ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  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 charmi
ng 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…

  SLOUGH

  Come tourists all, and flock to Slough

  as many as the streets allow

  By bus, or train - no matter how -

  Come, very soon!

  And lift forever the sad curse

  once laid in dull, sarcastic verse

  by one whose poetry is worse

  than Mills and Boon!

  Sir John - oh, what a sense of farce!

  A poet of the teacup class

  obsessed with railways, and stained glass

  and twisted bough

  and thus impervious to the call

  of the post-war suburban sprawl

  of Harlow, Basildon and all

  and glorious Slough!

  Oh Slough! Harbinger of my dreams!

  home of a thousand training schemes

  and theme pubs, patronised by streams

  Of tetchy men

  with blow-dried hair and blow-dried brain

  diplomas in inflicting pain

  and ne’er a thought for Larkin, Raine

  and Betjeman!

  A thousand jewellers’ shops contend

  The kitchen unit is your friend

  Designer labels set the trend

  with a blank stare

  And now - the latest, brightest star -

  a brand new ten screen cinema!

  The folk will come from near and far

  To worship there…

  Oh self-made, independent town!

  The jewel in Margaret’s southern crown!

  No more will poets put you down

  with mocking voice!

  Come tourists all, and flock to Slough

  as Milton Friedman takes a bow

  This town is fit for heroes now -

  Come, and rejoice!

  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 ca
ricature 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.