ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  From day one, I appointed myself one of the chief recruiters to the cause. I was aware that many of my mates from the tuneful, socialist, Clash/Redskins/Neurotics punk axis were labouring under the same misapprehension about Blyth as I had been. ‘No, they’re not Crassy anarcho-shouters, I used to think that too. They are one of the most original and inspirational bands on the planet. Listen to this…’ I’m proud to say that many were converted but despite all our best efforts Blyth Power remain criminally underrated. Their music is undefinable and not easily categorised, but if you’ve never heard of them and you like intelligent lyrics and powerful folky/punky/medieval melodies – that’s the simplest way to put it - there’s an eleven album legacy for your listening pleasure, and these days, thanks to the internet, they’re just a click away.

  Happy thirtieth anniversary to a wonderful band and well done, Comrade Joseph Porter.’

  And so say all of us.

  By the mid 1980s I was starting to get loads of offers to tour overseas, firstly in Northern Europe, then by the end of the decade a lot further than that. As you’d expect, a lot of West German leftist activists and organisers had come to the shows in East Germany, especially East Berlin: I got offers to play in West Germany and took them up with gusto. I remember the astonishment among audiences at the fact that I spoke German (they weren’t used to this from an English performer) and the trebling of that astonishment when I told them that I’d learned most of it in the GDR!

  At a big left wing festival in the Ruhr in 1988 I was approached by a pissed bloke in a strange looking brown football strip.

  ‘Hello Attila. I know you are a punk rocker, you love beer, you’re an anti-fascist and a big football fan. I want to introduce you to a team you will like a lot. Please go and watch FC St Pauli in Hamburg next time you have the chance…’

  I joined him for yet another beer and he told me a story. A story of how, in the early 80s, squatters had started to move into Hafenstrasse (Harbour Street) in the central dock area of St Pauli in the great port city of Hamburg and how, around 1986, football fans among the squatters had begun to watch matches at St Pauli, a little community club not far away which up until that point had just had a few thousand supporters. One of the squatters, Volker Ippig, was given a goalkeeping trial – he was taken on by the club and a legend was born. Left wing football fans from all over Hamburg (many of them HSV supporters disillusioned by the violence and racism prevalent there) started going to St Pauli, joined by more and more people from the local scene, and in a year or so attendances had quadrupled, many of the newcomers committed anti-fascists and punks. Right up my street, of course, and I resolved to visit as soon as I could.

  It took me a year or so to get my first gig in Hamburg, co-ordinated so I could get to a St Pauli match. I can still remember the feeling of that initial game, of meeting leading activist Sven Brux in the squatted hairdressers at Beim Grunen Jager which had been turned into the first alternative club shop and of being in a lovely old stand (the Gegengerade) full of people who shared my politics, my musical tastes and my love of beer. It was brilliant - and I have been back to St Pauli many, many times since while on tour in Germany, both solo and with my band Barnstormer. Over 25 years I have seen the club grow from a local rallying point for disaffected punk rock football fans into a truly global phenomenon and have done countless gigs there, both pub shows organised by fans and official events hosted by the club itself in the larger Hamburg venues, Markthalle and Docks. In the early 90s I recorded a live album at the Marquee Club in St Pauli (yes, they used to have one there too). I’ve played in the original St Pauli fan pub Zum Letzten Pfennig, its modern day successor the Jolly Roger and the St Pauli wine bar run by my friends Heiko and Raphael. My band Barnstormer and I were special guests at the aftershow party following the annual ‘Ein Kessel Braun Weisses’ cabaret in the main stand in November 2014: I did a solo spot in the cabaret too, with memories of 25 years’ association with the club. Wonderful memories of a true football phenomenon. I’m Brighton till I die, but St Pauli will always have a place in my heart. When you see the picture of the banner they made for me after my 2015 medical scare, you’ll understand why.

  So far I’d managed to take my words and music to East & West Germany, Holland and Belgium, and in 1988 and 1989 I added Finland to the list with two tours taking in Helsinki, Tampere and Turku, the second of these with then performance poet, now TV writer/production company manager Henry Normal. I’d met Henry on the poetry circuit and we got along famously: he was, probably still is, a fine poet, though he’s chosen a different path alongside Steve Coogan running Baby Cow Productions and I haven’t seen him for years. Finland was great: like the neighbouring Scandinavian countries (I’ve been to Denmark, Sweden and Norway several times each now as well) their understanding of English was at a level where I could more or less do the set I would at home. And there’s nothing like going for a sauna when the temperature is minus 20 and then rolling in the snow immediately afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.

  But now it was time to go further afield: as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I’d been invited to the Vancouver Folk Festival in July 1989, and on the back of that had managed to find a Toronto agent to book me a coast-to-coast summer tour of Canada. It had better be good, I thought, I’ve blown out gigs in Pyongyang for this! And it was. 18 gigs in a month, from one side of Canada to the other: exhausting, but wonderful. And – not very punk maybe, but absolutely brilliant - my mother came too.

  I mentioned at the beginning of this book that Mum had worked as a shift typist on the Enigma project at Bletchley during the war, and there she had met her lifelong friends Jean, Margaret and Winn, all Scottish. Winn had emigrated to Toronto many years previously with her Polish husband and when I told my mother that I was going to tour Canada, she said ‘I’ll come with you and visit her!’ We flew over together and she stayed with her friend while I did my Eastern Canada gigs, starting at the Mariposa Festival in Toronto and from then to Waterloo, Hudson, Montreal, Ottawa (where I met up again with The Men They Couldn’t Hang, also touring Canada, one of my favourite bands and now an established force both in the UK and abroad) Peterboro, Kitchener and London, Ontario, finishing with a show at the Rivoli back in Toronto.

  Canada, like Australia, New Zealand and the US, has a particular niche specially designed for a performer like myself: the college and community radio network. In this country university radio, then as now, is confined to the campuses, and community radio is mostly very bland, if it exists at all, which means we are reliant on the whims of the national and local BBC since commercial stations are by their very nature totally mainstream. But in all the above countries it’s very different: college and community radio stations can broadcast as far as their transmitters can reach (normally at least covering the city in which they are based) and regular fund drives are held to increase broadcasting capacity. Most of these stations have an ‘alternative’ feel to them to a greater or lesser degree and many had played my material from albums gleaned on import, apart from in New Zealand, where my debut album ‘Ranting At The Nation’ was released locally and easily available. You’ll hear about the repercussions from THAT release soon enough.

  This meant that not only were there plenty of stations happy to invite me to be a live guest, but quite a few people had already heard of me through tracks which had been already played, plus of course whatever had filtered through from my occasional forays into the national UK media. The gigs went well, especially the Rivoli show in Toronto where Mum and Winn were guests of honour, and that gig was recorded for a live album scheduled for national release in a few months’ time on Festival Records, the label run by the Vancouver Folk Festival. Then it was time to get on a plane and do the rest of the tour, my first ever with my mother as my roadie…

  The first leg in Eastern Canada had been a road trip, although some of the drives were quite long: the second leg took in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, the Vancouver Folk Festival a
nd Victoria on Vancouver Island, huge distances accessible only by plane. I wasn’t looking forward to that, because I’ve never enjoyed flying, especially flying nearly every day for a week - but it had to be done, and having my mother with me helped me calm down a bit!

  She took it all in her stride, by now thoroughly used to having a shouty punk poet for a son, and despite the demanding schedule all went well. We had an especially great time at the Vancouver Folk Festival, befriended by a lovely woman called Mary Ann Cantillon and her family, who lived next door to the festival site, enabling Mum to go there for a rest when things got a bit much. It was at that festival that I met Mick Thomas and his rumbustuous, inspirational Melbourne punk-folk band Weddings Parties Anything for the first time – there would more meetings in the future in Australia. I introduced them to The Men They Couldn’t Hang, who were also at the festival: both musically and personally they got along famously, kindred spirits indeed. And Billy Bragg was there too. He was absolutely charming to my mum and when she complained about being a bit cold, he lent her his jumper. After the festival ended I had an extra gig in Vancouver at the Rogue Folk Club, and I persuaded Mum to play the piano for me on one of my songs. None of them have more than four chords, but she had to score everything first: she was always as hopeless at playing without a musical score as I am at trying to read one. We, or rather she, got a standing ovation: another moment I’ll never forget. Mum enjoyed the tour so much that she said ‘I’ll do that again!’ And she did, later, as you’ll see….

  I came back from Canada with a second tour already in the pipeline, scheduled for early the following year to tie in with my first Canadian album release. Very soon afterwards I was off for another annual stint at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, playing in an improvised ‘theatre’ in Marco’s Leisure Centre rather than one of the ‘hip’ places, for the simple reason that they’d give me a door deal rather than demanding extortionate rental for the space. (I regularly hear media reports about how expensive it is for performers to do the Fringe, but every year I played there I made money: it’s my living, there would have been no point otherwise. I guess if you want to play trendy venues run by corporate rip-off merchants that’s a different matter!) I bumped into old mate and Edinburgh regular John Otway again, invited him to do a spot at my show, we got along famously on stage and off - and we decided that the following year we’d do the festival as a double act.

  It was the start of a sporadic, hectic partnership which continues, albeit occasionally, to this day, described by one Fringe reviewer as ‘a marriage made in a mental hospital’. Our 1990 show, which we didn’t really rehearse at all (no need: it was basically each of us doing what we normally did at our solo gigs, with the other one interfering occasionally in as odd a fashion as possible) was called ‘Headbutts and Halibuts’. Logical really: Otway has a song where he headbutts the mic a lot, and as you’ve heard already, I have a fondness for flatfish. Amazingly, we got some great reviews and attendances were good as well. Through the early part of 1991 we did loads of well received double act gigs all over the country, so we decided to do another stint at Edinburgh together.

  ‘We’ve got to write some new stuff, Otway. We can’t just do the same set we did last year!’.

  ‘Why not, Attila? I’ve been doing the same set for the past 25 years, and it hasn’t done me any harm…’

  But I was adamant, and I’d had an idea. One of the high points of Otway’s set has always been his, erm, rather theatrical recreation of the Bob Lind song ‘Cheryl’s Going Home’ in which he climbs up ladders, throws himself around the stage and generally behaves like a demented, lovesick lunatic.

  ‘Hang on, Otway. Cheryl’s going home: that bit’s obvious, she’s leaving you because you’re such a prat, and that’s why you’re so upset. But what exactly did you do? Who is she leaving you for? And where’s she going?’ I think I know, and I’m going to tell you…’

  Over the next few months Otway and I wrote ‘Cheryl – A Rock Opera’ (subtitled ‘An Everyday Tale of Satanism, Trainspotting, Drug Abuse and Unrequited Love.’) I was The Narrator, a Worldly Cynic: in thunderously sub-Chaucerian rhyming couplets I built a story detailing Cheryl’s increasingly nefarious and unfaithful activities and demanded a response from Otway. Otway was John, a Jilted Lover: in wimpy, pathetic, soppy songs he either denied that Cheryl had ever done any of the dreadful things I was accusing her of or made pathetic excuses for them. ‘Yeah, I know about the goat…’

  I’m not going to give the storyline away, but the finished product was a modern day morality tale – and it went down a storm at Edinburgh 1991, its 45 minutes stretched into an hour by my simultaneous German translation of Otway’s deranged version of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ and a ‘Glue Medley’ in which, for instance, Nilsson’s ‘Without You’ became ‘Without Glue’ and Sonny and Cher’s ‘I’ve Got You Babe’ became… you guessed it. You had to be there. Honestly.

  We recorded ‘Cheryl’ in an Edinburgh studio during the festival, with help from musical director Richard Holgarth, released a CD of the finished result and toured the show for several years to enthusiastic audiences, including a triumphant performance at the grand old Hackney Empire in London backed by Otway’s band – all old friends of mine from Harlow. We still gig together occasionally to this day. Otway is a good mate, as mad as ever, a true English original. He now has two hits, a film, and would have had his own World Tour in his own jet (Ot-Air) if he’d found enough people to fill the plane. He nearly did, but not quite, and as a result lost his share of the deposit on the plane - £15,000. His mates and backers lost far more than that. I felt really, really sorry for him.

  But if you think some of what Otway gets up to is nuts, I have my moments too. It was around this time that I stood in for Donny Osmond at a gig.

  I’d always enjoyed playing the Marquee Club, the history-sodden rock venue in Soho’s Wardour Street, sadly now closed: as already mentioned, I’d supported Otway there twice in 1982, the first time I had met him. My next gig there wasn’t until 1989, a tension-filled and storming night supporting the Angelic Upstarts. The previous year they had been attacked by fascists at a punk festival at the Astoria and the gig closed down: the fascists had vowed that the Upstarts would never play London again. Anti-Fascist Action laid down the gauntlet at one of the capital’s most high profile venues, the fascists didn’t show, the gig was fantastic, a truly memorable night. But the next offer I got to play there would be rather a contrast.

  A Monday in January 1991. Phone rings. Can’t remember the bloke’s name after all these years, but the conversation is still vivid.

  ‘Is that Attila?’ Hi, I book shows for the Marquee. Donny Osmond is supposed to be playing here tomorrow night, but he’s pulled out. We don’t want to shut the venue for the night, and we’re looking for someone to do a set. Would you be interested? We’ll pay you and give you as much beer as you want and as big a guest list as you like.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Well, I think I know the first verse of ‘Puppy Love’ - sure, I’ll give it a go!’

  The deal was simple – everyone who had booked to see Donny got a refund and the chance to watch Attila the Stockbroker for free: I had one day to ring round as many people I knew as possible and tell them that I was Donny Osmond’s understudy at the Marquee the following night, and there was free beer for anyone who made it along!

  Unfortunately this was of course way before the advent of social media, so I couldn’t put an event page on Facebook.

  I certainly will if it ever happens again.

  The gig was sold out. About half the audience decided to take up the Marquee’s offer, which meant that I was confronted with a fairly large number of very disappointed ladies in their mid thirties, plus a smattering of male partners, several of whom came up and told me that they were very pleased at the prospect of spending an evening listening to Attila rather than Donny! About twenty Attila fans turned up and got the promised free beer
. I started my set: by the end of the first fifteen minutes half the Donny fans had walked out.

  But the rest of them really enjoyed it. I got an encore. Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’d worked out the chords to ‘Puppy Love’ on the mandola, and memorised most of the words. The rest is history. Never to be repeated history, mind, but history nevertheless…

  In March 1990 I went back to Canada for my second tour, a frenetic time since I flew there more or less straight after my latest appearances at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin. The tour had been planned to coincide with my first Canadian vinyl/cassette release. ‘Live at the Rivoli’ had, as I’ve already said, been recorded in Toronto during the previous year’s stint, and radio stations were well primed with copies in advance so I got plenty of interviews and airplay on national CBC radio as well as the college stations, plus a couple of TV appearances. I now had a bi-monthly column in the Guardian, ‘On The Road’ which meant I could document my travels for UK audiences as well.

  My second decade as Attila the Stockbroker was starting off fine, but things were getting worse and worse in the country of my birth since on top of all the other injustices perpetrated by Thatcher she had now cooked up the hated Poll Tax, a local taxation system so stupidly unfair even a substantial section of her own party were opposed to it. Basically, it levied a flat fee on everyone registered to vote, more or less regardless of income or ability to pay, meaning that thousands of poor people removed themselves from the electoral register. This suited the Tories down to the ground since such people definitely were not going to vote for them! I’m absolutely certain that was a part of the reason why they introduced it.