Back in Harlow the Front Line, as the local punk fraternity was called, was growing all the time: there were fully operational bands, bands who were just starting and ‘bands’ who only ever existed as toilet graffiti. Three of the newest ones had just got themselves a gig at a local playbarn, as Harlow youth centres were called, and they were happy to add me to the bill. Newly christened Attila the Stockbroker, I made my debut on a sunny September 8th evening in 1980 at Bush Fair Playbarn, in between sets by The De-Fex, The Condemmed (yes, those two ‘m’s again!) and The Unborn Dead. They were noisy as hell. So was I, in a different kind of way…
There wasn’t time for me to go home and change after the evening’s commute back from my job in London, so I asked my flatmate Steve to take my mandolin along for me and I did the gig in my work suit. It must have seemed very strange indeed – a bloke in a suit with a tatty green carnation shoved in the buttonhole, hammering out his songs on a tinny little electric mandolin put through a phaser unit, shouting poems in between the songs. But, rather against my expectations, I went down really well and was immediately offered another gig, at a Rock Against Thatcher night in the recently opened Square One youth club in the town centre, which, as The Square, was still hosting gigs more than 30 years on as this book went to press, although its future is sadly in doubt.
This was just the incentive I needed to write more material, and I soon came up with a new poem, inspired by a Daily Express front cover I saw when I went home to visit my mum one weekend and my aunt and uncle, avid readers of that spectacular waste of good trees, were there. Half the page was a pinched-face rant about the RUSSIAN THREAT. The other half was a pinched-face rant about SOCIAL SECURITY SCROUNGERS.
I thought it was time they joined forces in a two pronged attack…
RUSSIANS IN THE DHSS
It first was a rumour dismissed as a lie
But then came the evidence none could deny:
A double page spread in the Sunday Express –
The Russians are running the DHSS!
The scroungers and misfits have done it at last
The die of destruction is finally cast
The glue-sniffing Trotskyists’ final excess:
The Russians are running the DHSS!
It must be the truth ‘cos it’s there in the news
A plot by the Kremlin, financed by the Jews
And set up by Scargill, has met with success –
The Russians are running the DHSS!
So go down to your Jobcentre – I bet you’ll see
Albanian students get handouts for free
And drug-crazed punk rockers cavort and caress
In the interview booths in the DHSS…
They go to Majorca on taxpayers’ money
Hey, you there, stop laughing – I don’t think it’s funny
And scroungers and tramps eat smoked salmon and cress
Now the Russians are running the DHSS!
We’ll catch that rat Scargill with our red rat catcher
We’ll send him to dinner with Margaret Thatcher
And we’ll make him stay there until he’ll confess
That he put the Reds in the DHSS!
Then we’ll hang ‘em and flog ‘em and hang ‘em again
And hang ‘em and flog ‘em and more of the same
We’ll GAS all the dole queues and clear up the mess:
Get rid of the Reds – AND the DHSS!
This poem, one of my best known to this day, eventually found its way onto the celebrated Cherry Red Records punk compilation album ‘Burning Ambitions’ which sold thousands – with the result that, even now, ‘What’s the DHSS, Attila?’ is one of the questions most asked of me by perplexed punks abroad. (One day soon, I guess, I’ll be asked it here too, along with ‘Who was Scargill?’ and my ambition is to live long enough for someone to ask me ‘Who was Margaret Thatcher?’) I still perform it occasionally for old time’s sake, and even though it is completely out of date it still gets a cheer…
After my Rock Against Thatcher appearance I was invited to do a couple more local gigs, also well received: emboldened, I entered the Harlow Council Rock Contest, even though I wasn’t a band, and to my absolute astonishment, got to the final - beaten in the end by my old mates Pete the Meat and the Boys. I had more material now, poetic sneers at the mainstream music scene like ‘I Don’t Talk To Pop Stars’ and ‘Pap Music For Wreck People’. As well as the poems I was writing new songs: by the end of 1980 I’d ditched my early efforts and cover versions in favour of the anti-capitalist pyromaniac anthem ‘Burn It Down’, ‘Factory Gods’, a rant against organised religion, ‘Fifth Column’, strangely prescient of Thatcher’s use of the police as her private army during the miners’ strike a few years later, and ‘World War Three’, an anti nuclear thrash based on a poem by Roger McGough. Oh, and ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’ – nuff said. And I was still going on stage in my suit.
So a set crammed full of biting socio-political comment from Day One, then? Well, yes and no. I was certainly doing my best, but, if I’m honest, in those very early days there’s no doubt whatsoever that the high point of an Attila gig for most of the audience was a song about a dead cat.
By 1980 the Newtown Neurotics were doing quite a few gigs outside Harlow, and, wherever possible, I’d pile into the Transit van along with them. One February night - Valentine’s Night - that year we had just been dropped off very late back at Steve’s flat in the Spencer’s Croft estate when we saw a cat lying in the road. It had self-evidently just had a terminal encounter with a motor vehicle and all nine of its lives had been used up in one go. Not wanting some poor unfortunate child to be greeted with the sight of a defunct, squashed and bloody family pet the next morning, we picked it up and placed it in some nearby bushes, and expected the council, or its owners, to clear it away: but they didn’t. The cat stayed exactly where it was (obviously, since it was dead) and as winter turned to spring, it came alive again. In a wriggly, maggoty, larval kind of way.
Word got round the local punk scene about The Spencer’s Croft Cat, as it was soon called, and people started making pilgrimages to the bushes to have a look: some didn’t just look, they poked it with sticks and things and watched the maggots crawl out. It remained unburied, and in no time at all had icon status. Its collar disappeared: I’m sure some punk rocker took it. Soon new Cat-inspired versions of political chants could be heard from the punk faction at demonstrations in the Harlow area, puzzling the hell out of the people around us.
‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat is a Dead Cat! Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat!’
‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat has got Maggat! Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat!’
‘What’s it got? Maggat! Who’s got maggat? The Spencer’s Croft Cat! When’s it got it? Now!’
The ‘small print’ on the poster advertising my very first gig was a prime example of this. Alongside the Crass-inspired slogan ‘Fight War Not Wars’ was a drawing of a spade and the words ‘Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat’. Indeed, ‘Bury The Cat’ became a favourite graffito all over Harlow, up there with the ubiquitous ‘Mick and Nick - Ant People’ (I’ve often wondered how Little Mick and his girlfriend felt when Adam and the Ants changed from bondaged-up sleaze-punk sadomasochists into teenybopper pirates).
Soon I’d written a song, predictably entitled ‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat’, in its honour. ‘Lying in the bushes, gone but not forgotten, its name may not be Johnny but it certainly is rotten…!’ Then I was offered my first ever London gig, supporting the Newtown Neurotics, Sods and Rabbits at the long-departed Music Machine. I thought I should do something special to mark the occasion and bought a couple of pints of fishing maggots, with the intention of showering the audience with them in the middle of the song to illustrate the Cat’s condition (good idea, eh?) But I let the Cat out of the bag, as it were, and only managed to throw one larval handful before Pat Bondy crept up behind me and tipped the remaining maggots over my head. I had a thorough wash and shook out my clothes, but bluebottles kept turning up in the flat for days afterwards…
To this day, that song is still requested across the world occasionally, and to Robina’s chagrin, when asked for it, I’ve still played it once or twice - now elongated to include ‘Dead Cat Strut’ (after ‘Stray Cat Strut’ by the Stray Cats) and ‘It’s Decomposing’ (after ‘What You’re Proposing’ by Status Quo). The Cat never was buried, though the bushes where it lay have been long since cleared away and an old people’s home built on the site. Yes, there is one corner of Spencer’s Croft which will be forever feline. And a bloke from New Zealand on a visit to London once travelled all the way to Harlow to pay homage there. No, I’m not making that up.
Of course, I shouldn’t be talking about this. I should be building up a picture of the hard-nosed radical street poet, unmoved by humour and frivolous songs about dead cats. In this country, if you get on stage you’re supposed to fit into a category: ‘poet’, ‘singer-songwriter’, ‘comedian’, whatever. And if you want to be ‘taken seriously’ by the people that matter, you are supposed to do ‘serious’ or ‘funny’, one or the other. Well, I don’t give a f**k. I’ll do an angry song and follow it with a silly poem if I feel like it, or vice versa. I don’t fit into boxes. The saga of The Cat did have one very important and serious effect though: it ensured that for the next ten years, Harlow felt like my punk rock home, just as Southwick and Brighton was and always will be my family and football home.
And then, in January 1981, after about six gigs, I got my first press feature.
In the Harlow Gazette.
‘CITY GENT’S MANIC TOUCH’ was the headline.
‘By day a mild mannered worker in a London stockbroker’s office, he changes into his alter ego Attila in the evenings, playing ‘manic’ folk’.
(‘Mild mannered’? Me?)
But this local journalist’s attempt to rewrite the Superman story in local hackese bore immediate fruit: I got a call from a young wannabe impresario called Ray Santilli, who said he’d like to manage me. There and then, he promised me a showcase A&R gig at the famous Dingwall’s jazz club in London and an interview with the Daily Mirror, though he hadn’t seen me, met me or heard me perform before.
‘Yeah, right’, I thought.
The next thing I knew the Daily Mirror were on the ‘phone wanting to do a photo session with me, in my suit – and a bloody Viking helmet. Then I got confirmation that I was booked at Dingwalls, and Ray Santilli said he’d pay for a coach so that the local punks could come and cheer me on, to impress the A&R people (jazz A&R people?) he was inviting to come and see me. I couldn’t work out why he was doing all this, and I thought it was time to meet him. (Though I didn’t say so, I thought the Viking helmet was a really, really naff idea as well.)
‘But Ray’, I said. ‘You’ve never seen me do a gig. You don’t know any of my stuff. It’s not jazz. It’s left wing performance poetry and rude, loud, very primitive punky songs, thrashed out on three chords on a cheap little electric mandolin put through a phaser unit. It’s indescribable really. I can’t sing, the mandolin sounds really tinny, and I’ve only been doing this for four months and about six gigs. I’ve got an awful lot to learn! No-one’s going to sign me, honestly! Especially not if they’re into jazz!’
‘It doesn’t matter what you do’, he said. ‘You’ve got a great stage name, and it’s a great story. Leave the rest to me.’
‘Well, Ok, I’ll do the photo session for the Mirror, and the gig, but I want free beer for the Harlow Front Line punks as well as the free coach to Dingwalls!’
I got it.
I did the photos, in my suit and a Viking helmet. I looked a complete and total plonker, and even though you might think that a national newspaper feature four months after my first gig would be everything I could have ever have wanted, I was mightily relieved when the editors decided not to run the piece.
The gig? A Monday night showcase at a cavernously empty Dingwalls. Fifty Harlow punks (the entire audience, apart from a posse of bemused A&R types) polished off Ray’s free beer on the coach trip down and went absolutely berserk all the way through my set. They cheered my poems to the rafters and sang along to ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’ as though their lives depended on it. Some invaded the stage to sing backing vocals on ‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat’.
‘Dead, dead cat – and it’s got MAGGAT!’ they shouted. ‘Bury the cat. Bury the cat. BURY, BURY, BURY THE CAT!’
The jazz A&R men left half way through, shrugging their shoulders in disbelief, and Ray Santilli disappeared soon after. I know he didn’t know what to expect, but I’m sure he didn’t expect what he got, if you see what I mean…
But, again, there is a rather large postscript. One day a few years ago, remembering that strange episode and thinking that I had heard his name bandied about somewhere recently, I put ‘Ray Santilli’ into Google. Here’s what I got: ‘Ray Santilli is a London-based film producer, who on 5 May 1995 presented for the first time his alien autopsy footage to media representatives and UFO researchers. It was suggested that the body belonged to one of the aliens picked from the supposed Roswell UFO crash site in 1947.’
It soon became apparent that this whole scam had become the film ‘Alien Autopsy’ starring Ant or Dec out of Ant & Dec (please note: I’m not interested in Ant & Dec and I haven’t seen the film) as Ray Santilli. With Ray Santilli as producer. He probably designed the costumes as well.
And it is, indeed, the same bloke. The same bloke who persuaded the Daily Mirror to take pictures of me in a Viking helmet. The same bloke who tried to persuade London’s top jazz impresarios to take under their wing a foetal, nay, embryonic Attila the Stockbroker about six gigs old, shouting poems and thrashing a tinny, out of tune electric mandolin while ‘singing’ about a dead cat and Willie Whitelaw’s Willie.
Why wasn’t the alien’s photo in the Mirror, Ray? It wouldn’t even have needed to wear a Viking helmet. And it’s a shame it was dead. You could have got it a gig at Dingwalls…
Back in my decidedly un-jazz world, I carried on gigging, going down a storm on the back of a lorry at a Right To Work Campaign march through Harlow – they promised me another spot at a demo in London - and doing spots at every punk rock gig I could.
Then it was time for my first recording, which took place in the Newtown Neurotics’ driver/roadie John Mortimer’s bedroom on an old tape to tape machine. I did 5 songs: ‘Burn It Down’, ‘Factory Gods’, ‘World War Three’, ‘Spencer’s Croft Cat’ (because I knew as long as that was on the tape, people would buy it in droves!) and ‘T5’ (which took its title from the number of the bus I caught to the station every morning on the way to work, and was based on a poem by Unborn Dead singer and up and coming ranter Little Dave). I called the tape ‘Phazing Out Capitalism’, after the effects unit I put my mandolin through. It was released – ie: we duplicated a couple of hundred copies - on Steve’s recently formed No Wonder label, with a very silly advert for the other releases, by the Newtown Neurotics and Spermicide from Belgium, on the other side.
Now a bona fide recording artist (!) I’d had enough of the Stock Exchange job: eleven thoroughly unpleasant eleven months were enough and I chucked it in, though it provided me with one last rant…
GENTLEMEN OF THE WRIST
In a shitty city wine bar whining in their wine about rates and dates and druggers and muggers and red ken and his men and dirty diners and militant miners they slob out the evening in sweaty pinheaded pinstriped pissed up pathetic postures paranoid penpushers on parole gin and tonic really chronic quite moronic want to be bionic but whoever heard of a bionic bank clerk wouldn’t that be a lark the nightly convention of the highly conventional order of the gentlemen of the wrist (brackets pissed) spews the news and blows a fuse they whinge and binge and singe their minge eric should have been home five hours ago his wife will kill him but it’s his round so he’s staying around the eighth pint’s been downed and the first one to be sick is a prick so give it some stick mick ‘cos eric’s a REAL MAN and he can hold his fizzy gnat’s piss better than you can heard the one about the queer irish jew locked in the loo ha ha great mate give us another before we go home to one mother or another look over there that bird is the word could really poke that no don’t be an absurd nerd don’t be a twat that’s too fat time to go see you tomorrow have a good pube on the tube but watch out for the beggars and the smeggers and the nightly convention of the highly conventional order of the gentlemen of the wrist (brackets pissed) is dismissed home to the wife who says hello little jife where have you been you smell obscene it’s plainly seen you’re no james dean four hours late food’s on the plate I didn’t wait HERO ZERO eight hours’ work five hours’ drinking five seconds’ thinking time for sleep for suburban sheep off to bed empty head might as well be DEAD!
Stock Exchange – goodbye and good riddance. For the first and only time in my life I signed on the dole for a few months, determined to dedicate all my time to writing new material and hassling for gigs. I stopped wearing the suit on stage as well: I didn’t want any more Clark Kent comparisons. The initial tape run sold out quickly and Rough Trade offered to distribute it for me. I was well chuffed.
And then everything was suddenly put into perspective. I got a call from my mum: she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had to have a mastectomy, and I went back to Southwick for a while to look after her.
My mum was a great woman, and, as I’ve already mentioned, a talented musician: thwarted by circumstance from fulfilling her dream and making it her profession, she became a piano teacher and organist, and started many young musicians on their way. She was strong-willed and determined when she faced her first great medical challenge: the second would come more than 20 years later and attack her brain, not her body. The story of that heartrending battle will be told much later on.
Mum had to wait an agonisingly long time – months - for her operation. It was nothing short of mental torture, and all down to the Thatcher-inspired running down of the NHS: her experience inspired my song ‘40 Years’ on the 1986 ‘Wake Up’ EP I shared with Billy Bragg, The Redskins and the Newtown Neurotics. ‘A loved one lies awake at night with iron in her soul/Haunted by a spectre, but the hospitals are full…’
After her mastectomy we weren’t sure whether the cancer was gone, whether she would survive. Her brother, Mick, lived in New Zealand and she’d never been there. ‘Well, if I’m going to die, I want to see New Zealand before I go!’ A few weeks after her operation, off she went for an unspecified period. I took her to the plane in a wheelchair. It wasn’t easy for either of us, especially given what had happened to my dad, but I was so proud of her. I was on the day she died, nearly 30 years later. I still am.
Determined to get more gigs outside Harlow, I took every chance available to shout my stuff at political rallies and events: one of the most unusual early ones I did was at Greenham Common, sometime in mid 1981 before it became a women only camp. I also hooked up with Patrik Fitzgerald, the early punk acoustic singer-songwriter best known for the punk classic ‘Safety Pin Stuck in my Heart’ and another early inspiration of mine, and we did a few gigs together. (We had some minor disagreements after that and went our separate ways, but in 2006, we got in touch through the internet, ended up touring the UK and Norway together again, and had a wonderful time. We still tour together sporadically to this day.)
Patrik introduced me to the poet Anne Clark, who, back then, was running events at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon; with her various musical accompanists she has been a huge presence on the mainland European spoken word/music scene for many years now. Anne was involved with ‘Riot Stories’, a ‘young people’s’ poetry publishing initiative set up by Paul Weller of The Jam, and promised to pass some of my material on to him. She organised a gig for myself and Patrik at the Warehouse, then all three of us were invited to Kidbrooke comprehensive school in South London by Joy Scully, who was teaching there. The gig was really well received and the school decided to publish a transcript of the performance.
I was really pleased: I’d just got my first tape out, now I was going to have some poems published in a book. I arranged to meet Joy in a burger bar next to Victoria Station to go through the material, and as I came in I saw a couple of little kids hassling customers. Soon they came over, one flashing a knife.
That day I wrote one of my best-known poems ever. It’s sold well over 100,000 copies. Why? Because it ended up on the celebrated 1982 Cherry Red Records compilation sampler album ‘Pillows and Prayers’. This sold in bucket loads because it was very varied and very good, but, far more importantly, because in true ‘Faust Tapes’ tradition (old gits will remember that one) it cost just 99p. Or the equivalent in local currency…
A BANG & A WIMPY
Swing door swings open in the fast food fun palace
Two pairs of eyes meet mine: I steel myself and grimace
Elbows against the counter they slump: mean-eyed, po-faced, no-nonsense
Prepubescent pugilists, terror tots, South London’s finest
Knee-high nihilists planning nursery crimes
The Wimpy Bar mafia, nine years old, macho, murderous
Primary school but primed to kill, or maim, or terrorise
Size you up and slice you through with Peter Sutcliffe eyes
They’re into older women – eleven or twelve’s their favourite age
They chat them up as they come in, invade their space like space invaders
‘Oi luv! Want some chips?’ Then invite them home – for glue
And a private rendition of the new Exploited single
Or some other manic mayhem to make their extremities tingle
Soon they’ll be old enough to bunk into a disco
But till then they’ll stick to the hamburger hustle
A bang and a Wimpy, a Wimpy and a bang
The grim and grimy gangsters from the mustard-and-Crass gang
Video vandals, violent virgin vigilantes verging on the vindictive….
Now I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels
Been searching everywhere, couldn’t find them anywhere
But here they are in the wimpy bar right by Victoria Station
I stand and watch them operate in muted fascination
Till ‘Ere, got ten pee, mate?’ snaps me back to hard reality
And the half concealed glinting switchblade smiles with awful clarity
I give them twenty-one pence and they give me a hard smile
Now they’ve the price of another tube they’re happy for a while
And in the Wimpy wonderland the crisis kids run free -
A bang, a Wimpy and a sniff and home in time for tea…
Then everything started to happen at once.
In late 1981 I had a call from Stuart Fancy, one of the organisers of the Woolwich Right To Work Campaign and now the world’s only Trotskyist capitalist chess champion (of Papua New Guinea – but don’t laugh, don’t even smile: if you want to lose at chess, play Stuart). They’d liked what I’d done at the march in Harlow, they were organising a series of ‘Jobs Not YOPS’ events in London (YOP stood for Youth Opportunities Programme, the 1980s Tories’ euphemism for cheap labour) and they wanted me to compere them. And there was a ‘People’s March For Jobs’ demonstration happening soon: would I perform at it? Poetry off the back of a lorry as I’d done in Harlow?
‘Sure’ I said.
Anne Clark had told me that there was a ‘Poetry Olympics’ event at the Young Vic Theatre in London in late November, and she’d be reading alongside Paul Weller. ‘You lucky so and so’ I thought. When I met Joy at the Wimpy bar she said she and her daughter Mary were going, and I realised that it was the same day as the Right to Work Campaign march. I decided that if I could blag a spot in between punk bands in Harlow, I could blag a spot at the Young Vic Theatre – or at least give it a try. So I said I’d see them there…
On the day of the demo I turned up at the lorry in Woolwich and met the skinhead poet Seething Wells, or Swells, as he was generally known. My partner in ranting verse for years, the other half of my first book, a force of nature and then some: you’ll hear a lot more about him in this book, his poetry, his journalism and his bloody-minded brilliance, right up until his tragic death from cancer in 2009. I miss you, Swells.
He’d already heard about what I was doing and had written to tell me about the developing ‘ranting poetry’ scene in his home town of Bradford and his ‘Molotov Comics’ fanzine. ‘Ranting poetry’, that’s what he called it: I liked that concept. I liked it even more after I’d heard his stuff: he was brilliant. ‘Tetley Bittermen’, ‘Aggro Britain’, ‘He/She’s Perfect’ - absolutely superb. When he told me that he’d named himself after a sewage farm in Surbiton (his real name was Steven Wells, as NME readers and general media-observers will know) that was the clincher. I decided that we’d try and crash the Poetry Olympics together, and invited him to come to the Young Vic with me. He thought it a great idea.
We didn’t have tickets or anything, so I sought out the organiser, London based poet/impresario Michael Horovitz. Horovitz has been running ‘Poetry Olympics’ events and editing anthologies like ‘New Departures’ and ‘Grandchildren of Albion’ since the Ice Age and is the living incarnation of the term ‘old hippie’: his ‘Anglo-Saxophone’ (read: kazoo) performances defy description. But I have huge respect for him: he has probably done more than anyone else alive today to help new and up and coming poets, and he has an open mind. When confronted by a punk rocker and a skinhead claiming to be poets and demanding spots at his showpiece event, he didn’t bat an eyelid. We were on. Specifically, we were on straight after Roger McGough, and immediately before Paul Weller. Five minutes each.
The big one.
I ran on stage and spat out ‘They Must Be Russians’ and ‘Russians in the DHSS’. All the gigs I’d done previously had been to punk crowds and/or at demonstrations, needing pure in-your-face energy to win the audience over. I’d never performed to a several hundred strong crowd of poetry-lovers before, but of course I did what I normally did. Most of them had never seen or heard anything like it. They loved it.
The place erupted.
Then I introduced Swells, who did ‘Tetley Bittermen’ and the place erupted again.
Unbeknown to us, New Musical Express editor Neil Spencer, a keen poetry fan, was reviewing the gig: he raved about us in the following week’s issue of the NME.
Michael Horovitz was well impressed. He said our poems would be included on the live LP of the event he was planning, and invited us to do a set at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, at a ‘Poetry Olympics’ event early the following year.
Gerda Barraclough from Henley invited Swells and me to do a CND gig there, and Neil Spencer dispatched X Moore, soon to be Chris Dean of The Redskins, to review it for the NME. (After the gig, Swells and I spent the night in a double bed at Gerda’s place, an experience preserved in my poem ‘The Night I Slept with Seething Wells’!)
Paul Weller invited Swells - not me - to support The Jam at the Hammersmith Odeon a week or so later. Swells returned the favour from the Young Vic gig and invited me to share his allotted time. We turned up backstage.
‘You the poet?’ grunted Weller’s manager dad to Swells.
‘Yes’ said Swells.
‘Who’s that c**t then?’
Despite this inauspicious introduction we both did a set, and the massed ranks of Jam fans gave us a great reception. The Jam were brilliant too. We got another fantastic review in the NME from the Henley gig and editor Neil Spencer commissioned me to write a big feature for the paper on ‘new town life’, based on the Harlow punk scene.
Very soon afterwards, still in December 1981, Swells and I were doing a Right To Work Campaign gig at a pub called The Roundhouse in Wandsworth. Red Saunders, the co-founder of Rock Against Racism, turned up and said he wanted to record it, which he did, on top of an old reggae cassette. It was a good live recording of a fine gig with an enthusiastic audience, and Red was on the ‘phone a couple of days later to say he wanted to release an EP of our poems – me on one side, Swells on the other - on his new Radical Wallpaper label.
I was sceptical, to be honest, because I didn’t think anyone would buy poetry on a record, but happy to accept and really pleased that a bit of vinyl was going to come out with my poems on it. I selected ‘A Bang and A Wimpy’, the two ‘Russians’ ones, ‘I Don’t Talk To Pop Stars’, ‘Pap Music for Wreck People’, ‘Andy Is A Corporatist’ and ‘Foyer Bar’ (there will be more on the last two poems later) and Swells chose five for his side. We decided to call the EP ‘Rough, Raw and Ranting’ because it was (!) and Red said he’d be in touch when it was pressed.
So in the space of a month I’d had two reviews in the NME, been commissioned to do my first piece of national press journalism, supported the Jam and been promised poems on two records, and most of that was down to five minutes on stage at the Poetry Olympics! Definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time…
Early in the New Year of 1982 the Right to Work Campaign got in touch again, confirming that they wanted Swells and me to compere the ‘Jobs Not YOPS’ march round London. By now the ‘ranting poets’ were becoming some kind of a team (as we grew in numbers, we’d also become a football team, though not a very good one…) In addition to Swells and myself there was the superb Little Brother and Joolz Denby from Bradford, Ginger John from Manchester and my mate Little Dave from Harlow, lead singer of the Unborn Dead, who took to ‘ranting’ like a duck to water. Very soon I was to meet the great Benjamin Zephaniah, who gave us the punk/reggae connection, in poetry as in music. It was time to tell the world.
I decided that, having got NME interested, albeit by accident, I should tackle the other major music weekly at the time, Sounds. They were very different. NME saw itself as an ‘intellectual’ rock paper, the home of ‘philosophers’ (ha!) like Ian Penman and Paul Morley, while Sounds specialised in down to earth heavy metal and street punk, the latter presided over by Features Editor Garry Bushell. Without further ado I took the train down to the Sounds office near Covent Garden and invited ‘Gal’, as he was known (doubtless still is) out for a beer.
Garry Bushell. Perhaps the most frustrating bloke I have ever encountered in the music scene, and I’ve met a few. Those who have never met him and only seen the stuff he has served up in various right wing tabloids or on TV may not believe this, but he did his journalistic training at Socialist Worker, and was once a supporter of the party. (Not for a long time, and I haven’t spoken to him since he crossed the printers’ picket line at Wapping while working for The Sun, but he was…) He is also highly intelligent, can write really well and can be very good company. When I first met him, we got on famously.
Like so many English people, especially people with healthy careers and bank balances, Bushell has a sacred cow, his ‘working class background’ and he wants everyone to know about it. Now I know that the worlds of journalism and the entertainment industry, like everywhere else, have their fair share of patronising snobs and clueless, pampered dorks - but you can take things too far. Bushell created the early 80’s ‘Oi’ punk/skinhead movement as a ‘working class alternative to the middle class punk scene’, and when he went to the Sun part of his justification was ‘it’s a working class paper’. These days he’s one of many journalists on the populist Right who uses ‘middle class’ and ‘politically correct’ as a stick to beat progressive people round the head with, and justifies all kinds of reactionary ideas because ‘that’s what working class (read: real, worthwhile, sensible) people think’.
Well I think that’s a pile of crap. There are millions of working class people who are not reactionary, tabloid-duped idiots, and it’s their values – the values of community, solidarity, trade unionism, social justice – which are the ones worth supporting. I know all about the Union Jack waving, Royal Family loving, right wing, anti-union, aspirational, ‘loyal’ working class: it is the exact definition of my father and my maternal grandparents, it was of my mother before I argued it out of her, and it can rot in hell.
Robert Tressell’s ‘Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. Craven cannon fodder for the pointlessly murderous upper class ego-squabble which was the First World War.
I owe my existence to the bug which kept my father back behind the lines the day every single other member of his company was killed or captured at the Somme in World War One. Brave, duped, dying in a senseless rich man’s spat.
That stupid attitude seems to be dying out a bit now, and people tend to be taken more for who they are (though there is a very worrying downside to this which makes me hanker for the old days a bit: so much of our culture, so many bands these days are bland, suburban and boring. Keane, Coldplay… FUCK OFF!) But back in the 1980s it was very different, and of course it wasn’t just the Right who used to go on like that. ‘A working class background’ used to be a holy grail in the left wing music scene, garlanded by years of guilt-ridden liberal self-loathing by people who aspired to one. And not only did you have to have parents from working class backgrounds and grow up with little money: rather bizarrely, it helped a lot if you only started being clever at what you were doing after you left school.
As you’ve already heard, my mum was bright and talented and won a county scholarship: I followed in her footsteps. Great in the ‘conventional’ world: bad news if you were a radical punk rocker. The 70s/80s UK music scene was probably the only place anywhere, ever, in the whole history of the world, where doing well at school, passing exams, going to university and so on was seen by some as a disadvantage - a lack of ‘street credibility’. ‘Just because you’re better than me/Doesn’t mean I’m lazy’ Billy Bragg famously sang. I’ve never thought academic achievement made me ‘better’ than anyone else, of course, but I’ll be damned if it made me ‘worse’, in some way less qualified to be the radical poet I was – and still am. No guilt trips round here.
When I met one of my great poetic heroes, Roger McGough, and he heard me speaking French, he said ‘John, you don’t want people to hear you doing that, it doesn’t go with the image’. WHAT? And in Bragg’s biography ‘Still Suitable for Miners’ by Andrew Collins, we ‘ranting poets’ (Swells and I basically) are described thus: ‘Angry youngish men playing at being Doctor Marten’s own town criers’. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Speaking at least one foreign language is considered absolutely normal by most people all over the world: it’s only in ‘insular’ England where it’s viewed with something approaching suspicion. Being academically bright isn’t a ‘privilege’ - and it doesn’t mean you don’t know how to handle a pair of DMs. I used mine on fascists occasionally because they used theirs on me: I wasn’t ‘playing at’ anything, I can assure you. I have worn nothing but DMs since the 1970s, and, although I very much hope that at 57 I’ll never have to use them in anger again, if I have to, I will.
I guess it all goes back to primary school in Southwick and that old ‘swot’ thing. It’s not ‘English’ to be clever, confident AND able to stand up for yourself. That’s ‘arrogance’. Robert the bully: It was nearly 50 years ago, but I’m sure his name was Robert. Tried to pick on me because I was bright, the teachers liked me, I was in for the eleven plus early and I helped the other kids with tests. I fronted him, no problem. I was the primary school ‘swot’ who was popular with the teachers and stood up to the bullies, and I’m proud of that. Softy Walter and Dennis the Menace rolled into one, I guess.
I have always found people who try and use their background as a point-scoring device really annoying. ‘Prolier than thou’ inverted snobs of all varieties (‘my dad earned less money than your dad, I grew up in a council house, you didn’t, I passed fewer exams than you, nah, nah, nah’) are irritating dickheads. People who indulge in that kind of behaviour, especially right wing idiots who are now thoroughly ‘middle class’ in terms of income and bank balance, should have the piss taken out of them mercilessly as in the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch in Monty Python (‘Lived in a hole in t’road? You were lucky!’) or invited to return to their former state if they are so bloody proud of it. A working class background, if it meant, or means, anything at all, means nothing unless you are on the radical left and stand up for the poor, the disadvantaged, the demonised: otherwise you’re just a me-first traitor. Working class right wingers are turkeys voting for Christmas.
If I have to choose between a Sun reader who parrots Murdoch’s clichés about ‘scroungers’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the opposite extreme, let’s say a progressive, left wing, open-hearted Old Etonian baronet (hi Comrade Sir Henry!) I’ll take Sir Henry any day. And to knock this one on the head once and for all: the greatest politician in my lifetime, Tony Benn, was an aristocrat, the greatest and most inspirational figure in rock ‘n’roll, ever, Joe Strummer, was a diplomat’s son, and the most influential DJ in history, John Peel, was an upper class bloke from the Wirral. It’s not where you come from, it’s what you DO that matters. 1-0 Attila. End of that argument!
Anyway, back to the matter in hand. Bushell said he’d do a feature on me in Sounds, based around my forthcoming Poetry Olympics gig in Stratford, and he very soon offered me the chance to do freelance work for the paper as well, maybe out of out of a desire to ‘poach’ me from the NME more or less before I’d started writing for them. To say I was chuffed would be an understatement. God knows where his head is these days, but I’ll make no bones about it: back in 1982 Garry Bushell helped me a lot, and I thank him for it.
By now opportunities were coming thick and fast. I was being offered more and more gigs, and was as ever writing lots of new material. From my first gig to this day, national and world events have never left me short of subject matter, and in 1982 it was certainly there in abundance.
In January of that year, at Ipswich Crown Court, an ageing High Court judge called Bertrand Richards ruled that a 17-year old female hitch hiker who was raped after thumbing a lift home from a dance hall was ‘in the truest sense, asking for it’ and guilty of ‘contributory negligence’. The man who raped her was let off with a fine, and there was a huge outcry. When I heard about the case, one of far too many over the years, of course, I was beside myself with rage, and my rage soon became verse…
CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE
Hitching up the M11
Coming back from an Upstarts gig
Got picked up ‘bout half eleven
By this bloke in a funny wig
Flash Mercedes, new and gleaming -
Deep pile seats and deep seat piles
I got in and sat there scheming
While the fat cat flashed me smiles…
Told me he was back from sessions
With a load of brain-dead hacks
Told me he’d made no concessions
To the bootboys and the blacks
Said he thought that it was stupid
Fuss ‘bout rapists on the news
Bloke was only playing Cupid
Girls like that they don’t refuse
Asked me if I thought him enemy
Asked me if I bore a grudge
Told me that he came from Henley
Said he was a High Court judge
I asked him to stop a second
‘Need a slash’ that’s what I said
When he did the anger beckoned
And I smacked him in the head
Took the keys and took his money
Crashed the car into a ditch
Though he moaned ‘They’ll get you, sonny!’
Got away without a hitch
I don’t think they’ll ever find me
‘Cos I’m many miles away
But if one day they’re right behind me
I know what I’m gonna say –
HE ASKED FOR IT! He’s rich and snobbish
Right wing, racist, sexist too!
Brain dead, stupid, sick and slobbish –
Should be locked in London Zoo!
He wanted me to beat him up!
It was an open invitation!
Late at night he picked me up –
An act of open provocation!
High Court judges are a blight –
They should stay home in nice warm beds
And if they must drive late at night
Should never pick up Harlow Reds!
A five pence fine is right and proper
And to sum up my defence
It was his fault he came a cropper –
CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE!
I performed this poem for the first time at Michael Horovitz’s ‘Poetry Olympics’ at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in early 1982: at the end of the fifth verse it was interrupted by a huge roar of acclaim. I had touched a chord, and the same thing happened again and again at gigs in the following weeks and months: I’d rarely finish it in one go. Thirty-plus years later, it still gets a cheer. And, very soon, the geriatric ramblings of the English judiciary would be in my line of fire again.
Around the same time as the Stratford gig, the ‘Jobs not YOPS’ march round London started, with evening benefit gigs compered by myself and Swells. The big one was a secret gig by the Jam. I was psyching myself up for another full frontal verbal assault on a big hall full of mods and punks when four blokes with guitars, weird cowboy-ish outfits and big hair - very, very big hair indeed - materialised in front of me: fully formed, image-perfect. They looked as though they’d been born like that.
‘Hello’, said the one with the biggest hair of all. ‘We’re The Alarm. Can we do a short spot?’
I checked, got the go-ahead from the organisers, and they did. I don’t remember their set, to be honest, but this was their first London appearance: former guitarist Dave Sharp confirmed that during a chat when he turned up at a gig I did in Southport just before this book went to press. I shared a few bills with them in the next couple of years and thoroughly enjoy their songs to this day, though it must be said that their lyrics made them sitting ducks (‘Get back in your shelter/If you can’t come down off the fence…’) Their first release was ‘The Stand’, an excellent song, and then the epic ‘68 Guns’, the words of which were so exquisitely ridiculous that they eventually inspired my ‘Zen Stalinist Manifesto’ in the mid 1990s. Singer Mike Peters heard it for the first time when I did a gig with him on the Leftfield Stage at Glastonbury in 2004, and I’m happy to say he found it very amusing. He’s a good bloke, has fought cancer in an inspirational way, and for the record, he and Paul Heaton from the Housemartins/Beautiful South are the two best footballers of all the musicians and poets I’ve ever met.
Here’s the poem, celebrating my new philosophy for the 21st century, Zen Stalinism: a combination of the caring, loving, pacifistic approach of Zen Buddism, the political clarity of Stalinism and the lyrics of The Alarm.
THE ZEN STALINIST MANIFESTO
Playing golf or being otherwise dull
with malice aforethought
watching TV for more than ten hours a week
(or any TV programmes or adverts
in the case of a stand-up comedian on stage)
and becoming obsessed with the work of
Quentin Tarantino
Damien Hirst
or William Burroughs
will become a criminal offence
punishable by five years’ enforced participation
in a non-stop mime
juggling
and face painting workshop
in Slough.
The Berlin Wall will be rebuilt -
only five metres higher.
It will keep people out.
People like the World Bank
the International Monetary Fund
Price Waterhouse
Roman Abramovich
Ant & Dec
Mark Lawrenson
Vladimir Putin
and Coldplay.
Michael Gove and Richard Littlejohn
will suffer immediate retrospective abortion.
In order to combat the increasing danger
to civilised society
posed by pig-ignorant
misogynistic
right-wing
testosterone-poisoned
road rage specialists
theme gulags will be introduced
for anyone who drives a van with scratches down the side
and shouts at or otherwise intimidates
lone women drivers at roundabouts
or buys shares in industries
which belonged to him in the first place.
These gulags will all be situated on Rockall
and will have three themes:
Saturday night in August on the Costa Del Sol
auction day at the used car emporium on Shoreham seafront
and happy hour in a Harlow theme pub.
All themes will run 24 hours a day
365 days a year
and inmates will be able to nominate their chosen
theme on arrival.
No theme changing will be allowed
but Clash albums
chess sets
and copies of ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’
by Robert Tressell
will be available for rehabilitation purposes.
Tight security will be enforced.
Theme gulags will be surrounded by large, deep moats
filled with soya milk and real ale
guarded by pitbullfrogs
and kept under constant surveillance
by hundreds of high court judges
watching from carefully constructed ivory towers.
Tony Blair will finally be recognised
as the war criminal he is
and made to spend the rest of his days
cleaning out the toilets
at the Glastonbury Festival.
With his tongue.
Every Western government leader
and the entire staff of the United Nations
will be forced to walk naked
through the memorials
and mass graves
in what used to be the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia
and then have the words
‘Marshall Tito was right’
tattooed on their foreheads.
A Zen Stalinist National Curriculum
will be introduced into schools.
Albanian
- both dialects, Gheg and Tosk -
will become compulsory as a foreign language.
Reading Geoffrey Archer
and supporting Crystal Palace
will become not just highly illegal
but indicative of a disturbed mental state
requiring instant frontal lobotomy.
The Alarm will reform.
All school students will have to attend morning assembly
and sing the new National Anthem:
‘68 Guns’ by The Alarm.
Mike Peters of The Alarm
will become the new Welsh football manager
with David Icke as his assistant.
The Royal Family
will be allowed to remain as figureheads
but will have to join The Alarm.
Billy Bragg will become next in line to the throne
and rhythm guitarist in The Alarm.
All game show hosts
all TV cooks
and everyone who works for the Sun
and the Times Literary Supplement
will be shot.
Their executions will be videoed
an acid house soundtrack will be added
and huge week-long parties
known as ‘graves’
will begin.
Ken Livingstone and his pet newt Dennis
will become Prime Minister
and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
All privatised industries will be renationalised
without compensation
and a huge TV and poster campaign will be launched
saying simply
‘Tell Sid tough shit.’
The Queen will be privatised
and promoted to lead singer of The Alarm.
The first Zen Stalinist Five Year Plan
will be published
declaring world peace and social surrealism
and the dark nightmare of monetarist madness
will finally come to an end.
For ever.
At one of the gigs on that tour, Swells was given a tape by a young singer-songwriter from Barking, and I think, though I’m not sure, that was the first time I said hello to Billy Bragg. There would be many more meetings in the future…
At the end of February 1982, Garry Bushell’s Sounds feature on me was published, typically headlined ‘You’re the Hun that I want’(!) and by the end of March I had written ‘Awayday’, the rude, loud, definitive early Attila piece which, along with ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’, would appear on one of his ‘Oi!’ compilation albums, with my anti-fascist poem ‘Andy Is A Corporatist’ on another. ‘Oh, bloody hell, Oi!’ I can hear some older and more ‘sensitive’ readers groan. ‘What were you doing getting involved with that?’ Well, having had a go at the judiciary – the upper class Right - the working class Right and the Stock Exchange middle class Right, it’s time I had words with the middle class Left.
I have always believed, as a socialist and anti-fascist, that it simply isn’t good enough to preach to the converted: if you spend your life in a vegetarian whole food-ridden ghetto strewn with wine glasses and discarded copies of Society Guardian, then you are absolutely no use to anyone. There’s a world out there. Right wing, fascistic and just downright dumb ideas need to be combatted head on, and there were plenty associated with ‘Oi!’ which is why I got involved – to reach people, argue, challenge ideas, change minds. Furthermore, despite what the likes of the NME said, it’s not true that everything to do with ‘Oi’ was awful, and the majority of the bands weren’t right wing: allied to it were some fine outfits like the Angelic Upstarts, Blitz, Red Alert and the fantastic Red London, whose first EP ‘Sten Guns in Sunderland’ I produced in 1983 after helping them get a record deal. I like punk rock, always have done, and I’ve never felt comfortable just preaching to the converted - not then, not now, and I never will. I’ll go to places most poets won’t. It’s meant a few bruises, metaphorical and physical, given and received, over the years, and so be it. Much more on this subject to come…
1982 was a bad year for the English judiciary: a very, very bad year indeed, even by their brontosaurine standards. Just two months after the ‘Contributory Negligence’ fiasco came the London Transport ‘Fares Fair’ debacle.
In October 1981, as part of their election manifesto, Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council reduced London tube and bus fares by 31% to encourage greater use of public transport and reduce traffic problems: it was a hugely popular and successful measure, and was challenged in an act of sheer political spite by Tory-controlled Bromley Council. Five Law Lords led by Lord Denning ruled that the entire scheme was illegal, and in March 1982, the GLC were forced to double the fares.
Once more, there was uproar at a ‘judicial’ decision made by elderly upper-class males who appeared completely out of touch with ordinary people and their lives. A campaign was launched, and many people refused to pay the increased fares. Badges and stickers were everywhere: ‘I voted for cheap fares. Who voted for Lord Denning?’
My contribution was a cautionary tale about the perils of a day out in London with the Law Lords…
AWAYDAY
Woke up got up read the post attacked the postman took the rat for a walk came back fed the amoeba made some coffee wrote a passionate love letter to shirley williams enclosing a small dead animal then thought i’m bored think I’ll go to london ‘cos london’s more interesting than harlow and i might be able to pick up some buck’s fizz bootlegs or the latest jean-paul sartre dub lp got the bus ten minutes late got the train twenty minutes late train was delayed for two hours due to dead liberals on the line got to london liverpool street went down the tube stepping on unsuspecting commuters all the way up to the ticket booth single to covent garden please sure mate that’ll be five pound fifty what do you mean five pound fifty it was only twenty pence yesterday i’m not paying five pound fifty to go to covent garden from liverpool street sorry mate i know it was only twenty pence yesterday but a ninety seven year old deaf geriatric ostrich-minded extremely rich archaic obsolete semi-senile reactionary friedman-worshipping member of an outdated unnecessary and entirely superfluous elitist and oligarchic institution who never uses the tube anyway ‘cos he’s got a fucking chauffeur-driven limousine woke up with a headache in the middle of last night and decided to increase london transport fares by two thousand percent and got four of his senile friends to agree with him – posthumously – and so we’ve had to put the fares up that’s called freedom democracy the rule of law and defending the british way of life that’ll be five pound fifty please…
BOLLOCKS TO THAT i said and after a short pregnant pause all the people in the queue plucked up courage and said BOLLOCKS TO THAT and all the pinstripe-and-soda brigade coming down the stairs said BOLLOCKS TO THAT and all the other people at liverpool street underground and at the bus stops said BOLLOCKS TO THAT apart from the nice polite human league and haircut one hundred fans who thought it was rude to say BOLLOCKS but when it was revealed to them that in the famous sex pistols LP cover trial of 1977 a high court judge had ruled that BOLLOCKS was not an obscene word then they too said BOLLOCKS TO THAT and soon the entire length and breadth of the london transport network was full of people saying BOLLOCKS TO THAT and refusing to pay the increased fares and when finally a large crowd of completely sober and totally moderate forty nine year old lloyds underwriters called Brian started going up to yer average law lord in the street saying BOLLOCKS TO THAT and hitting him over the head with a large mallet then the powers that be decided to abandon the fares increase in the interest of public safely then everything went back to normal but it made me wonder so i’m forming a mass revolutionary party and our slogan manifesto and programme is going to be BOLLOCKS TO THAT!
Whole audiences joined in. Punks and skins jumped up on stage and did backing vocals. But the country was in the iron grip of Thatcherism, and so, of course, the views of five reactionary Law Lords counted more than those of millions of Londoners. The fares stayed up. Bollocks to that.
I travelled up and down the country researching my piece on new town life for the NME, centred of course around the Harlow music scene, but also featuring Corby, Stevenage and Livingston in Scotland: it received a healthy double page spread in the paper. The money I earned from this, plus my first reasonably paid gigs, enabled me to sign off the dole. It was a very proud day when I phoned my mum in New Zealand to tell her this, along with the fact that my first record with Swells, ‘Rough Raw and Ranting’ had just been released: not long afterwards, recovering well and – wonderful news – with the all clear from the doctors, she came back home, and I went back to Southwick to see her.
Then came one of the happiest moments of my life.
I grew up by the sea, and ever since I was a small child, I’ve loved to go fishing: at many ‘secret’ spots round our local area but mostly off the Southwick Arm of Shoreham Harbour. I spend most of my time surrounded by people and really enjoy it, but sometimes it’s great to get away, and some of my best poems and songs have come to me gazing out across the sea, listening to music on the radio, waiting for an unsuspecting flounder or bass to chomp the red ragworm on the end of my hook.
Most species of fish feed best at night, and therefore one of my constant companions through the Seventies and Eighties on the Southwick Arm was the John Peel Show on Radio One. Standing there, gazing across the sea at the lights of Brighton in the distance, thinking my own thoughts and taking in whatever eclectic mixture the great man decided to feed through my radio.
So it was that night in March 1982. I was miles away, half listening to Peelie. A record came to an end. I heard him talking. ‘I’m sure some of you read the feature on new towns in the NME recently’ he said. My ears pricked up. ‘Now for something from the man who wrote it. Here’s Attila the Stockbroker.’
I nearly dropped my rod in the sea.
I stood on the harbour arm, transfixed, trembling in disbelief, while John Peel played ‘Russians in the DHSS’ from our EP. I felt like I’d just scored the winning goal for Brighton in the Cup Final. A few minutes later, before I’d really taken it in, he played ‘A Bang & A Wimpy.’ I felt like I’d just scored the winning goal for us in the European Cup Final. Sitting here, writing this, that feeling has come back. It’s a feeling I can’t describe. A feeling that, literally, thousands of musicians and writers have had over the years.
That first play on the John Peel Show. The stuff of dreams.
Nobody, anywhere in the history of UK popular culture, has done so much for people trying to realise their ambitions and get their words and music across to the world. He died too young, at the height of his powers.
On behalf of us all -
Thanks Peelie.