ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

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

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

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

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

  Fashion. What a way to run popular culture!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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