, the city centre was trashed, and the riot made the news all over Western Europe. But, for us, even that paled in comparison with what was to follow.

 

The next day, as planned, we went to the venue of our planned RAR gig, La Vieille Halle aux Bles (The Old Wheat Hall) and started setting up. Given the events of the previous evening we had half expected the owner to meet us and tell us it was off, or for there to be a load of police outside, but no. All the bands soundchecked, some people went off to get something to eat, the doors opened to the public and soon the place was pretty full, some people nursing bruises, everyone talking about what had happened the night before. Contingent was due to go on shortly, and someone opened the door to see where the rest of the band was. They – we all – got a nasty shock. The entire venue was surrounded by riot police with dogs and water cannons!

No-one was allowed in and anybody trying to leave was immediately arrested and taken off to the cells. Many people were trapped on the other side of the cordon, and none of the bands had a full complement of members. So, while some of the other organisers tried to work out what the hell we were going to do, I got up on stage and did a few songs on my own, accompanying myself on the electric mandolin. In some ways, you could call this the first Attila the Stockbroker gig, although I hadn’t come up with the name yet and most of the songs were covers or still in the try-out stage. But adrenalin and anger meant that at the very least I put on a show, and I went down pretty well.

By this time, we’d worked things out and come up with a plan. The police were self-evidently there because of what had happened the day before. Who was behind it? The mayor, van Haeleteren, obviously. We knew a good, sympathetic journalist called Daniel de Bruycker at the Brussels evening paper, Le Soir: Daniel didn’t like van Haelteren one bit, and he had lots of contacts. Fortunately, there was a telephone in the venue: we rang the paper and told him what was happening. He was beside himself with fury. ‘Leave this to me…’

The Neurotics’ drummer Tiggy Barber was on the other side of the police cordon, so Spermicide’s drummer Daniel Wang stood in and they made a brave attempt at playing a set. Bits of Urban Decay had a go as well. And then, suddenly, to massive cheers, the police packed up and disappeared, as quickly as they’d come. Everyone who had been trapped outside charged into the venue, the people in the cells were released, the bands all did proper sets and the evening turned into a massive victory celebration. And in the middle of it all, Daniel from Le Soir turned up.

‘I found out that the police action was unofficial and sanctioned by van Haelteren, so I rang him on his private number. I told him that unless he ordered them to pack up and go that instant, I would contact every press agency in Europe and tell them that every prejudice they had ever had about our country had just been proved right, and that Belgium was now officially a boring, geriatric, pinched-face, miserable, nasty, petty-bourgois little police state. I also told him that none of the trouble would have happened if the police weren’t such a bunch of prejudiced, ill-disciplined thugs and that he, the mayor, should start to try and live in the 20th century.’

I hope that Daniel is now a hugely successful journalist. He deserves to be.

This strange, surreal story had two positive results. Not long afterwards there was an enquiry in Brussels into police practice and behaviour, and not before time: I can safely say that the behaviour of the Brussels police in 1979 was the most stupidly brutal I have ever seen, and that is saying something. And, on a personal level, I really got to know the Harlow contingent, and especially Steve Drewett and the Newtown Neurotics: they were to play a huge part in the next ten or so years of my life, and Steve is my best mate to this day. It was they who got in touch with the NME, making sure the events of that weekend reached thousands of UK music fans.

There’s a postscript. During my time in Brussels I heard the work of the great Brussels-born singer and songwriter Jacques Brel for the first time, and ever since then I have been a massive fan. Years later my mother and I paid a visit to the Jacques Brel Foundation in Brussels city centre.

‘I know this building!’ I said to her. ‘I’m sure I do.’

I found an attendant.

‘Excuse me, did this place used to be called the Vieille Halle aux Bles?’

It did.

Jacques Brel, one of the most perceptive, biting, satirical, wonderful songwriters who ever graced this earth (he died in 1978) wrote many songs castigating comfortable prejudice and middle class pomposity: I think he would have been proud of the stand we took on that day in the building which was now dedicated to his life and work. He certainly wouldn’t have been a big fan of Mayor van Haelteren - in fact, I think he would have dedicated his song ‘Les Bourgeois’ to him.

The Harlow contingent made their way home, the furore died down, and not long afterwards I went back to England too: Brighton had just been promoted to the top division in English football and I wasn’t going to miss our first ever game there against the mighty Arsenal. But Contingent weren’t football fans, they didn’t understand and were none too pleased: although I returned for a month or so and did a couple more gigs, as far as my time in Belgium goes, back then that was the beginning of the end. Although I had loved playing in the band, by now I was completely fed up with being just a bass player, standing more or less in the background, offering my ideas to other people. I had been writing more and more songs and poems, and was sure that I had the beginnings of some kind of punk rock solo career.

But there’s a postscript here too, and the clue is ‘back then’. As happens all the time to all kinds of people, the internet brought Contingent back together in 2006, 27 years after we’d last played together. Bob, Eric, latter day drummer Daniel Wang and myself did a reunion gig in Brussels in 2007 to a great crowd and had such a good time that we decided to reform the band. Over the next few years we did sporadic gigs, always well received: I invited them over to my Glastonwick Festival (much more of that later) and Contingent supported my band Barnstormer (again, much more later) on quite a few dates in Germany. Under guitarist Eric Lemaitre’s stewardship we recorded the album that we should have done back in 1979. And then tragedy struck. On 10 January 2012, just three months after we had done our last gig together when Contingent supported Barnstormer at the Juzi in Gottingen, Germany, Eric died of cancer. He was just 53.

Music was Eric’s life. As well as being guitarist and trumpet player in three of Belgium’s finest bands (Walpurgis Volta and PPZ30 as well as Contingent) he was a consummate organiser and recording engineer. His music lives on in his talented daughter, Lydia. And his legacy lives on in the Magasin 4, the home of alternative music in Brussels, which he established in 1994 and masterminded until literally a couple of weeks before his death. In its current location at Avenue du Port, by the canal in the city centre, it provides a touring home for the musical underground from all over Europe, hosting literally hundreds of bands a year. As I said in his funeral address in Brussels and at the memorial gig we did for him at his beloved venue: Lenin and Eric both have their mausoleums, but Eric’s is the Magasin 4, which means his is a lot louder!

We said we’d only continue Contingent if we could find a guitarist big enough to fill Eric’s shoes, and, in Irish Brussels-dwelling rock ‘n’ roller James Neligan, we have.

So, very sporadically, the songs which Eric co-wrote for Contingent will live on too.

Adieu, mon vieux pote.

 

I came back to England for good in September 1979, got a job on a building site near Brighton, cheered on the Albion’s brave attempts to come to terms with football’s top flight and stayed at my mum’s for a short while. I hadn’t really stayed ‘at home’ for more than an occasional couple of weeks since I left school, and though I always had a very good relationship with my mother, at that time my relationship with my stepfather was non-existent and the atmosphere was awful. Once again it was time to go.

 

The seasonal booze-shifting job in Harlow was available again in October and, as luck would have it, Steve Drewett had just been allocated his flat by Harlow Council and was about to move in. He offered me somewhere to crash, and I accepted gratefully.

In between my shifts I saw as many of the Harlow bands as possible: Newtown Neurotics and Urban Decay of course, plus The Sods, The Gangsters, Pete The Meat and the Boys, Spelling Missteaks, The Rabbits and The Epileptics, who changed their name to The Licks following complaints, and eventually became Flux Of Pink Indians, their bassist Derek starting the hugely influential One Little Indian record label, home of Bjork and The Sugarcubes among many others. Many of these gigs were still taking place at Triad disco in Bishop’s Stortford and every time we went there an awful (to us) jazz rock trio, Tracks, would be playing in the foyer. In time, they would get even more awful: they would become 80s jazz/disco wallahs Shakatak. The Harlow punk scene was developing all the time: it was compact, creative and friendly and I felt very much at home.

I’d left my bass guitar in Southwick: I knew I wasn’t going to be a bass player or band member any more and was absolutely determined that very soon I’d be up on stage on my own. Wandering around Gilbey’s shifting booze left my mind free to come up with loads of new ideas. My poems were developing, becoming funnier and more immediate, and I concentrated on writing material I thought would go down well live.

Towards the end of my time in Belgium I had written the first poem that I was convinced would work well on stage. Thatcher had not long been in power, the ‘Soviet Threat’ was being played for all it was worth, and we on the Left would often hear the cry ‘Go back to Russia!’ I thought it was time to take the piss.

THEY MUST BE RUSSIANS

 

They slither round corners with scarves round their faces

They always turn up in improbable places

They lack the good taste of the British, our graces

They’re horrid – they must be the Russians!

 

They’re always involved in some dastardly plot

They’re never content with whatever they’ve got

And they are the cause of the Great British Rot!

They’re horrid – they must be the Russians!

 

They sit in the Hilton and scowl at the waiters

They drink a foul potion distilled from potatoes

And everyone knows they detest us and hate us

They’re horrid – they must be the Russians!

 

They’ve Benn and the Trots who all want to enslave us

And countless Red spies who all want to deprave us

But Maggie’s alright – she’ll defend us and save us

From the muggers from Moscow, the Russians!

 

And her mate in the White House, a fine, manly figure

He knows how to handle a Jew or a ni**er

When Maggie gets Trident and Ron gets the trigger

We’ll give ‘em deterrent, those Russians….

 

Oh, hang on a minute - my brain’s on the blink

I think that the Kremlin’s been spiking my drink

How unpatriotic – I’ve started to THINK!

It must all be down to the Russians…

 

My mate here just tells me they’ve got a new plan

They’re holding a party in Afghanistan

And he’s got an invite, as number one fan:

They can’t all be horrid, the Russians!

 

Hey, look – over there – they’re down in the park

They’re holding a meeting out there in the dark

The speaker looks just like that John Cooper Clarke –

They all dress so formal, the Russians…

 

I’m going to meet them: I want to be friends

Find out if they follow the West’s latest trends

And have long discussions, the means and the ends –

I’m getting quite fond of the Russians….

 

Hey, hang on – they’re smiling and there’s music playing!

It’s punk rock – the Malchix – oh, I feel like staying!

They’re handing out ice cream, and bopping, and swaying –

I THINK I’LL GO BACK WITH THE RUSSIANS!

Interesting how language has changed over the years: in the late Seventies I felt quite comfortable using the ‘n-word’ in a satirical, anti-racist context but now, I can only keep it there with asterisks in the middle. And note the reference to John Cooper Clarke. I’d actually never seen him live at that point, but I had heard him on the radio and thought he was brilliant. He had paved the way: he was up there, proving it could be done.

When my seasonal job at the alcohol warehouse finished, I stayed in Harlow. I was heavily involved in the local musical and political scene and had made lots of friends, Steve was happy for me to stay in his flat, and in any case my football team, my mother and my Brighton mates were only two and a half hours away by train. In early 1980 I set up another one off gig for the Newtown Neurotics in Belgium (there was another riot, this time with local right wing farmers) and took the opportunity once again to do an impromptu set of solo songs over there on my little electric mandolin, this time put through a phaser unit: again it went down pretty well. Back in Harlow, still not yet ready to inflict myself on the local scene, I carried on writing, determined that very soon I’d be earning my living from my words and music.

But in the meantime, I needed another temporary job. My time in Belgium had improved my French to the point where I was pretty much bilingual, so I registered for casual language-related work with a London employment agency. A few days later, in March 1980, I got a call: they had something for me. Bilingual settlements clerk - at a City stockbroking company.

My first reaction was ‘Bloody hell, no way!’ It was obviously in the very heartland of the system that I have despised all my adult life. Then I got to thinking and realised that it was an ideal opportunity to find out exactly what went on in such places - in any case I wasn’t going to be there long. Although the post was advertised as a permanent one it would be temporary for me - I would be out of there like a shot as soon as I started gigging in earnest. So I decided to go for the interview.

First, of course, I needed a suit and tie. I’d never worn one (and after I left have only done so on about 2 occasions in the subsequent 34 years). A Harlow charity shop solved that problem, and at the interview my French got me the job. It wasn’t very well paid, but the understanding was that, if you knuckled down, you’d progress up the ladder and then it would be, which was why the vast majority of the people who worked there were deferential to their ‘superiors’ to the point of servility. The partners were pompous, the dealers obnoxious. The rest of the staff were clerks: ordinary people who needed a job, knew the rules and either shrunk into themselves or bit their tongues when ‘a superior’ took the piss out of them or bullied them, which happened all the time. One dealer in the office was an absolute arsehole and constantly picked on one individual. He must have really needed that job: if I’d been talked to like that, I’d have decked the bloke.

It was a truly ghastly place.

My job entailed taking calls from French-speaking stockbrokers and passing them on to the dealers, and filling in bought and sold ledgers for hours and hours. At that time, this was done by hand and was, needless to say, stultifyingly tedious. Worst of all, I soon realised that the department I worked in specialised in shares in the South African gold mining industry, which in 1980 was of course controlled by a brutal apartheid regime: huge profits could be made because the wages paid to workers were minimal and working conditions obscene.

News would come through of a fire or collapse in a mine and the dealers would go into overdrive: not, of course, because of any concern for the people affected but because the share price would plummet. Conversely, of course, if a strike was summarily suppressed and the workers forced back, share prices would rise. Callous beyond belief; ‘respectable’ men in suits, doubtless considered pillars of their local communities, presiding over the misery of millions. And of course South Africa was just the tip of the iceberg. In that job I saw unfettered capitalism at its naked, brutal worst, and those 11 months were part of the reason why, when the socialist dream ended for some in 1989, it did not end for me. I will wave the red flag proudly till my dying day.

Filling in the ledgers meant I got to know exactly who was investing in other people’s misery. Lots of banks, as you’d expect, and lots of people with posh sounding names: pension funds: perhaps more surprisingly, the church. But then I know for a fact that one of the partners at the company was a member of the General Synod. What nauseating hypocrisy. Jesus Christ was a revolutionary communist!

The poem I wrote about my time in that job was finished after I’d left. It summed up my feelings about the people there, both the snobbish, status-obsessed partners and the bored, victimised clerks.

All this time I was busily writing, of course, and by mid 1980 I had half an hour of solo poems and songs which I thought were good enough to hold an audience.

And then, one day, I got myself a stage name.

A stage name that, on its own, got me fifty per cent of my earliest gigs outside Harlow, all my early media coverage and entries in ‘silly band name’ lists all over the world, alongside the likes of Death By Milkfloat and Half Man Half Biscuit. To this day, it still raises a smile everywhere I go.

I can be quite clumsy: I bump into things easily. And in that job I didn’t give a shit. I can’t exactly remember how or where, but I knocked a cup of coffee over in the office one day and somebody said something like ‘You’ve got the manners of Attila the Hun!’

A light came on in my head.

Attila the Stockbroker. That’s what I’d call myself.

The last bit of the jigsaw was complete.