No thunderclaps or anything like that to start off Orwell’s portentious year: for me just a hangover on New Year’s Day and then some university gigs in the North West with, sandwiched in between, my first appearance at Sandy Gort’s groundbreaking ‘Stand and Deliver’ club in Ashton Under Lyne.

Sandy, christened ‘Slimy Git’ by lead singer Muttley, was the manager of Macclesfield’s infamous Macc Lads when I had discovered their original demo tape lying around in the Sounds office a couple of years previously and, thinking it hilarious, gave them their first national media publicity. I don’t know if I can be credited with discovering the Macc Lads, or if I should be proud of it if I was! They were, erm, a very rude pastiche of the drunk, sexist Northern male: their first album, for instance, was called ‘Beer & Sex & Chips ‘n’ Gravy’.

They could be very clever and very funny – but, like the kids at my gig in Barton Hill Youth Centre, some of their audience took what they were singing at face value. I don’t think Muttley & Co handled it all that well, to be honest. But myself and my friends had some good times in Macc in the early days, my late, great friend Roy Chuter ‘starred’ in one of their videos and another late friend, Neil Dickinson aka Neil Axminster, supported them many times with his band All Over The Carpet and then became their road manager for years.

‘Stand and Deliver’ was a great performance space, doing exactly what it should – encouraging new, young writer/performers to take the stage. Soon it would be taken over by young singer/songwriter Darren Poyzer and award-winning playwright Kevin Fegan and between 1986 and 1990 it helped launch the careers of Manchester-based artists like Steve Coogan, Caroline Aherne, Henry Normal and more, playing the same kind of role in the Manchester area subculture as the New Variety circuit did in London.

I went up to Newcastle at the beginning of Feb to do a spot on seminal indie show ‘The Tube’ for Tyne Tees TV – ‘Nigel Wants To Go To C&A’s’, as mentioned earlier - and gigged at Sheffield Poly and Swindon Town Hall, then at Balliol College Oxford, alma mater of my poetic mentor Hilaire Belloc. Then to the opposite end of the class divide: a return to the North East and the legendary Bunker in Sunderland, home of Red London and their close mates Red Alert. Darlington Arts Centre, Teeside Poly, Peterlee Musicians’ Collective – a fine bunch, I’d be back there sooner than I’d have expected - Durham Uni, Salford Uni. This South Coast poet was establishing firm links with the punks and activists in the mining communities of the North East, bonds which would be strengthened still further during the coming months and, as you’ll hear, endure to this day. And I went to see John Cale at the Lyceum in London, where he was recording a live album. I didn’t ask to be the support act though.

Then I got a call from David Fielder at huge publishing house George Allen & Unwin, asking if Swells and I, as leaders of the new ranting poetry movement, were interested in doing a book for them. Yes please, I said, on both our behalves, and went for a meeting with him. Swells didn’t come: by this time he had new ideas up his sleeve.

I know it sounds incredible given that he exuded confidence and came on like a high decibel whirlwind on amphetamines, but Swells suffered from terrible stage fright. Beneath the brash exterior was a man who would be throwing up in the toilet before going on to do his set, even when he was playing to ten stoned hippies and a dog. So he’d never been that keen on my all-the-gigs-you-can-get approach. What he really wanted to be was a writer. A journalist. For the New Musical Express. And the way he went about it was typical Swells…

I guess he must have worked out that there weren’t that many female writers on the NME at that time, and that might be his foot in the door. The basic flaw in that idea - that he was male - didn’t bother him one bit. He got Bradford poet Joolz to dress him up in drag (as convincingly as a nearly six foot skinhead poet from Bradford CAN be dressed up in drag) and got a few photos taken. Then he did a live review of one of his mates’ bands and sent it into the paper, with a photo, under the byline ‘Susan Williams’.

It was published. So was his/her next piece, and the next. The NME wanted him/her (her, as far as they were concerned) to go down to London from Bradford for a meeting.

‘What am I going to do, John?’

‘I don’t know, Swells. Practise your drag act, wrap some rubber bands round your testicles and hope for the best? Your problem, not mine. I’d come clean. If they like the stuff, they’re not going to ditch you ‘cos you’ve been pretending to be a woman!’

Soon he did own up: because he was a brilliant writer, of course they forgave him and he could become what he became: the legendary rock-and-roll-and-sport-and-fashion-and-anything-else-he-could-wind-people-up-about Steven Wells, insane, charming, ranting, supremely literate hack god from the planet BLEAAAURGH!!!!!. But this meant that by 1984, although still gigging as Seething Wells, he was going a bit lukewarm on the whole ranting poetry thing and left all the negotiation for our book to me. Which was no problem of course, but would become one when I needed him to get his half of it together…

I got in touch with Porky, who had already contributed some wonderful cartoons for the first issue of my fanzine Tirana Thrash (‘The ranting poetry fanzine with the special Albanian bias’) and asked him to illustrate my poems for the book. I set myself the task of writing some new ones to go in it, to complement the best of the ones I’d written so far. Publication was scheduled for a few months’ time.

Now it was time to think about recording my second album for Cherry Red. Despite the crap reviews ‘Ranting At The Nation’ had sold several thousand copies and they were keen to get another one out: problem was I didn’t have anywhere near enough new poems to do another predominantly spoken word album. But I did have one really good new song, ‘Sawdust and Empire’, and I had an idea in my head about a ‘new folk revival’ before it was fashionable in the press. Let’s do a folk album, I thought. Let’s REALLY confuse all these people who think I’m a one-dimensional, loud, rude ranter. I started to try and write some good new folky songs, and I didn’t get very far.

And then the miners went on strike.

 

Trouble had been brewing for some time. Thatcher wanted revenge for the way the miners had beaten the Tory government of Edward Heath in 1972 and 1974, and she knew that if she could defeat the miners then the door was open for her to smash the trade union movement once and for all. People on the Left from all walks of life realised exactly the same thing, which meant that the stakes were incredibly high. The miners would need our help, and we would do all we could to support them.

After Coal Board chairman and Thatcher appointee Ian McGregor (who, as head of British Steel, had halved the workforce in two years in the name of ‘profitability’) announced the closure of 20 pits on 6 March 1984, miners walked out at one threatened pit after another. On the 12th Arthur Scargill, president of the NUM, declared a national strike. I can remember him telling the media that the government had a secret strategy to close over 70 pits: they denied this categorically, claimed that Scargill was scaremongering, and said there were no plans to close any others than the ones already announced.

But Scargill was absolutely right. Cabinet papers released under the 30 year rule in 2014 clearly document that McGregor’s intention was precisely that: he deceived the NUM and the Thatcher government colluded with him. Furthermore, they had prepared for a long drawn out strike by stockpiling coal, converting some power stations to burn heavy fuel oil and recruiting fleets of road hauliers to transport coal in case railwaymen went on strike in solidarity with the miners. This was also secretly done and not common knowledge at the time.

I’m not writing a book on the miners’ strike: there have been many written by people infinitely more qualified to do so than I. I’m not sure the decision not to call a national ballot before announcing the strike was the right one, because Scargill would have won it easily and not only would the Nottinghamshire miners, many of whom worked through the strike having been given better bonuses and conditions by the Tories in a classic ‘divide and rule’ strategy, have had their justification for doing so taken away, but the Tory press would have had one less stick to beat the strikers with.

Looking back, the politicised brutality of the police as Thatcher’s private army, the measures already taken to lessen the effects of the strike on production and the economy and the unbelievably biased reporting in the mainstream media meant that the odds the miners were faced with were unbelievable. But at the time they, and we their supporters, thought they could win: after all they already had in 1972 and 74…

Right from the start people I knew were organising town centre collections and leafleting campaigns: I’d sometimes do an impromptu performance at these, and our efforts met with a very mixed reaction from the public. Opinions on the street were divided, with working class opinion being ferociously targeted by Thatcher’s friend Rupert Murdoch’s craven toady ‘journalists’ in The Sun to considerable effect. Miners were ‘violent’, but never the police, despite the well documented assaults on mining communities by out of control thugs in uniform. Pits were ‘uneconomic’ even though there were years’ worth of coal left in them and the foreign pits in ‘competition’ got vastly bigger state subsidies. Cynical, one-sided propaganda.

Despite this, many people from outside the mining areas supported the strikers and organised benefits, in addition to those held at the heart of the communities themselves, and of course, when asked, I played for them. Thatcher famously described us as ‘The Enemy Within’ and we wore badges and stickers declaring that with pride: she was our enemy, the enemy of community, of solidarity, of trust, of everything that made Britain a decent place to live.

In my diaries of the period I see ‘Miners’ Benefit’ next to about 20 gigs during the strike, and that’s not counting the impromptu street performances. Memorable ones included Swindon with the Neurotics and local heroes Charred Hearts (the poster for that gig is on our kitchen wall to this day) and Peterlee and Sunderland again, the very heart of the embattled mining community: I did a great gig with local band Last Rough Cause at the King’s Head in nearby Ferryhill too. Memorable in a different way was one in Barnsley, where I was told very firmly ‘we don’t use language like that in front of the ladies’ and went down like a lead balloon. All kinds of leftist and gay activists and ‘alternative’ performers ended up visiting and performing in mining villages for the first time, and both sides had their eyes opened to a different world: attitudes were changed forever, as the excellent film ‘Pride’ depicts very well.

But, despite a truly heroic struggle against unbelievable odds, the strike was lost. I can still remember the banners flying as the miners marched proudly and defiantly back to work, but the reality was a bitter defeat which would have huge repercussions for the trade union movement as a whole, and there is no getting away from that. The capitalist state had thrown everything it had at the most militant section of the working class, and it had won.

For me, personally, the links forged at that time with certain mining areas remain strong to this day. I was incredibly proud to be invited to entertain Durham Miners’ Association at Easington Colliery Club on the day of Thatcher’s funeral – we had a party!

And last year, 2014, I received a whole swathe of invitations to events commemorating the 30th anniversary of the strike. A March gig in Chesterfield with the great radical folk singer Dick Gaughan to mark the start of the strike in Derbyshire: then in June I compered the Orgreave Mass Picnic near Sheffield, anniversary of the legendary mass picket and the planned brutalisation of the miners by Thatcher’s private army of police thugs. Then came a gig in London for the Orgreave Peace & Justice Campaign and, in July, Davey Hopper, General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, invited me to be after dinner speaker at the Friday night meal before their annual Gala.

It was an honour and a privilege to be involved, but I so wish they were commemorating a glorious victory. If they had won, the society we live in today, where greedy bankers bailed out by the taxpayer flaunt their wealth in our faces while the poor and sick are demonised and victimised, would be so, so very different. The defeat of the miners was a tragedy for decent, caring people everywhere. At the beginning of the year I wrote this poem, dedicated to the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

NEVER FORGET

 

I remember my stepfather moaning

In the first strike in ’72

‘Miners holding the country to ransom…’

I was fourteen. I thought about you.

You worked underground, often in danger.

Hewed the coal we depended upon.

He earned more checking tax forms in Brighton.

I knew then just whose side I was on.

I remember Kent pickets at Shoreham

When our port bosses shipped in scab coal.

By the time they were back twelve years later

A new anger burned deep in my soul.

You’d won once, but this time would be harder

For your foe was no bumbling Heath.

It was Thatcher, revenge her agenda.

A class warrior, armed to the teeth.

 

You were miners on strike for your future:

For your pits, your communities, ways.

We were punks, poets, anarchists, lesbians.

Theatre groups, Rastafarians, gays.

Different worlds in a rainbow alliance

Fired up and determined to win.

And Thatcher lumped us all together:

Punk or miner. The enemy within.

 

As a poet, I crisscrossed the country

From Durham to Yorkshire to Kent

Doing benefits, arguing, learning.

Raising funds that were so quickly spent.

Playing a tiny role in that great battle

That you fought so hard and to the last.

A battle so proudly remembered

Now that thirty long years have passed.

 

I remember those pictures from Orgreave.

Police faces contorted with hate.

The communities brutalised, shattered

By the raw, naked power of the state.

If it took guns and tanks to defeat you

She’d have used guns and tanks on you too.

The veneer of democracy shattered.

The hired thugs of the privileged few.

 

After Orgreave came Wapping, then Hillsborough.

With the press and police on her side

Thatcher smiled as the printers were beaten

And those ninety six football fans died.

She had a quite open agenda

Summed up well when she famously said

That there’s no such a thing as society.

Don’t blame us for being pleased that she’s dead.

 

Now the bankers destroy the economy

And the poor and the sick get the blame

And our once proud and strong labour movement

Is shackled, and timid, and tame

But this poet will always remember

All the brave men and women I met

We will carry on fighting for justice –

And we’ll never, no never, forget.

In between trying to do my tiny bit in the strike campaign I was still gigging all over the place, of course, still trying to write songs for my second album and still coming up with more poems for the book which Unwins had scheduled for publication later in the year. The first of many, many great gigs held on a Sunday lunchtime at the Key Theatre in Peterborough, organised by Anne Johnson: a home town show at the wonderful Harlow Square, then still called Square One: a gig in my other home town, more or less, at Sussex University. Leicester Uni, Northampton Durngate Centre, Basildon Roundhouse. I did two Oxford balls in quick succession – that felt weird in the middle of the miners’ strike – and then, based at Joy’s, went into the nearby Rendezvous Studios in Sydenham to record the album which I knew already would be entitled ‘Sawdust and Empire’. With some misgivings.

I had the basic plan worked out: I’d record the songs on mandola, add some fiddle and the odd recorder and then bring in RedRuth and Lynne to add flute and melodeon. So far so good: problem was that deep down I wasn’t sure I had the songs to begin with. The title track seemed so much better than anything else I’d prepared for the album. A couple of thousand people at least ended up buying it, many have told me they really enjoy it, which is brilliant, and at the time I was pleased: now I’m not so sure.

Out of the twelve tracks on it I’d actually written five entirely by myself: the title track, the medieval instrumental ‘March of the Levellers’ (revisited years later with my band Barnstormer) ‘Alone in the Disco’, about a horrible fire in a disco in Ireland which I’d read about, a new, folkier version of ‘Holiday In Albania’ which had already been on ‘Ranting At The Nation’ and ‘Factory Gods’ which was years old and had been on my first cassette ‘Phasing Out Capitalism’. Of the others, ‘Bodicea Uber Alles’ was a rewrite of the Dead Kennedys, ‘Nigel’s Revenge’ was a rewrite of ‘Jilted John’, ‘World War Three’ was a musical adaptation of a Roger McGough poem which had also been on ‘Phasing Out Capitalism’ and ‘Spare A Thought’, ‘Recession’ and ‘Midas The Grand’ were all old English Disease songs from my early Kent University days, written by myself and Tony Stevens. There was a hint of ‘the record company wants an album now, I’ll give them what they want instead of telling them to wait until I’ve written enough good new material’ about the whole thing.

But I had a good time in the studio with excellent engineer Gez Prior, layering fiddle tracks and recorder parts on top of each other. Hours and hours of concentrated work, and I learned loads about the recording process. Then I got Ruth and Lynne in to do their bits and by the end was happy enough with the result – and over the moon with the title track. Jim Phelan at Cherry Red did a great picture of myself, Ruth and Lynne for the cover and another fine, manic one of me for the inner sleeve, I hand-wrote the lyrics myself and got Porky to do a tongue in cheek ‘coat of arms’ for the back cover. By the end of May the album was ready to go into production: not on Cherry Red Records, but on their punk sister label, Anagram. Mike Alway at Cherry Red had never really worked out where I fitted in his scheme of things, and it seemed logical to send me over to the punk side of the office. I was soon to find out that the punk side of the office was the one nearest the door…

Two asides at this point. One: I must have heard the music of Norwegian pop monsters/icons A-Ha before nearly anyone else in the UK. Keyboard player Magne was doing demos for the (at the time unknown) band, not long arrived in Britain, at Rendezvous while I was recording my album and he’d be finishing as I started every day. We’d occasionally share a cup of tea. Not my sort of thing, but he seemed a nice bloke. Two: I’ve just asked people on my Facebook page what they think of the album and I have loads of 10/10s, 9s and nothing worse than an 8. Ok, they are the converted, but maybe I’m worrying myself unnecessarily here. It’s just that once I formed my band Barnstormer in 1994, everything fell so wonderfully into place musically that I wish I had done it years earlier…

First gig of the summer was the GLC ‘Jobs for a Change’ Festival at Jubilee Gardens in London’s South Bank: a good day out marred by a bonehead attack on The Redskins and The Hank Wangford Band which proved that, although the fascists were less powerful in the subculture than they had been earlier in the 80s, they most certainly had not gone away. Then, after a swathe of early summer gigs, I did the Stonehenge Free Festival, which came and went in a blur of hippies, Crass punks and beer, and then went for a well deserved holiday in Cornwall. Just me and my fishing rods. I love the life I lead, but just occasionally it’s great to get away from it all.

By this time I was going from strength to strength as a live performer, brimming with confidence and feeling absolutely at the top of my game. I’d obviously be touring to promote the album when it came out in the autumn, and looked to the agency to provide the majority of the gigs. But, gradually, I could sense ‘industry’ attitudes towards me changing, not just in the music press, who barely had a good word to say about me now, but also at Cherry Red and the people who were responsible for booking my shows. I guess the one led to the other: if I was being slagged off or ignored in the press, so influential at the time, I wasn’t such a good proposition for record company or agent. I was about to learn a stark lesson, and quickly.

I’d always booked a healthy percentage of my gigs myself: in those days long before the internet I gave my phone number to anyone interested and determinedly followed up any cards or phone numbers slipped into my hand by people who had enjoyed a show and wanted to organise something for me. But the biggest and best-paid shows, mostly in universities, inevitably came via the agency. I had a new agent now, who had started off doing a pretty good job, but my late summer 1984 I was getting a bit worried.

My album was due out in the autumn and the expected slab of uni gigs and other high profile events wasn’t materialising: every time I phoned reassuring noises were made, but although I was booking shows myself, very little was forthcoming from the agent. I set up a meeting.

‘Problem is, John, there isn’t the same level of demand that there was a year or so ago. Things are moving on now, people are booking different acts.’

‘But I can’t see a problem: I’m getting great crowds at gigs, and quite a lot of offers myself…’

‘Well, sorry, but that’s how it is from where I’m looking. Maybe best if you organise your gigs yourself now or find another agent, if that’s how you see it. I’ll still book you in when people ask for you, of course, you know that.’

In the nicest possible way: your fifteen minutes are up, mate, I’ve got other, more hip fish to fry now. Just as my second album was about to be released! The fact that I was far, far better as a live performer now than I was two years ago, and had better material, had nothing to do with it: suddenly I was becoming ‘last year’s thing’. To use my favourite analogy, it was like putting a first-year apprentice carpenter on the front of the national trade magazine and saying he was the best carpenter around, then, when he had finished his apprenticeship and was actually really good at his job, telling him to give up and become a plumber. It’s happened to countless talented artists who have given up, chucked it in, dreams shattered, spirits broken. It wouldn’t happen in any other walk of life, that’s for sure. It’s ridiculous.

Fashion. What a way to run popular culture!

Fortunately, I have enough self-belief to run an army, have always been a good, disciplined organiser and instinctively knew that as long as I took control of everything quickly and worked hard I would be OK. (And one advantage of being my own booking agent would be that I could make a determined effort to co-ordinate gigs in different towns with Brighton & Hove Albion away matches, something I have developed into a fine art over the years!) Although the press, and now the agency, were writing me off, John Peel - and fellow Radio One DJ Janice Long, who was also to give me a session soon - were still very much onside, I was developing a really good live performance network and thousands of people were enjoying my stuff. I contacted everyone I could think of and booked as many gigs as I could for a ‘Sawdust and Empire’ tour to start in the autumn, in addition to the miners’ benefits I was already committed to.

The album was released: NME and Melody Maker ignored it completely and, in Sounds, Garry Johnson did the same kind of hatchet job on it as Don Watson had on my first album. Unconnected to that, I stopped writing for Sounds: the exact opposite of Swells, I’d had enough of music journalism and wanted to concentrate 100% on being a writer/performer. ‘Sawdust and Empire’ did get a great review in ‘Folk Roots’: Ian Anderson got what I was going on about, even though I’m still not absolutely sure I did myself! Radio One, and not just Peel, played the title track a few times, all six minutes of it: I was really pleased about that, and the feedback was really good. My good mates Red London from Sunderland did a fine cover of it.

I went off on tour. Telford, Oakengates Theatre, 31 August, 1984. Nice place, good crowd. Then, in the middle of my gig, a bloke in the audience shouts ‘I’ve got some shit!’ Fine, I say, but I don’t smoke. ‘NO! I’VE GOT SOME SHIT!’ At which point he whips out a carrier bag full of his own faeces, smears it on himself, then starts on the people round him. I’ve seen some trouble at gigs, but no bunch of Nazi boneheads ever scattered an audience like that bloke did. Fortunately the venue security had hearts of oak and stomachs of iron: they pulled him out and the gig carried on. If anyone ever says ‘I had a really shit gig last night’ I say ‘I bet you I had a shittier one in Telford once’ and tell them that story.

Sudbury Quay Theatre, Royal Northern College of Music, Luton Free Rockfest, miners’ benefits in Madeley and Swindon, Birmingham Uni, Harlow Playhouse – I think that was a miners’ benefit as well – Loughborough Uni, Birmingham Springfield Hotel. And then off to Brussels with Mike, Tim, Bomber and Jim to indulge our passion for Belgian beer and football and, indulging my silly Albania obsession, to cheer their no-hope national team on in a World Cup qualifying match.

Belgium v Albania, Heysel Stadium, 17 October 1984. The night when a couple of days abroad with good mates for some fine beer, a laugh and a silly, one sided football match where we’d be shouting ridiculous made-up slogans for the Stalinist underdogs (and I’d be waving my little picture of Comrade Enver Hoxha on a stick) turned into a premonition of hell…

We got well hammered in some of my old haunts in the city centre, then got the tram to the Heysel Stadium and rolled into the away end. Needing a bit of support to make staying upright easier after all that Delirium Tremens, I flopped onto one of the crash barriers. It promptly gave way and pitched me headlong down the terrace.

I wasn’t hurt, but we were all shocked. We looked around: the stadium was in a dreadful state. Crumbling terracing, weeds growing in the cracks, a couple more of the crash barriers near us obviously unfit for purpose, gaps in the stands where seats should be. ‘If a big game’s played here, this place could be a bloody death trap!’ we said to each other, utterly shocked.

Eight months later, on May 29, 1985, a wall would collapse at the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, killing 39 Juve fans and injuring 600. The disaster was triggered by crowd disorder sparked by bad ticketing arrangements - but it seems obvious to me that that, if the stadium had been properly maintained, far fewer people, if any, would have been killed or injured. The disaster led to an indefinite ban on English clubs from all European club competitions.

Of course, on the evening that we were there, there was no hint of such carnage. Given the utterly closed nature of Albanian society back then, the only ‘away fans’ apart from us were, as far as we could tell, a few Belgians of Albanian descent. The reason we could tell that was that they kept up a humourous piss take of the well-known Belgian French/Flemish linguistic divide throughout the game, shouting ‘Belgique! Belgie!’ in a vaguely disparaging fashion. The result? Belgium won 3-1. Improbably, Albania did equalise, though, leading to (careful) leaping about among our little group…

I am a firm supporter of safe standing at football, always have been, and am very angry that the Thatcher-led agenda following Heysel and the subsequent awful Hillsborough disaster led to the imposition of all-seater stadia and all kinds of other ludicrous restrictions on fan culture in the UK.

These disasters were triggered by bad stadium maintenance and equally poor crowd control – enhanced in the case of Hillsborough, of course, by cover-ups, police lies and calumnies against Liverpool fans in the Sun ‘newspaper’ after the event, seized upon by the biased and anti-football Taylor Report. Thatcher loathed football fans, as she did any aspect of working class culture, and took any opportunity she could to paint us as a bunch of semi-literate, violent morons. Of course, there are a few of those amongst our ranks, but you can find similar in any town centre on a Saturday night.

Now that the truth about Hillsborough has been revealed, the Taylor Report spawned by it should be torn up and safe standing should return to the UK, thus ending the silly situation where thousands of fans stand in all seater-stadia every week – I know I do – and the authorities turn a blind eye to it. Overpriced, sanitised and torn to bits by greedy moneymen and ludicrously overpaid players, English football needs a massive overhaul. I know some people won’t agree with that, but that’s what I think. And that isn’t in any way to play down the awful tragedies which took place: I’ll never forget what I saw at the Heysel Stadium that night.

 

I thought it would be a good idea to put out some of my most recent poems on a 12 inch single to run alongside the folk album: Cherry Red agreed and the ‘Radio Rap’ EP was the result. Side One was a rant about the lobotomised nature of Radio One daytime radio broadcasting and playlists recorded over some proto-disco from producer Richie: Side Two a live recording of some of my new poems. Because I was slagging off Radio One and it had loads of rude words in it needless to say they didn’t play it, although it did get on the instore playlist for the Virgin Megastore chain, which was quite funny.

And Steve Drewett, RedRuth and I recorded ‘The Livingstone Rap’ in praise of the soon-to-be-abolished GLC leader, calling ourselves The Law Lords International (a reference to the Lords’ decision to declare Ken’s cheap fares policy illegal). ‘Yeah he’s the guy with the funky eye/He’s the socialist with the mocialist!/Yeah he is loved by everyone/Everyone except The Sun!’ Cherry Red put it out on a new subsidiary label: Cherry Red Ken Records.

You had to be there, honestly. The BBC banned it as ‘too political’ and it sank like a very heavy stone with a lead weight attached to it.

Back to the ‘Sawdust and Empire’ tour and another 25 or so gigs before the end of the year, many miners’ benefits of course, some with the Newtown Neurotics whose fine first album ‘Beggars Can Be Choosers’ (featuring Swells, Little Brother and myself ranting on the intro) had been out for a year now and had established them as a real force on the scene. I organised a special ranting poetry gig at my old stomping ground, Square One in Harlow, featuring Swells, Little Brother and Little Dave, as a try-out for a big event I was planning early the following year. In December I made yet another return to Holland, plus a one-off gig in Brussels at a poetry club where I told them about the state of the national stadium. But no-one took any notice. They weren’t interested in football.

 

1985 began with another slew of miners’ benefits. The strike was now in its second year, things were getting really hard and people were rallying round as much as we could: in early February I was back up in the North East in Peterlee and Sunderland. Just before that I’d done one at Camden Dance Centre in London with the Neurotics, David Eggleton the Mad Kiwi Ranter, freshly arrived from New Zealand to join our gang, and a new band, formed six months earlier, called The Men They Couldn’t Hang. I remember them performing semi-acoustically without a drummer: I don’t think the venue had a stage. I thought they were great - and they are now one of my favourite bands of all time.

I’ve done countless gigs with them, organised many more including at my Glastonwick Festival and our Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham, been backed by them on my poem ‘The Iron Man Of Rap’ which ended up as the B-side of their single ‘A Map Of Morocco’ and played fiddle in their spin-off band Liberty Cage. Their version of Eric Bogle’s ‘Green Fields Of France’ was so utterly brilliant that it inspired me to cover it myself on my third album: their song ‘Ghosts of Cable Street’ rightly became one of the anthems of the modern anti-fascist movement. ‘The Colours’, main writer Paul Simmonds’ unbelievable song about the 1797 naval mutiny at the Nore, will be played at my funeral. Not for a long time yet, I hope, but it will. They celebrated their 30th anniversary with a gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on April 19, 2014 and I was there with bells on. Thanks for thirty years of great music and good memories!

By now, the poetry book which Unwin and Allen were due to publish soon should have been completed. My half was finished – Porky had done a fantastic job with the cartoons and I’d written some new poems which I was very pleased with - but Swells was now gallivanting around with pop personalities as Steven Wells, hip young NME thing, and was simply not getting his act together: neither, if I recall, was his chosen illustrator Jon Langford, Leeds punk/pop/art genius and the man behind The Mekons and The Three Johns. I prodded and prodded: David Fielder at Unwins got justifiably irritated at the delay. I did, however, drag Swells away from pop hackery long enough to be one of the headline acts at the most ambitious ranting poetry event I’d ever put together, indeed the biggest gig I’d ever promoted in my life: The Ranters’ Cup Final at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London on Sunday Feb 17 1985.

I’d got the idea from Michael Horovitz and his ‘Poetry Olympics’ series and it was the fact that he had put events on at the Theatre Royal in Stratford which led me to approach them. They were very supportive and I got busy with the line-up: the gig would feature just about everyone who was active in ranting verse up until that point, plus as guest of honour, Mersey beat poet Brian Patten, with whom I had also shared an inadvertent double bed after a gig and had counted as an honorary ranter ever since!

Joolz, flame-haired poet and storyteller from Bradford: Benjamin Zephaniah: Seething Wells: Brian Patten: Little Brother: Porky the Poet: David Eggleton (aka The Mad Kiwi Ranter) all the way from Auckland, New Zealand: Cor Gout from Holland: Nick Toczek from Bradford: Dino the Frog from Sheffield: The Thin Man from Leicester: Richard Kool Knotes, fanzine writer and poet from London: Sandy Gort and Ginger John from Manchester: Belinda Blanchard and Pat Condell from London: Peter Campbell from Crawley: Swift Nick from Hull and Little Dave from Harlow. Compere Attila the Stockbroker, armed with water pistol – a jet for any poet who exceeded their allotted ten minutes. None did. Half time entertainment from The Newtown Neurotics.

And I had had another idea as well: we’d always joked about having enough ranters to start our own football team, so given that I had called the event ‘The Ranters’ Cup Final’ it seemed appropriate to organise a pre-gig match. I put the word around and the staff of cult music magazine ‘Jamming!’ accepted our challenge.

The big match was to take place on one of the pitches at Hackney Marshes and our motley crew assembled there. We had a genuine eleven-man team of ranting poets, most of whom didn’t play football regularly, some hardly ever, some never - but it was a laugh and we were all up for it. I knew that we had two really, really good players in Cor Gout and Swift Nick, and thought that we could at least make some kind of opposition for a scratch team from a little music magazine…

Unbeknown to me, however, Jamming! had outsourced the match. The sleek, professional-looking bunch at the other end of the pitch certainly didn’t look like your average 80s beer, chips and fags-guzzling music journos, and they weren’t. They were Mike Peters from the Alarm, who I swear could have played professionally if he had wanted to, plus assorted band roadies and other ringers, and they looked as though they played every week, which they probably did.

I can still remember Swift Nick and Cor, all six foot three or so of him, repelling wave after wave of attacks more or less single handed while the rest of us floundered around in the mud like pissed hippos. And I remember Dino, bless him, playing the whole game in his normal gear – leather jacket, drainpipes, huge pair of DMs - and then getting in the shower afterwards fully clothed. I have no idea how he got dry. Dino, aka Shaun Meadows, was a lovely guy and a friend for nearly 30 years: after a long battle with mental and physical problems he passed away around New Year 2012. I spoke at his funeral, telling stories about a young ranting poet most of his many friends never knew: I will never forget you, Dino, nor your circumcision aged about 45 which you described to me in gory detail. We lost the match 8-0, by the way. Without Cor and Nick in the side, I think the result would have eclipsed Arbroath v Bon Accord’s famous record in 1885 – that finished 36-0.

Unlike the game, the gig was a huge victory for ranting verse. We weren’t fashionable in the music press any more, but we filled the theatre and had a great, great night. I vowed we’d have a ‘Ranters’ Cup Final Replay’ the following year, and we did.

By this time my ranting poetry fanzine ‘Tirana Thrash’ was at the height of its operational powers. It ran for three issues in all: the cover for the first one was drawn by northerner Ranting Ritchie, now citizen of Brixton, while he was incarcerated in Northallerton Youth Custody Centre (I had many exchanges of letters with him). Porky did the other two covers and loads of illustrations in all three, and all those featured in the live events had poems printed in the fanzine, along with any poems sent to me by post I thought worthy of inclusion.

There was an awful lot of extremely silly stuff about Albania in each edition as well. Ludicrous Albanian football ‘reports’, ridiculous made-up Albanian recipes, unconsciously surreal Albanian cartoons I’d nicked from Stalinist publications, nonsense ‘travel guides’. I did a limited edition 500 copies of each one and sold them at gigs: I have one copy of each left now, and they go for many times the cover price on Ebay. Latterly, they caused quite a stir and a fair amount of interest in Albania itself and were the centrepiece of an exhibition and performance in Tirana in which I took part in May 2012. More on that one later…

A final miners’ benefit in February, in Bungay near Ipswich, and then on 3 March the strike was over. Of course, the support continued, because so many families were in desperate hardship at the end of it all. As I’ve already said, a bitter, bitter blow.

The Neurotics (at this point still officially called Newtown Neurotics, but everyone shortened the name to The Neurotics, and it wouldn’t be long before they dropped the ‘Newtown’) were, as I’ve said, now very much a headline act in their own right. It was an honour for me to go out as a double-headliner with my great mates Steve, Simon and Colin and sometimes to support them in places where they had picked up a following and I had not.

Thus alongside loads of solo gigs all over the place I ended up supporting them that Spring in Paris (sadly France has always been a closed book to me gig-wise) and just before that we travelled over to Jersey for a fantastic double-header gig at the Hawaiian club in Portelet Bay which is apparently, still talked about today. I’ve never been back to Jersey, though I play in Guernsey regularly: the last time was in late 2013 when I supported Norman Watt-Roy and his band – including the legendary Wilko Johnson, who was his normal blistering guitar self despite his well-documented battle with pancreatic cancer. ‘The doctors told me I’d be dead by now, mate’ he said… and against the odds it seems he has now recovered. Good on you Wilko!

Talking of that awful disease: my lovely mum, now three years officially in the clear, was by mid-1985 organising a counselling group in Southwick for cancer stricken people who needed support from others who understood what they were going through, and she needed funds. On May 18, with support from Porky the Poet, I did a fundraiser for her at Manor Hall, my old primary school in Southwick, nearly twenty years after my first gig there, aged nine. It was a very emotional night.

And I was STILL pestering Swells to get the material for his half of our book over to Allen & Unwin: finally he did it. He came up with far less stuff than I’d provided, because he wasn’t writing much poetry any more, but all his best ones were there alongside some great illustrations from Jon Langford. Into production it went: publication date September 30. Book title: ‘The Rising Sons of Ranting Verse’. My half (actually about 65%), title chosen by me with homage to Mr Belloc: ‘Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters.’ Swells’ half, title chosen by Unwins because Swells couldn’t be bothered to come up with one of his own: ‘Rants.’ My cover: Porky’s illustration of me, in pinstriped suit and bowler hat, carrying a machine gun and a bomb in front of a line of identikit businessmen commuter types. Swells’ half: a masked terrorist with a sawn off shotgun menacing a tied up hippy beat poet with the quote ‘Buy this book or the poet gets it!’ Illustrations great, material our best stuff: I was well happy.

A summer of gigs, including another long stint in Holland and Belgium and a return to Glastonbury, a Radio One session for Janice Long and then, not long before publication, I went to the Unwins office in London and saw the first copy of my first-ever book of poetry – one of a print run of 5,000, which is an awful lot for a poetry book.

At first glance I was disappointed: it looked as though it had been printed on bad quality toilet paper and the cover illustrations and titles were surrounded by strange multicoloured stripes. But I soon got used to that and ended up very proud of it. We (or rather I) did quite a lot of interviews – though there was very little in the music press, which didn’t surprise me by now. It went into the shops, and, of course, I started selling the books at my gigs: I had to pay about 45% of cover price for each copy, but got them on account, paid Unwins when I’d sold them, and they sold very well. At gigs, that is. Not so well in the shops.

It soon became obvious to me – and, I guess, to Unwins - that people were far more likely to buy a copy after they had seen me performing the poems live than if they were simply browsing in a bookshop. When I got the initial sales figures after a year or so, the balance between shop sales and live sales was about 65-35, but after that I sold more than the shops did, soon many, many more. I was learning another lesson here. By most poets’ standards I do an awful lot of gigs: over my 35 years of performance this has varied between about 80 and 120 or so a year, averaging out at slightly under 100. Very early on, I started to think: if I produced books myself, I could have exactly the design I wanted - and I wouldn’t have to pay 45% of cover price for each one to sell at gigs! My first self-published poetry book (of five so far) wouldn’t come out until 1998, but the seeds were sown in my mind well before that. And in any case it wouldn’t be that long before my first book would become self-published in one sense.

About two and a half years after the book came out I got a call from Unwins, though obviously not from the department which regularly dealt with me when I came in to pick up more copies to sell…

‘Mr. Baine, this is a courtesy call to inform you that the remaining copies of your book are about to be remaindered and pulped, and we are offering you ten copies at the special discount price of £2.’

‘How many copies are left?’

‘Let me see. Approximately 1,500.’

‘Right! I’ll have the lot. But I’m not paying you £2 each for them. How about 10p?’

A brief discussion with higher authority and the deal was done. Fortunately there was a small lock-up right outside the front door of Steve’s flat in Harlow, and very soon it was crammed full of books. Within three years they had all gone. 5,000 sales for a book of poetry is a pretty rare thing, and the majority of those sales were done via a very, very heavy rucksack. I didn’t drive in those days, and unless Joy, or occasionally melodeon player Lynne, drove me to a gig it was always the train. Swells sold a few, but by then he was well into a career as a much-loved (and much-feared!) journalist, video director and publisher: he wasn’t a Rising Son of Ranting Verse any more. Although out of print for years now the book is still available on EBay, needless to say, and like my fanzine Tirana Thrash, it goes for a lot more than the cover price. As some of you will already have realised, many of the poems in it are featured here.

The publication of my first book meant, of course, even more gigs than usual. I had a pretty good circuit established now, both in the UK and Holland, and more venues were being added to it all the time as people got in touch: each one was treated like gold dust, carefully written down with contact name and phone number and listed in a home-made directory. If I wasn’t going to be getting much help from ‘the business’ in the future I was going to make sure I could do the business myself. Bristol Poly, Norwich Penny’s, Swaffham Labour Club, my first gig in Liverpool at the North Star (or was it Birkenhead? Very different, I know, but I can’t remember!) and plenty more.

Steve and I organised some UK gigs for fiery French punks The Brigades from Paris - who had set up the shows for The Neurotics and myself earlier in the year - and then in October I was off to Belfast for the first time ever.

This, of course, was during the Troubles: the Anglo-Irish Agreement was about to be signed, much to Ian Paisley’s disgust, and the signs of war and division were everywhere. I met and stayed with Martin Smyth, editor of ‘Youth Anthem’ fanzine, with whom I’d already been in touch, and he and his mates made it clear to me exactly where, as a youngish bloke with an English accent, I could go safely - and where I couldn’t. I remember walking through the security gates in Belfast city centre and thinking ‘this really is a warzone’: eighteen years later, with help from the late lamented Colin McQuillan, singer with Belfast punk legends Runnin’ Riot, I’d record a live spoken word/music album (called, imaginatively enough, Live In Belfast) at a newish venue called the Warzone Centre. By that time there was enough hope for that youth/community centre to have been so named tongue in cheek, but 1985 was very different.

Many English bands and performers wouldn’t go to Belfast at that time. I took the view that as long as I accepted the advice of those who lived there as to where to play and what to do, I’d be fine, and of course I was. The punk scene was one of the few areas where the two ‘sides’ mixed freely and openly, because of course the whole idea of punk was to reject that kind of bigotry and division – as summed up in Stiff Little Fingers’ wonderful anthem ‘Alternative Ulster’. Martin soon introduced me to Terri Hooley, founder of the ‘Good Vibrations’ record shop and label and the man behind the success of band like The Outcasts, Rudi and of course The Undertones. I still haven’t seen the acclaimed film of the same name made about his life, but by the time this book is published I will have done, no doubt of that.

My first gig in Belfast was an anti-apartheid benefit at Queen’s University on Thursday 24 October and over the next few days I enjoyed the hospitality of Martin and his family. He showed me round the city, or the bits of it where it was safe for us to go, and we spent a lot of time in the legendary Lavery’s bar. I filmed a poem for BBC Belfast on the top of the Europa Hotel, which had the dubious distinction of being the most bombed hotel in Europe. And on the Sunday we went to Dublin: I didn’t have a gig there, I just wanted to visit the place, since I’d never been to Ireland before.

It took a few years before I came back: in 1989 I did gigs in the Rotterdam Bar and Queens Speakeasy and in the early 90s I played the Errigle Inn, then at the Cathedral Quarter Festival at the beginning of the last decade and the Warzone Centre as mentioned above. There have been some other visits too (I remember once doing a gig at Laggan College, a pioneering school with pupils from both sides of the divide). I always had a good time, especially after the peace process had taken hold and I could go there with Robina, whose maternal family originate from Clough, County Down, and walk together round parts of the city we could never have visited in safety twenty years before. I also played at Derry Arts Centre once – and eventually got to do a gig in Dublin too. I still remember that gig: it was at a pub which had two names, The Firestone or The Plough. I also remember that I have never seen so many pissed people in one room before. I finally came back to Dublin for the James Connolly Festival in 2015.

But my most unlikely souvenir of Belfast is a photo Martin took of me sitting in an old bath we found lying around at Knockbracken Snooker Centre. It was a publicity photo for years, and it’s in this book. I really like Belfast, a brave and vibrant city, and I’m due a return visit.

Back in Harlow I’d started playing the fiddle with a very, very silly country & western band called Austin’s Shirts, fronted by my old mate Richard Holgarth, an absolute stalwart of the local scene. The Shirts played the Square regularly and I got them a few gigs in London as well. Soon I’d start recording with Richard a lot: he was not only a brilliant guitarist and pianist but also a talented arranger and studio engineer. Then I’d meet up with John Otway again, Otway would need a guitarist sidekick after his previous one (Robin, I think) wore out, as they tended to do after a while, and I’d suggest Richard.

At that point Richard’s life would change forever as he learned how to bash his head on a microphone, play guitar behind his back while standing at the top of a dangerously teetering ladder, not get angry when his lead was pulled out in the middle of a solo and impersonate a Portuguese man of war jellyfish! And Seymour from the Shirts would become a founder member of the Otway Big Band. But that was still a few years away…

Of the twenty of so gigs left at the end of 1985 I shall give special mention to just two: there’s no need for me to do long lists anymore. On 9 November, after Brighton had played away at Shrewsbury, I had a gig at the Bull Hotel in Ludlow where my conversion from lager to real ale officially became complete: about ten pints of the lovely stuff were lined up in front of me during my set and I ended up on the floor attempting to do a Jimi Hendrix impersonation by playing the mandola with my teeth. (Needless to say I couldn’t, I looked very silly and I felt rather ill the next day.)

And on 23 November I did my first ever gig at the Adephi in Hull, without doubt my favourite venue of anywhere I have ever played in my 35 years. Not because I get my best crowds there: in the Eighties when I was popular with students I would pack the place out, but now, after around 25 gigs there in a changing town and a changing world, attendances are nowhere near what they were. Not because it is a breathtakingly beautiful venue: it is quite literally a hollowed out terraced house in a Hull back street with a World War Two bomb site as a car park and toilets which, until a recent and quite startling upgrade, were legendary.

No: because The Adelphi and its indefatigable and inspirational owner Paul Jackson epitomise the very heart and soul of the independent music scene. He, like me, has carved his own path, without compromise, for thirty years. The Adelphi launched countless music careers, from Pulp to The Housemartins: it is at once a home for local bands starting out and a welcoming and familiar stop-off point for regular visitors from far afield: it is brimming with friendship, fairness and honesty and has great real ale. Many far grander venues all over the world would do well to learn from The Adelphi. Mr. Paul Jackson, you are a hero from Hull and I salute you.

 

If early 1985 saw the end of the miners’ strike, early 1986 saw the beginning of another great battle between the forces of ideological Thatcherism and those of a group of workers with a powerful trade union and a proud history. This time it was the Fleet Street printers, organised in SOGAT and the NGA - and, once again, Thatcher was determined that her side would win. Her Minister of Propaganda Rupert Murdoch, boss of News International, had demanded that the print unions working on The Sun, Times, Sunday Times and News of the World accept flexible working, agree to a no-strike clause, adopt new technology and abandon their closed shop. The unions said no.

War started on 24 January 1986, when nearly 6,000 newspaper workers went on strike following the breakdown of talks around News International’s plans to move its entire operation from Fleet Street to a new plant in Wapping, East London. All strikers were immediately served with notices of dismissal. Overnight, Murdoch then moved the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World to the new site, dubbed ‘Fortress Wapping’, and hired members of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (shame on them!) to man it.

Journalists were then instructed to report for work there: many did, including Garry Bushell, to whom I wrote an angry letter a few days later. (I got a reply. ‘Still wearing the turn-ups, John?’ That’s all it said. Haven’t spoken to him since.) Some refused, but not enough to affect production. The new plant was immediately besieged by thousands of angry workers whose livelihoods had been snatched away – and, as during the miners’ strike, Thatcher used the police as her private army to enforce Murdoch’s will.

I joined the demonstrations in Wapping and saw the brutality at first hand: not only was I angered beyond belief at the brazen connivance of Thatcher’s government and Murdoch, the fact that my granddad had been a printer gave me some sort of vague connection as well. Police charging, battering, brutalising and arresting peaceful demonstrators, women as well as men, denying local residents access to their own homes and towing legally parked cars out of the way so that Murdoch’s distribution lorries were able to drive away from the plant at a ludicrously dangerous speed down the narrow streets to get the papers to their outlets. The open partisanship of the police at Wapping was evident: it was class war, they were there fighting for Murdoch and Thatcher, and many of them thoroughly enjoyed doing so. The aim of the demonstrators was to try and stop the scab labour, both print workers and journalists, from getting into the plant, and to block the lorries carrying newspapers getting out: there were several different exits from which lorries could leave, and demonstrators were constantly trying to work out which one was going to be used next. Thereby hangs a rather amusing story.

My former partner Joy had a long and successful career as a journalist and editor and was firmly on the side of the print workers: she was not, however, someone to end up at the bottom of a scrum being battered by police. When I told her what was happening at the demonstrations she decided to drive us over there so she could see for herself – despite my protestations that the place was a bloody fortress surrounded by hordes of rabid police perfectly happy to attack anything that moved. We skirted round the plant for a bit and, sure enough, arrived at a solid blue wall bristling with hostility and gesturing vigourously to her to turn round and go back from whence she’d came. Joy held her ground: she was made of sterner stuff. One of the more senior policemen approached. As far as I can remember, matters proceeded roughly thus.

I kept quiet and covered up my anti-Murdoch badge. She put on her most authoritative editor’s voice.

‘Excuse me, Officer. I’m not quite sure where I am. I’m supposed to be having a meeting at the News International plant, but I don’t know where to go. Could you direct me, please?’

‘Have you got any accreditation?’

‘I’m sorry Officer, no. I had no idea that all this trouble was going on, or that I’d need any.’

No idea how she got away with it, but confronted by a very polite but firm sounding middle class lady in a Volkswagen Golf, the policeman was taken in. The blue line parted - and we were driving down the main thoroughfare where the lorries left from. Pickets were everywhere, trying to spot the lorries coming out so that they could block their way: so, of course, were police. For a mad few minutes we drove up and down the line: every time we saw a lorry about to emerge, Joy would drive to the nearest lot of pickets and I’d point the relevant entrance out to them. I can still remember pickets cheering as we drove past. The police eventually cottoned on, of course, and we managed to drive off before they stopped us: if they had done, it would have been interesting to have seen their attempts to make a charge stand up in court. Although I am sure Thatcher and Murdoch’s pet police would have tried to prove that it was, driving up and down the public highway is not yet a criminal offence.

As during the miners’ strike I did benefit gigs (and played in a fundraising football match organised by SOGAT) but, sadly, the printers’ battle was doomed from the start. Murdoch had planned the switch to Wapping with military precision and, of course, churned out endless propaganda in his papers against the strikers. Other newspaper owners, pleased to see the back of a strong and organised trade union, joined in the propaganda with gusto and brutal police tactics did the rest. The strike collapsed on 5 February 1987.

With the miners and printers beaten, employers could declare open season on trade unions and hard-fought workers’ rights and they did: current UK labour conditions are the poisonous legacy of those days. Zero hours contracts, ‘flexible working’, unions banned from workplaces, arbitrary sackings, minimum wage salaries while employers’ profits soar, bankers flaunting their wealth in our faces while the poor and the sick are blamed for their own condition: all this, for me, has its roots in the great defeats of 1984-1985 and 1986-1987.

 

Now here’s an irony. As the Wapping dispute was escalating and the miners were licking the wounds of their bitter defeat, the ‘Labour’ Party – which had studiedly and abjectly refused to back either the miners or the printers - decided to go into showbiz.

The seeds had been sown at the end of 1985: I was one of many who received an invite to a reception at the Houses of Parliament for the launch of something called Red Wedge. Somewhat against my better judgement I went along and I found a load of pop personalities, media figures and MPs being served drinks by bow-tied waiters on a House of Commons terrace. Not my scene at all. I was offered a drink by a very familiar-looking waiter with a wry grin on his face. We both burst out laughing. It was my early inspiration, sometime gig partner and all round punk rock hero Patrik Fitzgerald!

I’d often wondered what had happened to him in the couple of years since we’d lost touch - now I knew. He was a House of Commons waiter, and he was serving drinks at a Labour Party ‘showbiz’ function to performers many of whom, as far as I was concerned, were not fit to lick his boots as songwriters or social commentators. The whole event seemed pretty silly to me after that, and very soon I adjourned to the pub - but not long afterwards I was contacted by Red Wedge and asked to take part in a ‘comedy/cabaret’ tour they were putting together for March 1986.

The declared aim of Red Wedge was to raise political consciousness among young people and inspire them to vote Labour against the Thatcher government in the 1987 general election – obviously a good idea. The problem for many of us was that Labour’s record during the great strikes had been so pathetic that they didn’t exactly inspire impassioned and vocal support. But it was Hobson’s choice: we were desperate to get rid of the Tories, so we went along with it.

In January and February 1986, while I was doing loads of gigs up and down the country in my own little world, the big, mainstream Red Wedge tour got going featuring many of the left-leaning pop stars of the day. Billy Bragg, Weller’s band The Style Council, Jimmy Somerville and The Communards, Junior Giscombe, Lorna Gee and Jerry Dammers, Madness, Heaven 17, Bananarama, Prefab Sprout, Elvis Costello, Gary Kemp, Tom Robinson, Sade, The Beat, Lloyd Cole, The Blow Monkeys and The Smiths all played some part.

Then in March it was the turn of the spoken word performers and comedians. This was a much more low key event: the Red Wedge Cabaret Tour, with varying contributors – comics, poets, acoustic artists - at different venues all over the country. My diary tells me I did Barnsley, Leeds Poly, Huddersfield Poly and Newcastle Poly, with a couple of other more music-orientated ones to come later in Wales. Brilliant satirical comedy/music duo Skint Video were on with me along with a poet turned actor who definitely sticks in my mind. Cue a rather, erm, cheesy story.

From a very early age I have always liked a good knob joke, and despite being 57 I have to confess to the fact that I still do, much to my poor wife’s despair. An excerpt from my notorious poem ‘Joseph Porter’s Sleeping Bag’ is a prime example of the genre: ‘A mad bacteriologist’s dream/ Where bell end boursin reigns supreme/ And even bedbugs puke and gag/ It’s Joseph Porter’s sleeping bag.’ The word ‘smegma’ - often truncated to ‘smeg’ – has always held a definite comedic appeal for me. (NB: the WORD. Not the SUBSTANCE, which is REVOLTING. Obviously.) Even before I started performing as Attila one of the terms of abuse I had coined to hurl at anyone or anything which I thought deserved it was ‘a complete and total smeghead’. It was certainly fairly prominently in evidence in my set at that time back in 1986.

On the bill on that short tour was an affable up and coming young Scouse performance poet/comedian called Craig Charles. It does seem to me that a certain epithet, now familiar to the fans of TV sci-fi comedy ‘Red Dwarf’, may well have been implanted in his mind at those gigs. Of course, I may be wrong. If I am right, I’m certainly not the slightest bit, erm, cheesed off about it: there can be no copyright on references to helmet brie, and Craig had an unfeta’d right to use it how he wanted.

Sorry, folks. I’ll stop right there.

Red Wedge gigs carried on through the whole of 1986 and into the 1987 election year, with many of the top left-leaning showbiz faces of the time involved. Labour, of course, lost yet another election, and that was that for Red Wedge. I performed at a few more events and attended a couple of the bigger ones: everyone had a good time, and I’m sure some people were galvanised, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t down to the performers - all we can ever be is catalysts. No poet, songwriter, band or comedian has ever won an election or changed the course of history. Allied to a powerful grass roots political movement which catches the common mood, we can play a powerful part, we can unite and inspire, but that movement has to exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, after its abject showing in the miners’ and printers’ disputes, all that the Labour Party had going for it was that it wasn’t the Tory Party - and that simply wasn’t enough to put a fire in anyone’s belly. The leadership were desperate to appear ‘moderate’ and not scare off the middle classes, and in doing so, they left many of their core supporters feeling a deep sense of betrayal. When Blair arrived on the scene and Labour became ‘New Labour’, things of course got a whole lot worse – to the point that when Labour finally won an election they had a leader who could profess his admiration for Thatcher and describe her as ‘a towering global figure’. What a fucking traitor. And not just a traitor: a traitor who should in many people’s opinion be on trial for war crimes after orchestrating the brutal slaughter of the Iraq war against the wishes of the vast majority of the British people.

I have often wondered how things would have turned out if Labour had done things differently: backed the strikers fair and square, stood up to Murdoch, stopped worrying about Surbition and reached out to the non-voting poor and dispossessed as Obama did in his first election campaign. I know there would have been a lot more enthusiasm in the cultural and activist community, and all of us Red Wedgers, ‘celebrities’ or no, would have felt that we really had something to fight for. Would we have won the election? We’ll never know. But if we’d lost, at least we’d have lost believing in something!

Red Wedge did give me one thoroughly memorable experience, however: a gig in Brecon Market with a DJ set from John Peel - and performances by seminal and inspirational Welsh language bands Anhrefn and Datblygu, both of whom had become friends by then and both of whom, in different ways, had a big impact on me. Let’s go to Wales for a bit.

 

I’d been gigging there a fair amount since the early days: Bangor, Aberystwyth and Cardiff universities, punk gigs, a couple of miners’ strike events. At the beginning of 1985 a mutual friend, Huw Jones aka Huw Prestatyn, had introduced me to Rhys Mwyn, Anhrefn’s singer and the absolute galvanising force behind the budding alternative Welsh language music scene. Pioneer of punk in a previously conservative and inward-looking culture and founder of Anhrefn Records, the first Welsh language independent label, Rhys was determined to take Welsh language rock ‘n’ roll out of Wales - and once I’d met him and heard Anhrefn (Welsh for Disorder) I was determined to help him. Melodic driving punk with attitude, sung in an ancient language which had been repressed and sneered at by Anglocentric authorities but was now firmly on the way back, on the school curriculum, on the street and now on the punk rock stage. I was most impressed. Despite the fact that I didn’t know what he was on about - although as someone who’d always had an instinctive interest in foreign languages I gave it my best shot.

And then I heard Datblygu… wild, surreal, ranting, impassioned, mad, unique Datblygu. There are countless musical genres in the world, but Datblygu occupy one all on their own. David R Edwards and Patricia Morgan. Some people say ‘The Welsh Fall’ but that is nowhere near enough of a description: haunting melodies and strange, discordant soundscapes side by side, fronted by David’s beautiful manic voice throwing out words which somehow seemed to fit in and make sense even if you didn’t understand them.

If Rhys kicked down the barriers with the punk power of Anhrefn and made it possible for others to follow by releasing their records and furthering their ambitions - as he did for the likes of Catatonia - David and Datblygu are revered and regarded by bands like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals as the prime catalyst in the scene’s development. Fittingly, Datblygu is Welsh for Develop. And it wasn’t just me: John Peel gave Datblygu five sessions on his show and described them as ‘the best incentive anyone could have for learning Welsh’. I’d go along with that.

After doing a few gigs with them in Wales I was determined to bring both Anhrefn and Datblygu to England for the first time, and I did – at the Ranters’ Cup Final Replay in 1986 and at various venues in Harlow and London in 1987 and after. Rhys and David are good friends to this day and I have huge respect for them both. Rhys is still working hard bringing interesting alternative Welsh language music to the world, his band Anhrefn have reformed (I hosted them at my Glastonwick festival a few years ago) and he now has his own management company. He has published his autobiography, ‘Cam o’r Tywyllwch’ (‘A Step out of the Darkness’) but although he has given me a copy, I’ve never read it, because I can’t. Thanks to Rhys, I can say ‘my nipples explode with delight’ in Welsh though. Mae fy tethau yn ffrydro gyda mwynhad. There you go.

For David things have been much, much harder. Part of Datblygu’s appeal lay in his manic, unpredictable performances – at one gig we did together, in a village hall somewhere very Welsh indeed, he leapt off stage half way through the set, ran out and disappeared! Datblygu split in 1995 and David has had to battle mental illness for many years, but has remained creative, is gradually getting stronger and his legacy is definitely secure: he is a hugely influential figure in his native land. I visit him every time I’m in his part of Wales and we are regularly in touch.

In early 2015 Datblygu released a new album and did their first gig for twenty years, which made me very happy, although I couldn’t be there. I cherish the hope that we may share a stage again one day, and I am so glad that Ankst Records have finally released a triple CD of David’s finest work with the lyrics translated into English. My favourite Welsh genius: he would share that billing equally with John Cale if the latter hadn’t got the bouncer to throw me out of my own gig, but thanks to that, David has the number one spot for ever.

 

I’ve just mentioned the Ranters’ Cup Final Replay: the second (and last in that format) big celebration of ranting verse and independent, original music was held at Bay 63 in London on 18 May 1986. Organiser and compere Attila the Stockbroker: performers Kevin Seisay, Benjamin Zephaniah, Surfin’ Dave, Little Brother, Seething Wells, Belinda Blanchard, Big J, Ann Ziety, Pat Condell, The Thin Man, Porky the Poet, John Moloney, The Neurotics, Trespassers W, Anhrefn and Datblygu. Lovely evening. Incredible diversity and range of performing talent. Big audience.

NME review: ‘Dodgy Old Lines Men’.

Seems to me that the heading may well have been thought up before the reviewer even turned up to the gig. Ranting verse, and especially anything specifically associated with or organised by Attila the Stockbroker, was now definitely ‘last year’s thing’ as far as the music press were concerned. And not just the press: Cherry Red didn’t want to release my records any more and I no longer had a booking agent. But I had loads of gigs, good audiences, was getting great feedback from them and was constantly writing better and better material. I didn’t understand the contradiction between the reception I was getting at live gigs and the attitude of the ‘business’: it was almost as if a very powerful figure in the industry was going round telling people not to like me… but that couldn’t possibly have been true, could it?

Anyway, I didn’t worry about it much: there was a whole world out there for me now and I was beginning to get getting huge satisfaction from running it myself. And in the next few years that world, up until this point confined to the UK and Holland, was destined to get a whole lot bigger, as you are about to see.

But first, a foray into world music. Sort of.

 

On April 15th 1986 the US Air Force had launched a bombing raid on Gaddafi’s Libya in response to an alleged Libyan terrorist bombing of a West Berlin disco. It’s an interesting foreign policy position which claims that the best way to respond to terrorism is to bomb targets entirely unconnected to the alleged terrorists, purely because these targets are in the alleged terrorists’ country of origin. Surely that itself is the very definition of terrorism? Libya was rapidly becoming a convenient scapegoat for all kinds of conspiracy theories and accusations: I decided to take things to their logical conclusion and blame the Libyan people for everything that had gone wrong throughout the whole of history. Soon I had written the first – and last – traditional Libyan thrash metal song, or at any rate the only one designed to be played on an acoustic mandola…

In terms of audience response this was another ‘Contributory Negligence’ – a piece that immediately struck a huge chord everywhere. It’s one of the longest-serving numbers in my set, was the title of my third album released in 1987, inspired a T-shirt sold in about ten different countries, has had real live Libyan students coming up to me at gigs saying things like ‘hi Attila, I’m not from Hell, I’m from Tripoli’ – and on 8 June 1986 gave its name to an evening ‘revue’ at the legendary Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, north-west London, headlined by the Redskins. Keith Allen and Skint Video were on the bill too, and my song, more or less brand new then, raised the roof.

Billy Bragg was there, roaring with laughter. It always made me happy when I saw him enjoying my stuff, because I loved his: those first three albums are classics. His attitude to me has always seemed ambivalent, especially in the very early days when I got the impression that he saw me as some kind of ‘rival’, which was very silly as far as I’m concerned - I’ve always thought that radical performers should stick together, after all, there’s not that many of us! To this day I’ve never really worked it out, not that it matters after all these years. In any case he was about to do me a big, big favour.

Thanks to Billy, very soon, I’d be touring all over East Germany – the German Democratic Republic – with him and my mates The Neurotics. And with the initial contact made, I’d come back five more times before the end of 1990. An amazing time and one that will remain with me till I die: it comprises the next chapter of this book.

Winners write history, as the saying goes: with the GDR gone for ever and so much contemporary commentary about it entirely negative and written by Western media figures who had never set foot in the place, I want to add my eyewitness contribution. I toured there in each of the four years leading up to the fall of the Wall, was back East again three months after it had gone, again eight months after that, and at least once in most of the 25 years from then until now. I have a story to tell.