A few weeks after typing this I’m again booked to play the Green Room in Welwyn, very near Hatfield, part of their manor, and if the last gig is anything to go by, loads of old faces will be there. We’re all old gits now, of course, but a bit of reminiscing will be in order and I’ll be reading them this bit. To Mick and the Hatfield crew, to Jim, Big Andy, Gary, Colin and the others – and to all those comrades who came later – a heartfelt thanks. You made the work of an anti-fascist poet, and not just me but all of us involved in the ‘cultural’ fight against the far Right, a lot safer back in the day.
April turned to May and the gigs kept coming: Birmingham Poly, then I headlined Manchester University Great Hall for the second time that year supported by Seething Wells and Little Brother. The day after that, a May Ball at Wadham College, Oxford, the first time I had done that kind of gig. Dinner jackets, ball gowns. It was like a door opening into another world, not one I wanted to be part of. Good reception though…
All this time, my thoughts kept returning to one upcoming date, and this one wasn’t a gig. It was going to be one of the greatest days of my life, one I wished so much my dad could have shared with me, one I’d never forget. Before that, I did a couple more shows and interviewed the superb Action Pact – shouty female-fronted bouncy Heathrow punk - hi Alison! - and militant talkover/dub trio Anti Social Workers for Sounds. Tim Wells, then one third of ASW, is now a clever, charismatic hub of the London spoken word scene and editor of Rising fanzine. He is currently setting up a ranting poetry archive and hosting a big London ranting gig in June 2015. Lovely bloke – and a Wells to boot. (Doc Marten boot: he’s a reggae skinhead.)
And then the day arrived. May 21st, 1983. FA Cup Final, Wembley, Brighton & Hove Albion v Manchester United. Our first ever final. The stuff of dreams. I know the FA Cup has been a bit devalued these days by the attitude of some of the top clubs, but back then it was the big one, especially for the fans of a team who had never been there before.
We’d just been relegated from the First Division after a four-year battle: Manchester United were, well, Manchester United. No-one gave us a cat’s chance in hell. I went back to my mum’s a couple of days before and travelled up with my friends, with the euphoric blue and white throng. We flooded into Wembley, sang our hearts out, and watched in hope. Somehow our team was matching the gods from Old Trafford. Then, unbelievably, we took the lead! A cross into the box, Gordon Smith in between two defenders – GOAL! We went nuts. Leading at half-time!
In the second half United’s Irish midfielder Norman Whiteside’s dreadful tackle left our right back Chris Ramsey writhing in agony: we screamed for a red card, but he stayed on the pitch. Ramsey was crocked and hobbling, but this was the Cup Final and he wanted to carry on. Frank Stapleton took full advantage, beat him to the ball and scored. Then an unmarked Ray Wilkins gave United the lead. Time ticked away. Despite a wonderful display it seemed the dream was over: in the final stages we started a new refrain. ‘We’re proud of you, we’re proud of you, we’re proud of you, we’re proud!’
Three minutes to go. We won a corner. Case to Grealish, Grealish to defender Gary Stevens, standing on the penalty spot. He controlled the ball, then smashed it into the net. We roared with happiness. 2-2! Extra time.
Both teams very tired. Few chances. And then the moment that all English football fans of a certain age will surely remember.
Ten seconds from the end of the match. United gave the ball away on the halfway line. Jimmy Case played it over their defence to our centre forward Mick Robinson. Robinson beat a couple of defenders and passed the ball to Gordon Smith, scorer of the first goal, standing only a few yards from the target with just United keeper Gary Bailey to beat. Around the country, around the world, listeners heard commentator Peter Jones shout, excitedly and almost in disbelief:
‘And Smith must score…’
Smith took a touch to steady himself, then shot, but he hadn’t lifted the ball high enough. It hit one of Bailey’s desperately flailing legs, then richocheted away to safely. The referee blew the whistle for full time. Teams like United don’t give teams like ours a second chance. No penalties in those days: the final was replayed the following Thursday and we were annihilated 4-0. No more dreams.
That was the start of a gradual, inexorable decline in the fortunes of the Albion, a decline which ended with us bottom of the whole league, ground sold by greedy scum, nearly going out of existence. But this isn’t primarily a football book, obviously, and if you don’t like football you may be pleased to hear that you’ll hardly be hearing about Brighton & Hove Albion again until the penultimate chapter: when you do, the story won’t just be about football. It will be in the context of an organised and very long supporters’ struggle against rapacious moneymen, a struggle in which I gave my all and which brought our fans into the national news headlines as pioneers in the fight against the destruction of our national game by people who care about nothing else but pounds and pence. But as the last word for the moment, here’s the poem I wrote about that memorable day: we used to have a fanzine with the same title as well.
So near and yet so far. Sorry, Gordon.
AND SMITH MUST SCORE
Five yards out, an open goal
and not a man in sight
The memory of that awful miss
still haunts me late at night…
Ten seconds left in extra time
and history in the making
But Smith’s shot hit the goalie’s legs
and now our hearts are breaking.
A paralytic lemming
with the skill of a dead cat
and the finesse of a hamster
could have done better than that…
A decomposing dogfish
wrapped in bondage head to toe
could have stuck that ball into the net –
but Gordon Smith? Oh no!
When Robinson broke down the left
and stuck the ball across
we knew for sure the Seagulls’ win
was Man United’s loss
and as old Smithy shaped to shoot
a mighty roar went up…
The impossible had happened!
We’d won the FA Cup!
A fleeting glimpse of glory -
alas, ‘twas not to be…
we lost the replay 4-0
went down to Division Three.
The one chance of a lifetime
so cruelly snatched away
But till the white coats come for me
I’ll never forget that day!
I trudged sadly back to Harlow by tube and train after the replay, sticking out like a sore thumb decked out in blue and white. But straight away I had something to take my mind off the football: in this insanely busy and eventful year, the very next day I was off to Holland with Swells, Little Brother and Belinda Blanchard to take part in the One World Poetry Festival, with shows in The Hague and at the world famous Paradiso club in Amsterdam.
If you are a writer and/or performer born with English as your first language, you’re very lucky: you have a gateway to the world. Your words will be naturally understood in most of the most populous, powerful and influential places on it, and in the others there will be many thousands or millions of people either fluent in your language or trying hard to be so. I can and do regularly perform in Holland and Scandinavia, for instance, because they speak English nearly as well as we do. If you are born with a minority language as your mother tongue, however, it’s far more difficult.
Every time my talented Dutch writer friend Cor Gout asks me to look over and if necessary correct or improve his work in English, I reflect on this. If you’re Dutch, say, your direct audience is Holland, the Flemish part of Belgium and tiny Suriname (you’ll be understood in Boer South Africa as well I guess, but they won’t like you!) And because of this tiny catchment area few people in other countries round the world will be learning Dutch as a foreign language: your horizons truly are limited.
> For a prose writer that’s not so bad: there are excellent, sensitive translators around. For a songwriter it’s crippling, for a performance poet it’s worse. Not only does the translation of a song or poem have to reflect the meaning and the ‘feeling’ of the original, but it has to fit into the musical or rhythmical framework you started with, or it becomes something else completely, usually something else nowhere near as good. I have experienced this myself.
I am pretty fluent in French and German: in 35 years I have managed one half-decent translation of a piece of my work into French and have three working pieces in German, one poem, two songs, all translated for me by fine East German linguist George Wolter (more of him later) and his former partner Ilona Vildebrand. I have done perhaps 500 gigs in Germany, solo and with my band Barnstormer, and those are or have been mainstays of my set. The rest of the time I do my introductions in German and the material in English, and that works fine. Germans speak reasonable English: give them the gist in their own language, and they’ll get the rest. As an English language performer I don’t have to translate my stuff unless I want to: it goes down very well if I can, but it’s not essential.
But minority language songwriters and poets are not so lucky. They have to write and perform in a foreign language to have any hope of wider acceptance at all. The best way for those who want to reach an inevitably mostly monolingual audience of native English speakers, or communicate with people from other countries who also use English as a second language, is the way that Cor and countless other good writers do it. Become fluent in English, write in English, get a friend to check and hone the finished product where necessary. That’s fine for songs, and for page poetry as well, but it doesn’t work for performance poetry: translating performance poetry into another language is more or less impossible.
Ask Jules Deelder.
I met Jules at the same time as I met Cor. Jules was already pretty famous then (he’s a national institution in Holland, a bit like a Dutch John Cooper Clarke) and he was compering our gig at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. It was a very ‘arty’ gig: the poets literally had to walk the plank. Yes, a plank, maybe a yard and a half wide, sticking out from the stage with a mic at the end of it. Imagine that after a few pints! But it was a great gig, we all went down very well, Jules was obviously much-loved and I could tell that he was a very clever and skilful performer, although I could understand very little.
Afterwards I asked him if he’d tried to work in English to reach a wider audience, and he said it was impossible: his English wasn’t that good and translating wouldn’t work anyway. As I say he’s very well known in Holland, but I guess nearly everyone reading this will have no idea who he is, and that’s down to language. We native English speakers really are very lucky.
Cor Gout and I are firm friends to this day. When I met him he was writing an article about the poetry festival for a national paper, but he was already working on spoken word and musical performance material under the name Trespassers W, taken of course from Winnie the Pooh. His first single with musical sidekick Wim Oudijk was a spooky pop cover of my pyromaniac anthem ‘Burn It Down’ and he has since released a huge number of challenging and very clever experimental music/poetry albums with a whole host of collaborators under the Trespassers name. And then there’s the books of poetry, the self-published magazines, the music criticism, the huge volume of writing on the history and culture of his home town of The Hague…but that’s all in Dutch. See my original point. He came over to England quite a few times for ranting poetry events I organised, and, having played semi-professionally, was also by far the most talented member of our ranters’ football team. A true polymath, Cor.
A mention here for another Dutch poet friend I have known for years and often shared a stage with: Harry Zevenbergen. He does perform in English, and it works well enough for everyone who hears him to enjoy his stage show and give him huge credit for trying. But hear him in Dutch and it’s like a straightjacket coming off. Anyway, our little troupe of ranting poets had fun in Amsterdam and Groningen: I’d be back. In about six months’ time, as it turned out.
On 9 June 1983 Thatcher was returned to power in the General Election. Countless Ragged Trousered Philanthropists thought ‘Victory In The Falklands War’ was more important than the fact that her policies were wrecking their lives, just as she had hoped they would when she escalated a conflict which could have been resolved through diplomacy by sinking the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano as it was sailing away from the Falklands exclusion zone. The intervention of the pathetic SDP - splitting the Labour vote in half - did the rest. But those of us who loathed everything she stood for just got shook ourselves down and carried on: for me, personally, things were going very well and now it was summer and time for my first Glastonbury. I celebrated my 25th in 2014: I hope there will be many more. Thereby hangs another tale.
I’d heard a lot about the legendary festival, was incredibly chuffed when the agency got me the gig, and even more chuffed when I learned that Swells had been invited too. I got there on the train and purchased an enormous amount of extremely raw scrumpy upon arrival. This was to be my downfall…
Glastonbury had started in 1970 with an attendance of 1,500: 1983 was the seventh, and the numbers of punters attending had rocketed to 30,000, but the original hippy vibe was completely intact. Everything I had heard appeared to be true. There was minimal security at the fence, and everyone was incredibly friendly: some people were wandering around naked, more than a few completely off their heads. The weather was hot and sunny, which added to the laid back atmosphere: it was perfect.
I was booked to play the Cabaret Tent, probably less than a quarter of the size it is now - these days it’s the Cabaret Marquee. I’d been told I could sleep there as well, so I hadn’t bothered to bring a tent of my own. Swells and I met Cabaret organiser Arabella Churchill (granddaughter of Sir Winston, co-founder of Glastonbury with Michael Eavis and organiser of the Theatre & Circus Field until her sad death in 2007: Bella’s Field was named so in her honour) who was lovely, and I made sure that my scrumpy was secure and out of temptation’s way until I’d done my gig. I remember that I went on after Rik Mayall, who was doing his Kevin Turvey routine, and I got a great reception: Swells had been on earlier and gone down well too. Happy with a job well done, and thirsty in the heat, I took the lid off the scrumpy and got stuck in big time.
I’d never drunk proper West Country scrumpy before. The nearest thing to decent cider we had in Sussex was Merrydown, and I’d had some of that, but this was different. It tasted wonderful, and not as strong as I thought it would. Little did I know! I was drinking real ale now quite a lot of the time, and this was like real ale only made with apples: an absolute treat. I was feeling sleepy, and starting to see double. It was so hot. I didn’t really need all these clothes on, did I? Loads of people were walking around naked. It wasn’t something I’d normally do, but when in Rome…
I stripped naked, put my clothes under my head as a pillow and went to sleep on my back in the blazing afternoon sun, still clutching the scrumpy.
The next thing I knew, I was being blasted back into consciousness by a bucket of cold water and an unmistakable West Yorkshire accent. ‘John! John! John! You’re bloody frying mate! Wake up!’
It was Swells. He’d found me, still lying on my back naked asleep in the sun. Seeing what it was doing to me, especially certain tender bits of me, he’d tried to wake me and failed, so he’d gone for the bucket of water. That worked. I woke up. After the initial shock of the cold water had passed, I realised that I was absolutely roasted. I looked like a cooked lobster on a fishmonger’s slab. All bits hurt, but some bits hurt more than others. My poor knob looked like a tiny sundried lugworm. My scrotum was a raw mass. (Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!) And, as happens with sunburn, after a couple of hours the pain got worse, and worse…
Arabella Churchill took pity on me. She gave me some soothing cream to put on my tenderest parts, some strong coffee t
o clear my head and let me sleep in her (huge) tent. Despite the pain I somehow managed to enjoy the rest of the festival, and it certainly taught me a lesson about scrumpy!
Arabella invited me back to the next Festival and I have played every one there has been since: I guess I’m one of the longest-serving performers on site these days. It has been fascinating to see how it has grown and how the security/commercial aspect has increased. For the first few years the deal I got to perform there was £100 plus more or less as many tickets for my mates as I wanted! Bomber, Mike and Roy (RIP) were very happy and quite a few others got in that way too. Imagine that kind of a deal now, where 135,000 tickets sell out online an hour and a half after they go on sale…
After the controversial incidents involving the travelling community in 1990, security got tighter and tighter, and numbers have increased massively over the years as well, from 30,000 punters at my first festival in 1983 to around five times that at my 25th in 2014 (total numbers on site these days must be well over 175,000). Given that ticket prices have soared to over the £200 mark too, there have been all sorts of accusations that Glastonbury has ‘sold out’ and ‘isn’t what it was’. Of course, I understand what people mean. Loads of old Glasto fans simply can’t afford to go now, and it is a huge operation, a world away from 1983.
I have to say that Robina and I still absolutely love it, however. Some of the main stage fare is certainly mainstream beyond belief these days, but there’s good stuff on there too sometimes - and there is such a diversity of music and performance on offer elsewhere, and so many different arenas to watch it in, that I defy anyone not to have a good time. In the Green Fields (and to a large degree in the Cabaret Marquee where I have performed each year) the spirit of the old Glastonbury is still very much alive, or at least it is for me. Since I stopped doing ‘comedy’ gigs in the early Nineties, Glastonbury is the one place where I still meet and perform alongside old friends from those days: Steve Gribbin (hi to wife Sharon and their kids, who always come too) Mark Thomas, Jeremy Hardy, Simon Munnery, Arthur Smith, Steve Frost, Robin Ince and many more. And my old mate Otway, though I see him a fair bit elsewhere.
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