Determined to get more gigs outside Harlow, I took every chance available to shout my stuff at political rallies and events: one of the most unusual early ones I did was at Greenham Common, sometime in mid 1981 before it became a women only camp. I also hooked up with Patrik Fitzgerald, the early punk acoustic singer-songwriter best known for the punk classic ‘Safety Pin Stuck in my Heart’ and another early inspiration of mine, and we did a few gigs together. (We had some minor disagreements after that and went our separate ways, but in 2006, we got in touch through the internet, ended up touring the UK and Norway together again, and had a wonderful time. We still tour together sporadically to this day.)
Patrik introduced me to the poet Anne Clark, who, back then, was running events at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon; with her various musical accompanists she has been a huge presence on the mainland European spoken word/music scene for many years now. Anne was involved with ‘Riot Stories’, a ‘young people’s’ poetry publishing initiative set up by Paul Weller of The Jam, and promised to pass some of my material on to him. She organised a gig for myself and Patrik at the Warehouse, then all three of us were invited to Kidbrooke comprehensive school in South London by Joy Scully, who was teaching there. The gig was really well received and the school decided to publish a transcript of the performance.
I was really pleased: I’d just got my first tape out, now I was going to have some poems published in a book. I arranged to meet Joy in a burger bar next to Victoria Station to go through the material, and as I came in I saw a couple of little kids hassling customers. Soon they came over, one flashing a knife.
That day I wrote one of my best-known poems ever. It’s sold well over 100,000 copies. Why? Because it ended up on the celebrated 1982 Cherry Red Records compilation sampler album ‘Pillows and Prayers’. This sold in bucket loads because it was very varied and very good, but, far more importantly, because in true ‘Faust Tapes’ tradition (old gits will remember that one) it cost just 99p. Or the equivalent in local currency…
A BANG & A WIMPY
Swing door swings open in the fast food fun palace
Two pairs of eyes meet mine: I steel myself and grimace
Elbows against the counter they slump: mean-eyed, po-faced, no-nonsense
Prepubescent pugilists, terror tots, South London’s finest
Knee-high nihilists planning nursery crimes
The Wimpy Bar mafia, nine years old, macho, murderous
Primary school but primed to kill, or maim, or terrorise
Size you up and slice you through with Peter Sutcliffe eyes
They’re into older women – eleven or twelve’s their favourite age
They chat them up as they come in, invade their space like space invaders
‘Oi luv! Want some chips?’ Then invite them home – for glue
And a private rendition of the new Exploited single
Or some other manic mayhem to make their extremities tingle
Soon they’ll be old enough to bunk into a disco
But till then they’ll stick to the hamburger hustle
A bang and a Wimpy, a Wimpy and a bang
The grim and grimy gangsters from the mustard-and-Crass gang
Video vandals, violent virgin vigilantes verging on the vindictive….
Now I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels
Been searching everywhere, couldn’t find them anywhere
But here they are in the wimpy bar right by Victoria Station
I stand and watch them operate in muted fascination
Till ‘Ere, got ten pee, mate?’ snaps me back to hard reality
And the half concealed glinting switchblade smiles with awful clarity
I give them twenty-one pence and they give me a hard smile
Now they’ve the price of another tube they’re happy for a while
And in the Wimpy wonderland the crisis kids run free -
A bang, a Wimpy and a sniff and home in time for tea…
Then everything started to happen at once.
In late 1981 I had a call from Stuart Fancy, one of the organisers of the Woolwich Right To Work Campaign and now the world’s only Trotskyist capitalist chess champion (of Papua New Guinea – but don’t laugh, don’t even smile: if you want to lose at chess, play Stuart). They’d liked what I’d done at the march in Harlow, they were organising a series of ‘Jobs Not YOPS’ events in London (YOP stood for Youth Opportunities Programme, the 1980s Tories’ euphemism for cheap labour) and they wanted me to compere them. And there was a ‘People’s March For Jobs’ demonstration happening soon: would I perform at it? Poetry off the back of a lorry as I’d done in Harlow?
‘Sure’ I said.
Anne Clark had told me that there was a ‘Poetry Olympics’ event at the Young Vic Theatre in London in late November, and she’d be reading alongside Paul Weller. ‘You lucky so and so’ I thought. When I met Joy at the Wimpy bar she said she and her daughter Mary were going, and I realised that it was the same day as the Right to Work Campaign march. I decided that if I could blag a spot in between punk bands in Harlow, I could blag a spot at the Young Vic Theatre – or at least give it a try. So I said I’d see them there…
On the day of the demo I turned up at the lorry in Woolwich and met the skinhead poet Seething Wells, or Swells, as he was generally known. My partner in ranting verse for years, the other half of my first book, a force of nature and then some: you’ll hear a lot more about him in this book, his poetry, his journalism and his bloody-minded brilliance, right up until his tragic death from cancer in 2009. I miss you, Swells.
He’d already heard about what I was doing and had written to tell me about the developing ‘ranting poetry’ scene in his home town of Bradford and his ‘Molotov Comics’ fanzine. ‘Ranting poetry’, that’s what he called it: I liked that concept. I liked it even more after I’d heard his stuff: he was brilliant. ‘Tetley Bittermen’, ‘Aggro Britain’, ‘He/She’s Perfect’ - absolutely superb. When he told me that he’d named himself after a sewage farm in Surbiton (his real name was Steven Wells, as NME readers and general media-observers will know) that was the clincher. I decided that we’d try and crash the Poetry Olympics together, and invited him to come to the Young Vic with me. He thought it a great idea.
We didn’t have tickets or anything, so I sought out the organiser, London based poet/impresario Michael Horovitz. Horovitz has been running ‘Poetry Olympics’ events and editing anthologies like ‘New Departures’ and ‘Grandchildren of Albion’ since the Ice Age and is the living incarnation of the term ‘old hippie’: his ‘Anglo-Saxophone’ (read: kazoo) performances defy description. But I have huge respect for him: he has probably done more than anyone else alive today to help new and up and coming poets, and he has an open mind. When confronted by a punk rocker and a skinhead claiming to be poets and demanding spots at his showpiece event, he didn’t bat an eyelid. We were on. Specifically, we were on straight after Roger McGough, and immediately before Paul Weller. Five minutes each.
The big one.
I ran on stage and spat out ‘They Must Be Russians’ and ‘Russians in the DHSS’. All the gigs I’d done previously had been to punk crowds and/or at demonstrations, needing pure in-your-face energy to win the audience over. I’d never performed to a several hundred strong crowd of poetry-lovers before, but of course I did what I normally did. Most of them had never seen or heard anything like it. They loved it.
The place erupted.
Then I introduced Swells, who did ‘Tetley Bittermen’ and the place erupted again.
Unbeknown to us, New Musical Express editor Neil Spencer, a keen poetry fan, was reviewing the gig: he raved about us in the following week’s issue of the NME.
Michael Horovitz was well impressed. He said our poems would be included on the live LP of the event he was planning, and invited us to do a set at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, at a ‘Poetry Olympics’ event early the following year.
Gerda Barraclough from
Henley invited Swells and me to do a CND gig there, and Neil Spencer dispatched X Moore, soon to be Chris Dean of The Redskins, to review it for the NME. (After the gig, Swells and I spent the night in a double bed at Gerda’s place, an experience preserved in my poem ‘The Night I Slept with Seething Wells’!)
Paul Weller invited Swells - not me - to support The Jam at the Hammersmith Odeon a week or so later. Swells returned the favour from the Young Vic gig and invited me to share his allotted time. We turned up backstage.
‘You the poet?’ grunted Weller’s manager dad to Swells.
‘Yes’ said Swells.
‘Who’s that c**t then?’
Despite this inauspicious introduction we both did a set, and the massed ranks of Jam fans gave us a great reception. The Jam were brilliant too. We got another fantastic review in the NME from the Henley gig and editor Neil Spencer commissioned me to write a big feature for the paper on ‘new town life’, based on the Harlow punk scene.
Very soon afterwards, still in December 1981, Swells and I were doing a Right To Work Campaign gig at a pub called The Roundhouse in Wandsworth. Red Saunders, the co-founder of Rock Against Racism, turned up and said he wanted to record it, which he did, on top of an old reggae cassette. It was a good live recording of a fine gig with an enthusiastic audience, and Red was on the ‘phone a couple of days later to say he wanted to release an EP of our poems – me on one side, Swells on the other - on his new Radical Wallpaper label.
I was sceptical, to be honest, because I didn’t think anyone would buy poetry on a record, but happy to accept and really pleased that a bit of vinyl was going to come out with my poems on it. I selected ‘A Bang and A Wimpy’, the two ‘Russians’ ones, ‘I Don’t Talk To Pop Stars’, ‘Pap Music for Wreck People’, ‘Andy Is A Corporatist’ and ‘Foyer Bar’ (there will be more on the last two poems later) and Swells chose five for his side. We decided to call the EP ‘Rough, Raw and Ranting’ because it was (!) and Red said he’d be in touch when it was pressed.
So in the space of a month I’d had two reviews in the NME, been commissioned to do my first piece of national press journalism, supported the Jam and been promised poems on two records, and most of that was down to five minutes on stage at the Poetry Olympics! Definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time…
Early in the New Year of 1982 the Right to Work Campaign got in touch again, confirming that they wanted Swells and me to compere the ‘Jobs Not YOPS’ march round London. By now the ‘ranting poets’ were becoming some kind of a team (as we grew in numbers, we’d also become a football team, though not a very good one…) In addition to Swells and myself there was the superb Little Brother and Joolz Denby from Bradford, Ginger John from Manchester and my mate Little Dave from Harlow, lead singer of the Unborn Dead, who took to ‘ranting’ like a duck to water. Very soon I was to meet the great Benjamin Zephaniah, who gave us the punk/reggae connection, in poetry as in music. It was time to tell the world.
I decided that, having got NME interested, albeit by accident, I should tackle the other major music weekly at the time, Sounds. They were very different. NME saw itself as an ‘intellectual’ rock paper, the home of ‘philosophers’ (ha!) like Ian Penman and Paul Morley, while Sounds specialised in down to earth heavy metal and street punk, the latter presided over by Features Editor Garry Bushell. Without further ado I took the train down to the Sounds office near Covent Garden and invited ‘Gal’, as he was known (doubtless still is) out for a beer.
Garry Bushell. Perhaps the most frustrating bloke I have ever encountered in the music scene, and I’ve met a few. Those who have never met him and only seen the stuff he has served up in various right wing tabloids or on TV may not believe this, but he did his journalistic training at Socialist Worker, and was once a supporter of the party. (Not for a long time, and I haven’t spoken to him since he crossed the printers’ picket line at Wapping while working for The Sun, but he was…) He is also highly intelligent, can write really well and can be very good company. When I first met him, we got on famously.
Like so many English people, especially people with healthy careers and bank balances, Bushell has a sacred cow, his ‘working class background’ and he wants everyone to know about it. Now I know that the worlds of journalism and the entertainment industry, like everywhere else, have their fair share of patronising snobs and clueless, pampered dorks - but you can take things too far. Bushell created the early 80’s ‘Oi’ punk/skinhead movement as a ‘working class alternative to the middle class punk scene’, and when he went to the Sun part of his justification was ‘it’s a working class paper’. These days he’s one of many journalists on the populist Right who uses ‘middle class’ and ‘politically correct’ as a stick to beat progressive people round the head with, and justifies all kinds of reactionary ideas because ‘that’s what working class (read: real, worthwhile, sensible) people think’.
Well I think that’s a pile of crap. There are millions of working class people who are not reactionary, tabloid-duped idiots, and it’s their values – the values of community, solidarity, trade unionism, social justice – which are the ones worth supporting. I know all about the Union Jack waving, Royal Family loving, right wing, anti-union, aspirational, ‘loyal’ working class: it is the exact definition of my father and my maternal grandparents, it was of my mother before I argued it out of her, and it can rot in hell.
Robert Tressell’s ‘Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. Craven cannon fodder for the pointlessly murderous upper class ego-squabble which was the First World War.
I owe my existence to the bug which kept my father back behind the lines the day every single other member of his company was killed or captured at the Somme in World War One. Brave, duped, dying in a senseless rich man’s spat.
That stupid attitude seems to be dying out a bit now, and people tend to be taken more for who they are (though there is a very worrying downside to this which makes me hanker for the old days a bit: so much of our culture, so many bands these days are bland, suburban and boring. Keane, Coldplay… FUCK OFF!) But back in the 1980s it was very different, and of course it wasn’t just the Right who used to go on like that. ‘A working class background’ used to be a holy grail in the left wing music scene, garlanded by years of guilt-ridden liberal self-loathing by people who aspired to one. And not only did you have to have parents from working class backgrounds and grow up with little money: rather bizarrely, it helped a lot if you only started being clever at what you were doing after you left school.
As you’ve already heard, my mum was bright and talented and won a county scholarship: I followed in her footsteps. Great in the ‘conventional’ world: bad news if you were a radical punk rocker. The 70s/80s UK music scene was probably the only place anywhere, ever, in the whole history of the world, where doing well at school, passing exams, going to university and so on was seen by some as a disadvantage - a lack of ‘street credibility’. ‘Just because you’re better than me/Doesn’t mean I’m lazy’ Billy Bragg famously sang. I’ve never thought academic achievement made me ‘better’ than anyone else, of course, but I’ll be damned if it made me ‘worse’, in some way less qualified to be the radical poet I was – and still am. No guilt trips round here.
When I met one of my great poetic heroes, Roger McGough, and he heard me speaking French, he said ‘John, you don’t want people to hear you doing that, it doesn’t go with the image’. WHAT? And in Bragg’s biography ‘Still Suitable for Miners’ by Andrew Collins, we ‘ranting poets’ (Swells and I basically) are described thus: ‘Angry youngish men playing at being Doctor Marten’s own town criers’. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Speaking at least one foreign language is considered absolutely normal by most people all over the world: it’s only in ‘insular’ England where it’s viewed with something approaching suspicion. Being academically bright isn’t a ‘privilege’ - and it doesn’t mean you don’t know how to handle a pair of DMs. I used mine on fascists occasionally because they used their
s on me: I wasn’t ‘playing at’ anything, I can assure you. I have worn nothing but DMs since the 1970s, and, although I very much hope that at 57 I’ll never have to use them in anger again, if I have to, I will.
I guess it all goes back to primary school in Southwick and that old ‘swot’ thing. It’s not ‘English’ to be clever, confident AND able to stand up for yourself. That’s ‘arrogance’. Robert the bully: It was nearly 50 years ago, but I’m sure his name was Robert. Tried to pick on me because I was bright, the teachers liked me, I was in for the eleven plus early and I helped the other kids with tests. I fronted him, no problem. I was the primary school ‘swot’ who was popular with the teachers and stood up to the bullies, and I’m proud of that. Softy Walter and Dennis the Menace rolled into one, I guess.
I have always found people who try and use their background as a point-scoring device really annoying. ‘Prolier than thou’ inverted snobs of all varieties (‘my dad earned less money than your dad, I grew up in a council house, you didn’t, I passed fewer exams than you, nah, nah, nah’) are irritating dickheads. People who indulge in that kind of behaviour, especially right wing idiots who are now thoroughly ‘middle class’ in terms of income and bank balance, should have the piss taken out of them mercilessly as in the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch in Monty Python (‘Lived in a hole in t’road? You were lucky!’) or invited to return to their former state if they are so bloody proud of it. A working class background, if it meant, or means, anything at all, means nothing unless you are on the radical left and stand up for the poor, the disadvantaged, the demonised: otherwise you’re just a me-first traitor. Working class right wingers are turkeys voting for Christmas.
If I have to choose between a Sun reader who parrots Murdoch’s clichés about ‘scroungers’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the opposite extreme, let’s say a progressive, left wing, open-hearted Old Etonian baronet (hi Comrade Sir Henry!) I’ll take Sir Henry any day. And to knock this one on the head once and for all: the greatest politician in my lifetime, Tony Benn, was an aristocrat, the greatest and most inspirational figure in rock ‘n’roll, ever, Joe Strummer, was a diplomat’s son, and the most influential DJ in history, John Peel, was an upper class bloke from the Wirral. It’s not where you come from, it’s what you DO that matters. 1-0 Attila. End of that argument!
ARGUMENTS YARD Page 7
