There’s one final twist to the East German story. In February 1989, at East Berlin’s final Political Song Festival before the Wall came down and my fourth visit to the GDR, I was approached after a performance by a group of Asian-looking blokes in matching dark suits with red lapel badges. I’d seen them at several events at the festival, always together, always suited up, always far more reserved and formal than the other guests and participants. Even before they spoke to me, I knew where they were from.

‘Good evening, comrade. We have come to ask you if you would be interested in performing at the World Festival of Youth and Students, which will be held later this year in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. About 20,000 people from 177 countries will be attending. We would be very pleased to invite you.’

I punched the air. The next month, along with a bunch of fellow readers of the football fanzine When Saturday Comes, I was already looking forward to going to Albania, ostensibly to see England play a World Cup qualifier, actually because that was the only way the Albanians would let us in. You’ll be reading about that below. But for sheer hardline Stalinism, North Korea put even Albania in the shade. It truly was the big one.

‘Too bloody right, comrades. Thanks very much! When is it?’

‘It takes place in the first week in July.’

My heart sank. At a previous Political Song Festival I had been approached by Gary Cristall, director of the Vancouver Folk Festival, and invited to play there - and on the back of it I had booked my first tour of Canada, 20 dates from mid-June to mid-July. There was no way I could cancel it, and no way I wanted to - but I was still absolutely gutted.

‘I’m sorry, I’m doing a Canadian tour then. You couldn’t possibly put it back a couple of weeks, could you?’

They didn’t understand that I was joking, which in itself was very funny! But I did manage to get them to give my old friend Steve Drewett from the Neurotics the gig instead. He went to Pyongyang on a Soviet troop carrier, played unplugged versions of his songs to huge crowds of frenziedly applauding Koreans, saw ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations against US imperialism organised through loudspeakers attached to lamp posts and had a thoroughly surreal and very good time.

The lucky, lucky bastard.

 

Even though I didn’t make it to North Korea, Albania made a pretty good booby prize. England had been drawn against Albania in the qualifying stages of the 1990 World Cup, the football fanzine When Saturday Comes had organised a trip, and given my lifelong interesting in that enigmatically Stalinist country I was going with bells on. Before we went, I made one of my sporadic appearances on BBC TV, being interviewed about the trip for the lunchtime news, and I was featured in the Guardian too, holding a bust of Enver Hohxa (‘Albania beckons for Attila the Stockbroker’). Steve Drewett and my Brighton friend Mike Williams were up for it as well, and we joined around 50 other fans on a rickety coach journey from London to Tirana - through the Balkan mountains.

The coach broke down in Kent, on the way to Dover. It was repaired. It broke down again in Senj, now in Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia: after a long delay it was declared demised and gone to meet its maker, and after we had forked out for a replacement an even more clapped-out looking Yugoslav one appeared and an insane lunatic then drove this ancient contraption into the mountains and around tiny bendy roads at breakneck speed. The back of the coach hung way over the edge on each bend, allowing those unfortunate enough to be sitting in that part, including us, an ideal view of the burnt out and crushed wrecks in the ravine below. It was absolutely terrifying. I just had to take the approach I do when flying: the driver/pilot doesn’t want to die either, so he must know what he’s doing…

Eventually, to our enormous relief, we arrived at the Albanian border crossing of Hani I Hotit. Prior to the trip, all beards and long hair had been shaved off – although Enver Hoxha had died in 1985, Albania was still the world’s only officially atheist state and since a hirsuite appearance could indicate an affinity with Islam, it was banned. A few Yugoslav ‘revisionist’ travel guides were confiscated and then we were on the way to Tirana and the Hotel Tirana, our designated hotel, mostly wearing the T shirts which When Saturday Comes had made specially for the trip. On the front, the WSC logo and an Albanian flag. On the back, in Albanian: ‘Friendly English football fans salute our Albanian comrades on the historic occasion of the first meeting between our two countries’. For indeed it was.

Enver Hoxha’s partisans had liberated Albania from Nazi rule in 1944: he’d fallen out with Tito very quickly and chummed up with Stalin. After Stalin was repudiated by Kruschev, Enver declared the Soviet Union ‘revisionist’ and teamed up with Mao: before his death in 1985 he’d fallen out with Mao too, and Albania was on its own, a paranoid and very poor country (albeit with decent health care and very high literacy levels) pockmarked with bunkers and ruled by Enver’s anointed successor Ramiz Alia, who was attempting ‘reforms’. These presumably included letting a coachload of self-declared leftist alternative football fans into the country. We soon discovered, however, that we weren’t the only England fans there, and the others were neither leftist nor alternative…

We met up with Ari, our tour guide, and checked into the hotel. Knowing that Albanians were football mad but obviously couldn’t get hold of any Western football paraphernalia, we’d brought along loads of English league programmes, and when we started distributing them to the crowd of inquisitive locals who had gathered round our coach, all hell broke loose as kids rushed forward, grabbed the programmes (I gave out loads of Brighton ones, hope they weren’t disappointed!) and stood there trying to talk to us. Then a group of men in long leather coats, who had been standing in the background, moved forward menacingly. The crowd scattered: they were the feared Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi. Although they weren’t exactly secret police: the long leather coats were a kind of uniform and everyone seemed to know who they were. And if the fashion sense of the not-so secret police was suspect, that of the general population was even more so: polo necks everywhere. Polo neck jumpers, Benny Hill and Norman Wisdom: all three welcome in Albania. (No foreign books or videos though!)

But soon we realised that, unbelievably, English fascist football hooligans were welcome there too - or if not welcome, at least allowed in. Emerging from our hotel and into Skanderbeg Square we saw Union Jacks draped over shoulders and chants of ‘Inger-land’ - and the 50 or so England away crew who had somehow managed to make it into Albania weren’t pleased to see us at all. They’d seen the media coverage surrounding our trip, had decided we were ‘commie bastards’ who should ‘fuck off back to Russia’ and were spoiling for a fight. Most of our lot weren’t the fighting type at all, and so we were met with abuse and intimidation every time we encountered them throughout the trip – especially during England’s 2-0 victory in the World Cup qualifier in the Qemal Stafa Stadium in Tirana.

I’ll never forget that moment. In the capital of the most hardline Stalinist country in the world, a group of England hooligans did a fascist salute during the English national anthem and threatened those of us who opposed them. ‘You fascist bastards’, I remember shouting. They readily agreed. ‘Yes, we are – and we’ll see you afterwards….’ The Albanians all round us were smiling and friendly, offering cigarettes: this was too much for some of our right wing compatriots. ‘It’s too friendly round here’ one said. ‘Let’s go and get some beers’. This just confirmed what we thought: they were there for the fights, not the football. A big up to Mark Perryman of the England Fans’ travel group, who has led the campaign to make following England ‘too friendly’ for bigots and hooligans on a permanent basis: it’s certainly a lot better now than it was in the 80s, that’s for sure. Fortunately the hooligans left the country after the match while we got on with our holiday.

As well as going to the games (we saw England Under 21’s win in Shkoder too) all kinds of special activities had been arranged for us. Visits to Enver Hoxha’s grave and to a working model of a recently-opened hydroelectric power station, a trip to a factory, an evening of traditional Albanian dance. Yes, some of the ‘official’ stuff was a bit dull, and the roads were awful, which meant that coach journeys took hours – our tour guide Ari and I played chess to while away the time. But overall it was fascinating. I got to see the Radio Tirana studio which had made the broadcasts that had entertained me so much in my youth. And the last night of our trip was so memorable that, 23 years later, it was recreated as a piece of performance art!

We were staying at the Hotel Tirana, but had been promised a farewell party by our hosts at the basement of the Dajti, the other hotel in the city (yes, there were just two). When we got there we discovered that our ‘entertainment’ was a local band playing instrumental Beatles covers: we were quite surprised, because the official line was that all Western pop music was ‘decadent and bourgeois’ and up until then all the music we had heard had been of the traditional Albanian social-realist folk variety. To say this band were utterly crap would be an understatement: we all listened politely, of course, but it wasn’t much fun, especially since the only Albanians in the room (apart from the musicians and our guide Ari) were so obviously Sigurimi secret police that they may as well have had it tattooed on their foreheads.

The band stopped for a break, leaving their instruments propped invitingly by the stage. An idea came into my head, and, egged on by a few of our party, I had a word with my friend Steve from the Newtown Neurotics: he liked it. We got up and approached the musicians. ‘We’d like to play a couple of songs, please.’ This was obviously the last thing they were expecting, and were very confused – but soon Steve had the guitar in his hands and I had the bass. We needed to borrow their drummer. ‘Can you play drums for us, please?’ we asked. Rather nervously, he agreed…

‘Bliztkrieg Bop’ by the Ramones was an obvious choice. Steve and I both knew it, and it was so simple that anyone who vaguely knew their way round a drumkit would be able to play it. Many of our fellow guests started to dance, the Sigurimi looked shocked….but nobody told us to stop, so we carried on with a Neurotics number, the drummer doing his best. I think we did three songs in total, plus a poem from me, before politely handing the instruments back to the band, who were very nervous as to what was going to happen next! But nothing untoward did: we drank our beers, they played their crap Beatles covers, when the beer ran out we went to bed – and the next morning we went home.

You’d have thought that two English punk rockers playing three punk numbers with a borrowed Albanian drummer in front of fifty compatriots and a few Sigurimi would have been quickly forgotten… but no. This ‘gig’ somehow achieved legendary status in some quarters as the first ever punk gig in Albania! 23 years later Robina and I were invited back in order for me to recreate the moment with some local musicians at a Tirana art exhibition, which also featured copies of my fanzine ‘Tirana Thrash’, the above mentioned ‘When Saturday Comes’ football shirt, and a photostatted guide to Albanian league grounds written by some English Stalinist groundhopper in the 1970s. You really couldn’t make it up…

 

Time to bring the narrative back home. After the defeats of the miners and the printers and another hiding for Labour in the 1987 General Election, things were pretty desperate for the Left in the UK, and it has to be said that some spectacular own goals were scored around that time. 1987 saw the launch of the News on Sunday, a new, supposedly radical tabloid newspaper with backing from trade unions and Labour local authority pension funds. I was recruited to do a football column, and as far as I know can honestly claim to have been the first to bring the irreverent and surreal style of the football fanzines into the sports section of a national newspaper. But as a campaigning voice for the Left the paper was a disaster both in design and content, and it folded after six months amid loads of rancour - a real opportunity missed.

Despite the national political picture and the fact that I wasn’t ‘trendy’ with the music press any more (if I ever was) on a grass roots level things were going very well for me as I carried on writing, gigging and recording, building up contacts both in the UK and, increasingly, abroad. I returned to the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 in the company of the biting, witty and feminist comedy trio Sensible Footwear and after loads of great reviews we not only came back to Edinburgh together the next year but did loads of gigs elsewhere – the seemingly ‘chalk and cheese’ package of the ranting punk poet and three charming satirical women proving a roaring success. In 1987 I released my third album ‘Libyan Students From Hell’ on Oxford-based label Plastic Head Records. Cherry Red had never quite worked out what to do with me, but boss Iain McNay had always liked me, and he helped me find a new label.

The album was recorded by my friend Wim Oudijk in his studio in The Hague and was exclusively songs: in 1988 I followed it up with ‘Scornflakes’, a mainly spoken word album recorded live at gigs in the UK and the GDR. That one, I’m happy to say, was released on Geoff Davies’s legendary Liverpool Probe Plus label, home to the incomparable Half Man Half Biscuit. Both LPs got some plays on John Peel, both were featured in loads of fanzines, and both were either completely ignored or slagged off by the national music press. I wasn’t surprised or hurt by that any more.

 

And then there was the Slough saga. It all started, of course, with that Betjeman poem. ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough…’

In 1988 a new ten screen cinema was opening in that much-misrepresented town and the people responsible hired Mark Borkowski, then an up and coming PR man, to do the publicity for them. (Mark is now head of Borkowski PR and one of the most successful of his type in the country.) He had got to know me through the poet Michael Horovitz and suggested to me that, as part of the campaign, I should rewrite Betjeman’s thoroughly nasty poem as a celebration of Slough and invite its citizens to submit their own pro-Slough verse. I thought that was a very funny idea, and I did. Not only did I write the poem, but I unilaterally renamed Slough ‘The Berkshire Riviera’ and (long before ‘The Office’ came along) nominated Slough trading estate as the eighth wonder of the world…

Mark Borkowski was pleased. So was the Slough Observer, denizens of the aforementioned trading estate: they publicised the competition with gusto and promised to publish a book of the best entries. Offerings flowed in. As tends to be the case in these circumstances, many were truly appalling, some were not that bad, and a few were, well, alright. I declared the contribution of Matthew Moore, then aged 13, to be the winner and his poem had pride of place in ‘In Praise Of Slough – The Quagmire Strikes Back’ a compilation of local verse, edited by Attila the Stockbroker and published by Slough Observer Publications. It sold a certain number of copies, all of them in Slough.

Matthew and I made Page 2 of the Daily Telegraph sitting in the middle of Slough shopping precinct reading poetry to each other under the caption ‘Betjeman catches the flak as Slough heeds belated call to arms’. Loads of other media then took the bait, and for a week or so Slough, Attila and Matthew were big news. I still see Matthew’s dad occasionally at gigs, and he’s still very proud of his son. As he should be.

In the same year I led a debate at the Oxford Union about ‘human nature’ and whether or not our alleged inbuilt greed meant socialism would never work: I can’t remember the result, though I do remember getting into a row with some horribly right wing toff types. And I was nominated for the position of Rector of St. Andrews by a bunch of punks at said university. Despite going down very well at the hustings I lost to Nicholas Parsons.

 

1988 was also notable for my first encounter with Blyth Power, one of my favourite bands of all time, part of the soundtrack of my life from that day to this and certainly a fundamental inspiration in the founding of my own band, Barnstormer, six years later. Here’s the piece I read at the celebration of their 30th anniversary on February 16, 2014. I’m including it here not just in tribute to the band, but because it contains my thoughts on the whole 1980s Crass ‘anarchist’ phenomenon…

‘I blame Crass for lots of things. I blame them for their annoyingly persistent 1980s habit of releasing records with fascinating sleeves containing mind-shreddingly unlistenable vinyl. I blame them for their stencilled logo, designed and intended as a symbol of independence and freedom from ‘the system’ but emblazoned like a corporate barcode on the backs of a million sheeplike punks.

I blame Crass for leading a substantial section of radicalised Eighties youth into that vague, unfocussed no man’s land known as ‘anarchy’ - although it may well actually be Johnny Rotten’s fault. If the Sex Pistols’ first single had been called ‘Disciplined, Clear-Sighted, Marxist-Led And Trade Union-Centred Militant Action In The UK (With Clean Underpants)’ we may well have made more progress in the subsequent punk rock wars against Thatcher and her minions, although I do accept that ‘Anarchy In The UK’ had a catchier ring to it.

I blame Crass for their outrageous description of the comrades who saved their arses, and those of their audience, when fascists attacked their gig at Conway Hall in 1979 as ‘as bad as the Nazis’: that was possibly the most abject load of Epping Forest commune hippy bollocks I have heard in my entire life. I blame them for the countless identikit, shouty, tuneless, ‘Pay No More Than 45p’ clone-bands they spawned. But above all, I blame them for depriving me of the first five years of Blyth Power, and of five years of the friendship and wit of Mr. Joseph Porter (though I am quite pleased to have missed the first five years of his sleeping bag and his trainspotting obsession).

It was all my fault really, of course. Because most of the bands who fell off the noisy, rickety Crass production line, doing vegan farts and shouting ‘SMASH THE CISTERN’, sounded exactly the same, I assumed they all did, and wrote off some who manifestly didn’t without listening to them: thus, sadly, both The Mob and Zounds passed me by. When Blyth Power began, and I saw their first LP ‘Wicked Men, Wicked Women and Wicket Keepers’ in the indie charts, I remember being a bit surprised that a bunch of presumed shouty Crass punks could come up with such a clever-sounding album title, but thought nothing more of it.

It was Colin from Anti-Fascist Action who finally made me see the error of my ways. ‘You’d really like Blyth Power, John’ he kept saying whenever we met at gigs. ‘They’re not shouty Crass punks at all. They’ve got really great, original medieval-folky-punky tunes and clever lyrics about history and trains and stuff!’ I remembered those words one day in 1988 while in the Virgin Megastore, had a look under ‘B’ and found a just-released copy of ‘The Barman And Other Stories’.

I marvelled at the cover. No circled ‘A’s, no pictures of little furry creatures being horribly tortured, no badly drawn caricature depictions of extreme police brutality. It was a beautiful Hogarth painting. I opened the gatefold sleeve, started to read the lyrics, and was transported into a very un-Crass like world of historical allegory, Robert Graves and hymns. Oh, and trains, of course. Very unlike me, I bought it without a second’s hesitation and without hearing a note: when I did get to hear it, it was even better that I had hoped, and struck a musical and lyrical chord deep within my soul.

I immediately bought the aforementioned first album as well, and at the very first opportunity went to see Blyth Power. Needless to say, the gig was at the legendary George Robey in London and the spirits of all those present were as high as the tide in the Robey toilets. I had a most wonderful time, introduced myself to Joseph, Protag (RIP: a truly lovely bloke) and James and not long after obtained the licence, still held to this day, to fiddle sporadically with Blyth in its various incarnations both on stage and on record. Over the years and the line up changes (only Joseph remains from those early days) we have done scores of gigs together.

I immediately sensed, however, that this unique-sounding band had a niche problem. Although musically they had nothing whatsoever to do with the Crass scene which had originally spawned them, their initial following definitely came from that direction: to be frank, they were far too clever, original and different for much of it, and thus many of the early attendees went off to smash the cistern somewhere other than at a Blyth gig at the George Robey, where it had any case been smashed already. Furthermore, when Joseph decided to feature a depiction of a stag hunt as the artwork for the cover of their third album ‘Alnwick & Tyne’, a whole swathe of vegan crusties decided he was a traitor and stormed off in a huff, which was silly, because he wasn’t endorsing stag hunting, but there you go: storming off in a huff is something vegan crusties probably do better than anyone else on the planet. So attendances at gigs started to diminish: by the time I arrived on the scene it was plain that a new influx of fans, untainted by the vaguaries of clannish punk fashion and inspired solely by the band’s wonderful music, was desperately needed.

From day one, I appointed myself one of the chief recruiters to the cause. I was aware that many of my mates from the tuneful, socialist, Clash/Redskins/Neurotics punk axis were labouring under the same misapprehension about Blyth as I had been. ‘No, they’re not Crassy anarcho-shouters, I used to think that too. They are one of the most original and inspirational bands on the planet. Listen to this…’ I’m proud to say that many were converted but despite all our best efforts Blyth Power remain criminally underrated. Their music is undefinable and not easily categorised, but if you’ve never heard of them and you like intelligent lyrics and powerful folky/punky/medieval melodies – that’s the simplest way to put it - there’s an eleven album legacy for your listening pleasure, and these days, thanks to the internet, they’re just a click away.

Happy thirtieth anniversary to a wonderful band and well done, Comrade Joseph Porter.’

And so say all of us.

 

By the mid 1980s I was starting to get loads of offers to tour overseas, firstly in Northern Europe, then by the end of the decade a lot further than that. As you’d expect, a lot of West German leftist activists and organisers had come to the shows in East Germany, especially East Berlin: I got offers to play in West Germany and took them up with gusto. I remember the astonishment among audiences at the fact that I spoke German (they weren’t used to this from an English performer) and the trebling of that astonishment when I told them that I’d learned most of it in the GDR!

At a big left wing festival in the Ruhr in 1988 I was approached by a pissed bloke in a strange looking brown football strip.

‘Hello Attila. I know you are a punk rocker, you love beer, you’re an anti-fascist and a big football fan. I want to introduce you to a team you will like a lot. Please go and watch FC St Pauli in Hamburg next time you have the chance…’

I joined him for yet another beer and he told me a story. A story of how, in the early 80s, squatters had started to move into Hafenstrasse (Harbour Street) in the central dock area of St Pauli in the great port city of Hamburg and how, around 1986, football fans among the squatters had begun to watch matches at St Pauli, a little community club not far away which up until that point had just had a few thousand supporters. One of the squatters, Volker Ippig, was given a goalkeeping trial – he was taken on by the club and a legend was born. Left wing football fans from all over Hamburg (many of them HSV supporters disillusioned by the violence and racism prevalent there) started going to St Pauli, joined by more and more people from the local scene, and in a year or so attendances had quadrupled, many of the newcomers committed anti-fascists and punks. Right up my street, of course, and I resolved to visit as soon as I could.

It took me a year or so to get my first gig in Hamburg, co-ordinated so I could get to a St Pauli match. I can still remember the feeling of that initial game, of meeting leading activist Sven Brux in the squatted hairdressers at Beim Grunen Jager which had been turned into the first alternative club shop and of being in a lovely old stand (the Gegengerade) full of people who shared my politics, my musical tastes and my love of beer. It was brilliant - and I have been back to St Pauli many, many times since while on tour in Germany, both solo and with my band Barnstormer. Over 25 years I have seen the club grow from a local rallying point for disaffected punk rock football fans into a truly global phenomenon and have done countless gigs there, both pub shows organised by fans and official events hosted by the club itself in the larger Hamburg venues, Markthalle and Docks. In the early 90s I recorded a live album at the Marquee Club in St Pauli (yes, they used to have one there too). I’ve played in the original St Pauli fan pub Zum Letzten Pfennig, its modern day successor the Jolly Roger and the St Pauli wine bar run by my friends Heiko and Raphael. My band Barnstormer and I were special guests at the aftershow party following the annual ‘Ein Kessel Braun Weisses’ cabaret in the main stand in November 2014: I did a solo spot in the cabaret too, with memories of 25 years’ association with the club. Wonderful memories of a true football phenomenon. I’m Brighton till I die, but St Pauli will always have a place in my heart. When you see the picture of the banner they made for me after my 2015 medical scare, you’ll understand why.

 

So far I’d managed to take my words and music to East & West Germany, Holland and Belgium, and in 1988 and 1989 I added Finland to the list with two tours taking in Helsinki, Tampere and Turku, the second of these with then performance poet, now TV writer/production company manager Henry Normal. I’d met Henry on the poetry circuit and we got along famously: he was, probably still is, a fine poet, though he’s chosen a different path alongside Steve Coogan running Baby Cow Productions and I haven’t seen him for years. Finland was great: like the neighbouring Scandinavian countries (I’ve been to Denmark, Sweden and Norway several times each now as well) their understanding of English was at a level where I could more or less do the set I would at home. And there’s nothing like going for a sauna when the temperature is minus 20 and then rolling in the snow immediately afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.

 

But now it was time to go further afield: as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I’d been invited to the Vancouver Folk Festival in July 1989, and on the back of that had managed to find a Toronto agent to book me a coast-to-coast summer tour of Canada. It had better be good, I thought, I’ve blown out gigs in Pyongyang for this! And it was. 18 gigs in a month, from one side of Canada to the other: exhausting, but wonderful. And – not very punk maybe, but absolutely brilliant - my mother came too.

I mentioned at the beginning of this book that Mum had worked as a shift typist on the Enigma project at Bletchley during the war, and there she had met her lifelong friends Jean, Margaret and Winn, all Scottish. Winn had emigrated to Toronto many years previously with her Polish husband and when I told my mother that I was going to tour Canada, she said ‘I’ll come with you and visit her!’ We flew over together and she stayed with her friend while I did my Eastern Canada gigs, starting at the Mariposa Festival in Toronto and from then to Waterloo, Hudson, Montreal, Ottawa (where I met up again with The Men They Couldn’t Hang, also touring Canada, one of my favourite bands and now an established force both in the UK and abroad) Peterboro, Kitchener and London, Ontario, finishing with a show at the Rivoli back in Toronto.

Canada, like Australia, New Zealand and the US, has a particular niche specially designed for a performer like myself: the college and community radio network. In this country university radio, then as now, is confined to the campuses, and community radio is mostly very bland, if it exists at all, which means we are reliant on the whims of the national and local BBC since commercial stations are by their very nature totally mainstream. But in all the above countries it’s very different: college and community radio stations can broadcast as far as their transmitters can reach (normally at least covering the city in which they are based) and regular fund drives are held to increase broadcasting capacity. Most of these stations have an ‘alternative’ feel to them to a greater or lesser degree and many had played my material from albums gleaned on import, apart from in New Zealand, where my debut album ‘Ranting At The Nation’ was released locally and easily available. You’ll hear about the repercussions from THAT release soon enough.

This meant that not only were there plenty of stations happy to invite me to be a live guest, but quite a few people had already heard of me through tracks which had been already played, plus of course whatever had filtered through from my occasional forays into the national UK media. The gigs went well, especially the Rivoli show in Toronto where Mum and Winn were guests of honour, and that gig was recorded for a live album scheduled for national release in a few months’ time on Festival Records, the label run by the Vancouver Folk Festival. Then it was time to get on a plane and do the rest of the tour, my first ever with my mother as my roadie…

The first leg in Eastern Canada had been a road trip, although some of the drives were quite long: the second leg took in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, the Vancouver Folk Festival and Victoria on Vancouver Island, huge distances accessible only by plane. I wasn’t looking forward to that, because I’ve never enjoyed flying, especially flying nearly every day for a week - but it had to be done, and having my mother with me helped me calm down a bit!

She took it all in her stride, by now thoroughly used to having a shouty punk poet for a son, and despite the demanding schedule all went well. We had an especially great time at the Vancouver Folk Festival, befriended by a lovely woman called Mary Ann Cantillon and her family, who lived next door to the festival site, enabling Mum to go there for a rest when things got a bit much. It was at that festival that I met Mick Thomas and his rumbustuous, inspirational Melbourne punk-folk band Weddings Parties Anything for the first time – there would more meetings in the future in Australia. I introduced them to The Men They Couldn’t Hang, who were also at the festival: both musically and personally they got along famously, kindred spirits indeed. And Billy Bragg was there too. He was absolutely charming to my mum and when she complained about being a bit cold, he lent her his jumper. After the festival ended I had an extra gig in Vancouver at the Rogue Folk Club, and I persuaded Mum to play the piano for me on one of my songs. None of them have more than four chords, but she had to score everything first: she was always as hopeless at playing without a musical score as I am at trying to read one. We, or rather she, got a standing ovation: another moment I’ll never forget. Mum enjoyed the tour so much that she said ‘I’ll do that again!’ And she did, later, as you’ll see….

I came back from Canada with a second tour already in the pipeline, scheduled for early the following year to tie in with my first Canadian album release. Very soon afterwards I was off for another annual stint at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, playing in an improvised ‘theatre’ in Marco’s Leisure Centre rather than one of the ‘hip’ places, for the simple reason that they’d give me a door deal rather than demanding extortionate rental for the space. (I regularly hear media reports about how expensive it is for performers to do the Fringe, but every year I played there I made money: it’s my living, there would have been no point otherwise. I guess if you want to play trendy venues run by corporate rip-off merchants that’s a different matter!) I bumped into old mate and Edinburgh regular John Otway again, invited him to do a spot at my show, we got along famously on stage and off - and we decided that the following year we’d do the festival as a double act.

It was the start of a sporadic, hectic partnership which continues, albeit occasionally, to this day, described by one Fringe reviewer as ‘a marriage made in a mental hospital’. Our 1990 show, which we didn’t really rehearse at all (no need: it was basically each of us doing what we normally did at our solo gigs, with the other one interfering occasionally in as odd a fashion as possible) was called ‘Headbutts and Halibuts’. Logical really: Otway has a song where he headbutts the mic a lot, and as you’ve heard already, I have a fondness for flatfish. Amazingly, we got some great reviews and attendances were good as well. Through the early part of 1991 we did loads of well received double act gigs all over the country, so we decided to do another stint at Edinburgh together.

‘We’ve got to write some new stuff, Otway. We can’t just do the same set we did last year!’.

‘Why not, Attila? I’ve been doing the same set for the past 25 years, and it hasn’t done me any harm…’

But I was adamant, and I’d had an idea. One of the high points of Otway’s set has always been his, erm, rather theatrical recreation of the Bob Lind song ‘Cheryl’s Going Home’ in which he climbs up ladders, throws himself around the stage and generally behaves like a demented, lovesick lunatic.

‘Hang on, Otway. Cheryl’s going home: that bit’s obvious, she’s leaving you because you’re such a prat, and that’s why you’re so upset. But what exactly did you do? Who is she leaving you for? And where’s she going?’ I think I know, and I’m going to tell you…’

Over the next few months Otway and I wrote ‘Cheryl – A Rock Opera’ (subtitled ‘An Everyday Tale of Satanism, Trainspotting, Drug Abuse and Unrequited Love.’) I was The Narrator, a Worldly Cynic: in thunderously sub-Chaucerian rhyming couplets I built a story detailing Cheryl’s increasingly nefarious and unfaithful activities and demanded a response from Otway. Otway was John, a Jilted Lover: in wimpy, pathetic, soppy songs he either denied that Cheryl had ever done any of the dreadful things I was accusing her of or made pathetic excuses for them. ‘Yeah, I know about the goat…’

I’m not going to give the storyline away, but the finished product was a modern day morality tale – and it went down a storm at Edinburgh 1991, its 45 minutes stretched into an hour by my simultaneous German translation of Otway’s deranged version of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ and a ‘Glue Medley’ in which, for instance, Nilsson’s ‘Without You’ became ‘Without Glue’ and Sonny and Cher’s ‘I’ve Got You Babe’ became… you guessed it. You had to be there. Honestly.

We recorded ‘Cheryl’ in an Edinburgh studio during the festival, with help from musical director Richard Holgarth, released a CD of the finished result and toured the show for several years to enthusiastic audiences, including a triumphant performance at the grand old Hackney Empire in London backed by Otway’s band – all old friends of mine from Harlow. We still gig together occasionally to this day. Otway is a good mate, as mad as ever, a true English original. He now has two hits, a film, and would have had his own World Tour in his own jet (Ot-Air) if he’d found enough people to fill the plane. He nearly did, but not quite, and as a result lost his share of the deposit on the plane - £15,000. His mates and backers lost far more than that. I felt really, really sorry for him.

 

But if you think some of what Otway gets up to is nuts, I have my moments too. It was around this time that I stood in for Donny Osmond at a gig.

I’d always enjoyed playing the Marquee Club, the history-sodden rock venue in Soho’s Wardour Street, sadly now closed: as already mentioned, I’d supported Otway there twice in 1982, the first time I had met him. My next gig there wasn’t until 1989, a tension-filled and storming night supporting the Angelic Upstarts. The previous year they had been attacked by fascists at a punk festival at the Astoria and the gig closed down: the fascists had vowed that the Upstarts would never play London again. Anti-Fascist Action laid down the gauntlet at one of the capital’s most high profile venues, the fascists didn’t show, the gig was fantastic, a truly memorable night. But the next offer I got to play there would be rather a contrast.

A Monday in January 1991. Phone rings. Can’t remember the bloke’s name after all these years, but the conversation is still vivid.

‘Is that Attila?’ Hi, I book shows for the Marquee. Donny Osmond is supposed to be playing here tomorrow night, but he’s pulled out. We don’t want to shut the venue for the night, and we’re looking for someone to do a set. Would you be interested? We’ll pay you and give you as much beer as you want and as big a guest list as you like.’

I burst out laughing. ‘Well, I think I know the first verse of ‘Puppy Love’ - sure, I’ll give it a go!’

The deal was simple – everyone who had booked to see Donny got a refund and the chance to watch Attila the Stockbroker for free: I had one day to ring round as many people I knew as possible and tell them that I was Donny Osmond’s understudy at the Marquee the following night, and there was free beer for anyone who made it along!

Unfortunately this was of course way before the advent of social media, so I couldn’t put an event page on Facebook.

I certainly will if it ever happens again.

The gig was sold out. About half the audience decided to take up the Marquee’s offer, which meant that I was confronted with a fairly large number of very disappointed ladies in their mid thirties, plus a smattering of male partners, several of whom came up and told me that they were very pleased at the prospect of spending an evening listening to Attila rather than Donny! About twenty Attila fans turned up and got the promised free beer. I started my set: by the end of the first fifteen minutes half the Donny fans had walked out.

But the rest of them really enjoyed it. I got an encore. Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’d worked out the chords to ‘Puppy Love’ on the mandola, and memorised most of the words. The rest is history. Never to be repeated history, mind, but history nevertheless…

 

In March 1990 I went back to Canada for my second tour, a frenetic time since I flew there more or less straight after my latest appearances at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin. The tour had been planned to coincide with my first Canadian vinyl/cassette release. ‘Live at the Rivoli’ had, as I’ve already said, been recorded in Toronto during the previous year’s stint, and radio stations were well primed with copies in advance so I got plenty of interviews and airplay on national CBC radio as well as the college stations, plus a couple of TV appearances. I now had a bi-monthly column in the Guardian, ‘On The Road’ which meant I could document my travels for UK audiences as well.

My second decade as Attila the Stockbroker was starting off fine, but things were getting worse and worse in the country of my birth since on top of all the other injustices perpetrated by Thatcher she had now cooked up the hated Poll Tax, a local taxation system so stupidly unfair even a substantial section of her own party were opposed to it. Basically, it levied a flat fee on everyone registered to vote, more or less regardless of income or ability to pay, meaning that thousands of poor people removed themselves from the electoral register. This suited the Tories down to the ground since such people definitely were not going to vote for them! I’m absolutely certain that was a part of the reason why they introduced it.

However, it had a precedent which should have warned Thatcher off, since the only other Poll Tax in our history, instigated in 1381, had led to the Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler, one of the most famous English rebellions ever. The tax had already been introduced in Scotland in 1989 to widespread opposition, which rapidly spread to England, where it would come into force a year later. I’d already done some anti-poll tax gigs in 1989 and while I was in East Germany and Canada in the early months of 1990, anger was steadily growing: when that anger finally exploded in the legendary modern day Peasants’ Revolt in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 31st March, I was a few hours back from Canada, jetlagged as hell, unaware there was a riot goin’ on – and not there. No social media in those days, remember: if you were on tour on another continent, things like that really could pass you by. I did write a song about it, though, one of my best ever, I reckon.

This second Canadian tour was even more extensive than the first, which is saying something: Nova Scotia to Victoria, BC in a month. Canada is a huge country and in winter it is bloody cold: I arrived in Halifax in early March and immediately had the chance to walk on water for the first time in my life since the sea was frozen! I had a very warm reception from the people of Nova Scotia, though. Canada is very different from the USA, far more ‘European’ in its perception of events, and none more so, of course, than in Quebec, where the original French settlers made their home and French is the primary language.

And what a language Quebecois is, an amazing mixture of 17th century French and modern Americanisms: ‘char’, literally short for ‘chariot’ is their slang word for a car, for instance. Most amusing for me was the fact that all their worst swear words are related to Catholicism, which until recently had an iron grip on Quebec, and the words are in themselves not rude at all, it’s the context and tone of voice of the user which makes them so. Say you’re a bit of a sweary person and you hit your thumb with a hammer doing some DIY. An expressive way of showing your dissatisfaction with this turn of events in Quebecois would be to say ‘Criss de calice de tabernac d’osti de sacrement!’ which literally means ‘Christ of chalice of altar of host of sacrament’, which actually sounds rather pious, doesn’t it? However, despite the fact that your observant relatives would happily use these words to their priest, they would be shocked beyond belief at your using them in this context : I guess the English translation would be something like ‘fucking shit wank cockwomble fuckturd’. The wonders of language.

I was able to explore all of this in October 1991 courtesy of the BBC, in a six part series for Radio Four entitled ‘The Art of Insult’ in which I documented precisely how different cultures and nationalities choose their terms of abuse: one of many sporadic appearances on that esteemed station over the years, although I have always been used sparingly and virtually never allowed on live radio. I think I am viewed as a bit of a loose cannon. I wonder why?

From Quebec I basically went to every major town in Canada, even more than on the first tour, finishing in triumph at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre with the local launch of the ‘Live at the Rivoli’ album just released on Festival Records. On the way I did two shows at the University of Alberta in Calgary with the fantastic Canadian band Spirit of the West, who were to become firm friends: when they finally made it to the UK I helped as much as I could. Linda, Geoff, Hugh and John: we haven’t seen each other for years, but I have fond memories of our times together and John, my heart goes out to you in your battle with early onset Alzheimer’s, a ghastly disease I know only too well. All the very best. I also met and made friends with manic klesmer-punk accordionist Geoff Berner, who, I’m happy to say, claims me as a formative influence on his bitingly satirical and highly original songwriting style. We see each other fairly regularly, indeed did a show together at the Greys in Brighton in March 2015.

I returned to Vancouver for the Folk Festival in 1993 and the Readers’ and Writers’ Festival in 1994, and then eleven years came back with Robina in the summer of 2005 to do the Winnipeg Comedy Festival (even though I’m not a comedian as such) and the Vancouver Folk Festival. I keep thinking ‘I must get back to Canada’ and often get emails asking me to – I hope very much it’ll happen one day.

Back in 1990 I returned to an England in the grip of an anti-Poll Tax campaign and despite missing the big Trafalgar Square demonstration there were once again loads of benefits to be done and events to perform at. And this time we won – although it would be a somewhat Pyrrhic victory since the Tories still got in at the 1992 general election. But at least the Poll Tax debacle brought about Thatcher’s downfall: it was so unpopular that the Tories knew that to have a chance of winning the next election they had to pledge to ditch it, and the only way they could do that was by ditching Thatcher, so, quite unceremoniously, they did. The utterly unremarkable John Major became leader of the Conservative party, and soon the next Prime Minister. Thatcher left the Commons for the last time with tears in her eyes. We cheered. I wrote this song, dedicated to the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt against the Poll Tax of 1381.

Goodbye, Iron Lady, and good riddance.

TYLER SMILES

 

Here’s to you, the sceptic few

In the dark old days of ‘82

When a thousand corpses stoked an awful pyre

Here’s to ‘84 and 5

When all our dreams took another dive

‘Midst the jeers of Mammon and the howls of the Digger’s choir

There were times I really thought

They’d all been conned and all been bought

Too much Chingford on the brain

And never going to think again

But it’s a taxing time for Essex now….

 

CHORUS

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

On an angry crowd stretching miles and miles

Six hundred years but the lesson wasn’t learned

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

Though a hail of bricks and stones and tiles

Now history rolls back, the worm has turned

Retribution earned.

 

Tell me why it took so long

All these years we’ve sung this song -

And will the spectre ever go away?

A hundred thousand garden gnomes

Outside a hundred thousand homes

Are ‘standing on their own two feet’ today

No strident tones now, just a whine

A hand picked bank clerk holds the line

The same song with a few new chords

For Albion’s user-friendly hordes

A thornless rose is flopping in the breeze….

 

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

Through the acid rain and the sheepdog trials -

Perhaps he never really went away

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

On the village greens and the seven dials

There’s still a bit of fight in us today..

Tyler smiles.

 

And if it’s really over

And the swords turn into ploughshares

She’ll go to Eastern Europe -

Oh, they really love her there

The fool Walesa and the iron curse….

 

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

As Labour’s leaders close their files

On ‘Wat’s his name?’ from their own history

And Tyler smiles, Tyler smiles

On that angry crowd stretching miles and miles

‘Hey, gotcha, lady, gotcha - finally!’

Tyler smiles.