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 ar
eas 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 Barnstor
mer 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.
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