ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  But gig wise, the most exhilarating part of that exhausting year was yet to come. Steven Herrick had found a Sydney booking agent called Frank Cremona to help him organise gigs for me in Australia, and David Eggleton and his friend Otis Mace had been receiving enthusiastic responses to the idea of an Attila tour of New Zealand. On November 26, having already done a hundred or so gigs in the UK in 1991, I flew to Sydney to begin my first ever Antipodean tour.

  In the weeks preceding the trip I read Robert Hughes’ epic ‘Fatal Shore’ and listened to lots of Weddings Parties Anything to get me in the mood. No Fosters though, those days were long, long gone: it would be green bottles of Cooper’s Ale which would sustain me through that first tour during the Australian summer. Loads of pre-tour interviews were done with Aussie and NZ radio and press, and I arrived in a very warm Sydney to an even warmer welcome from Steven and his wife Cathie.

  My first gig was at a legendary inner city pub, the Rose, Shamrock & Thistle – affectionately known locally as the Three Weeds. Support band were The Whitlams, named after the Aussie premier who was sensationally and unjustly removed by the Governor General of Australia in 1975 in the middle of a constitutional crisis. Good name, I thought, and at that point they were a great band too: they were to take a different musical path later and gain huge commercial success (and a less than complimentary role in a much later poem of mine) along the way. There was a good turnout, I went down very well and the next day I did some radio interviews, went swimming at Bondi Beach and had a storming gig at a poetry night at the Harold Park Hotel. I was starting to like Australia a lot.

  At the time (though sadly not any more) the best thing about touring Australia for people like me was the ABC radio station JJJ. It was like a permanent John Peel Show, playing alternative and underground stuff all the time, day and night, to most of Australia, and it was incredibly popular. On my first tour they gave me a fair amount of exposure: on my second tour in 1993 I did what amounted to a short gig live on air and the impact was astonishing, as you’ll hear later.

  After the Harold Park gig I flew to Melbourne for an interview with the legendary DJ Dave Taranto on his ‘Cheese Shop’ show, broadcast on the influential Melbourne radio station 3RRR, and had a wonderful gig at the venue he ran, the Prince Patrick Hotel. Then I did the Royal Derby pub with award winning Aboriginal singer/songwriter Kev Carmody. Kevin and I discussed the dreadful plight of his people, marginalised and beset with social problems often connected with alcohol. ‘White people drink to forget, John’ he said. ‘Black people drink to remember’. I’ll never forget that.

  Then, after a night hosted by the Perseverance Poets (based at the beautifully named Perseverance Hotel) it was back to Sydney, where I met up with Weddings Parties Anything and supported them at a sold out and rumbustuous night at the Annandale – their audience loved my stuff and it cemented a friendship with the Weddoes, and especially singer and songwriter Mick Thomas, which continues to this day. I have organised many gigs in the UK for him, and did my third Australian tour with him in 2000. At a show with the late, great socialist songwriter Alistair Hulett’s band Roaring Jack at the Sandringham (‘Sando’) I met up with witty Hobart singer-songwriter Rob Clarkson, whose ‘Hellbent in Hobart’ tape was literally played to bits once I got home: I still miss listening to it, it’s brilliant! One more gig in Sydney, and then it was time to fly to New Zealand.

  I’ve already described how New Zealand was the one other country apart from the UK where my debut album ‘Ranting at the Nation’ had been released in 1983: it had had a lot of radio play and I’d been getting sporadic letters and visits from Kiwis ever since. While in Australia I’d been hearing positive reports from over there about the pre-tour publicity – big headlines ‘Attila on the Rampage’ in the national New Zealand Herald and ‘Attila Invasion of New Zealand’ in Wellington’s Dominion newspaper being two – and I’d done stacks of radio interviews. But even so, I was in for a shock.

  I arrived in Auckland on December 17, picked up the mandola, cleared customs and wandered towards the arrivals area where I was meeting David Eggleton and Otis Mace. There were a couple of TV cameras waiting at the entrance point: must be someone famous on the flight, I thought to myself. The next thing I knew this bloke (TV music reporter Dylan Taite it turned out) was in my face with a microphone.

  ‘Attila the Stockbroker, welcome to New Zealand!’

  I was absolutely flabbergasted.

  There was another TV crew there to film me, and I had a quick chat with them before being taken to a bus and interviewed for the national television news while doing a kind of punk sightseeing tour of Auckland. Then it was on to the Galaxy Theatre in the Old Customs House building (quite a big place) for a gig that was so packed that I was told people broke down the fire exit doors to get in. I’d brought as much merch as I could take on the plane and it all went at that first show!

  It was like being a pop star. Utterly bizarre.

  Later I saw myself on television - someone must have videoed the piece - and read the New Zealand Herald article: everything was rather put into perspective. I was on the national news following an item about a dispute between two neighbours who couldn’t agree which one was legally responsible for cutting down a dangerous tree straddling their properties. And immediately after the very large piece about me in the paper there were about 16 pages of fat sheep prices. (Does that mean no-one likes thin sheep in NZ? That seems a bit unfair…) But there was no doubt that the interest generated from that album release eight years previously had, if anything, grown over the years, and I was very happy: as a DIY poet/performer, to travel to literally the other side of the world and get a reception like that really meant something to me.

  The one thing I hadn’t managed to do was come up with any local material before the trip, but I put that right the following day as myself, David and Otis flew to Wellington. Six years earlier the Greenpeace vessel ‘Rainbow Warrior’ had been sunk by French Government agents because of its role in the protests against French nuclear testing at the Moruroa Atoll, and a crew member had died: the level of outrage in the international response had been muted, to say the least, and Kiwi president Jim Bolger had tried to smooth over the whole affair, not least because of pressure from the massive NZ farming lobby threatened by a French boycott of their number one product. Taking a very famous and obvious tune, I wrote:

  Somewhere under the Rainbow swam a spy

  Planted a bomb and left a man to die

  Murder sanctioned by the Bolger crew

  Sheepshagging farmers told them what to do

  Kiwi corporate interests don’t give a damn

  They just want someone to buy their lamb

  Cowardly politicians toe the line

  I’ve seen molten jelly with more spine

  This angry Pom is quite concerned for you –

  Surrounded by sheep and governed by them too…

  This song (which appeared on my 1993 Australia/NZ CD release ‘668 – Neighbour of the Beast’ on Sydney’s Larrikin Records) has the distinction of being the only one to date where I have used sheep as backing vocalists, the ending degenerating into a literally sheepish version of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ entitled ‘This Lamb Is Your Lamb’(!) Anyway, off to Wellington where it went down very well at some student radio interviews and at the strangely named New Carpark venue, again stuffed with fans: then David and I flew to Christchurch, where I had a very strange encounter.

  In the UK, if a crew of boneheads turned up at one of my gigs wearing ‘White Power’ T shirts, there would be only one reason – to try and smash it (and me) up. So when, among the healthy crowd at the Coachman Inn, I spotted a very unhealthy-looking bunch doing precisely that, I asked the promoter why the hell he had let them in, and didn’t he know what was going to happen? No, he said, they’d be fine, that was ‘just’ the name of a New Zealand gang, that particular lot weren’t any trouble and were big fans of Attila the Stockbroker!

  I’m afraid th
at didn’t cut any ice with me, so I went and had a word. No, they said, they weren’t there for aggro and they loved my stuff, they’d got all my tracks on the Oi albums and one of them had ‘Ranting at the Nation’ too. White Power was their gang, Black Power was another gang, the Mongrel Mob was another gang, there were loads of gangs… it was just how things were in NZ. Gangs for whites, gangs for Maoris. And that didn’t really mean they were racists, they knew I hated fascists, they liked my anti-fascist stuff, they weren’t fascists, NZ was different…

  Oh, bollocks. Blokes in White Power T shirts who said they liked my stuff and that they weren’t racists. So what should I do now? I asked them to cover up their shirts and they did. I did my set, they cheered like everyone else, and I’m sure they’d have bought some merch if I hadn’t sold it all in Auckland. Things became even more confusing when I was told later that some of the black gangs used Nazi insignia and some gangs had patches like biker gangs but didn’t ride bikes. Weird.

  I have had some unusual cultural experiences, but blokes in White Power T shirts telling me they weren’t racists has got to be one of the most exotic ones ever. Fortunately I only encountered them in Christchurch, which seemed to be their stronghold: as a sad postscript, the Coachman venue was destroyed in the 2011 earthquake.

  Then David drove me to Dunedin, where I did a gig at Sammy’s Nightclub with The Verlaines, a legendary band signed to seminal New Zealand label Flying Nun Records: turns out they were big fans too. From there I flew to Auckland for a couple of days to do more interviews and radio spots and look round the city before a show at the Loud Dork Café – and on Christmas Eve it was back to Sydney.

  I’ll never forget Christmas Day 1991, because I spent most of it at a party round a swimming pool on a steaming hot day, downing schooners of Cooper’s Ale and stuffing myself with turkey! One last triumphant gig at the Harold Park Hotel on December 28, billed as ‘Attila the Stockbroker’s Antidote to Christmas’ – and home. What a year. The NME may have tried to tell me to get lost about eight years previously, but sod ‘em – the world was now my oyster, and I was on a high.

  As had happened in Canada, the impact of my first tour of Australia encouraged Warren Fahey, boss of Sydney-based folk label Larrikin Records, to offer me an Australian album deal – and Frank Cremona, the Sydney agent who had organised much of my first tour, agreed to put another one together for early 1993 to coincide with its release. David Eggleton and John Kitto of the Dunedin Music Bureau sorted NZ, including quite a few gigs tied in with student orientation week (freshers’ week in the UK) and in late February I flew direct to Auckland for the start of my second Antipodean jaunt promoting my debut CD there, ‘668: Neighbour of the Beast’. I was going to have company on the Australian leg: both my mother and my friend Mike were flying out to join me, Mum on her way to her own trip to New Zealand to see her brother Mick and his family, last visited twelve years previously.

  ‘668: Neighbour of the Beast’ comprised excerpts from my five most recent albums: ‘Scornflakes’, ‘Donkey’s Years’ and ‘Cheryl – A Rock Opera’ (UK) ‘Live at the Rivoli’ (Canada) and the recently-released ‘This Is Free Europe’ (Germany) including, of course, the very appropriate ‘Bible According to Rupert Murdoch’. But I’d written quite a few pieces especially for Antipodean ears, and one, ‘The Beatification Of Paul Keating’, really hit the spot because my tour coincided with the Australian general election scheduled for March 13.

  Aussie Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating had put his arm around the Queen while showing her around during a visit to Australia: apparently that was contrary to protocol (big deal!) The sycophantic UK press had a field day, with the Sun describing him as ‘The Lizard Of Oz’ and people like Ian Botham and Mike Gatting having a go as well: with enemies like that, he must have been doing something right. Keating was a brash individual with an odd mix of views and policies, but despite this his forthright way of demolishing his opponents, and the colour he brought to Australian politics, was great: as I said in the song, ‘you sound like you’re pissed and you’re a monetarist, but Keating we need you’.

  Due to the proximity of the election this song got serious amounts of radio plays even before I arrived in Australia: the same thing happened to my Rainbow Warrior song ‘Somewhere Under The Rainbow’ in New Zealand. (The album also included ‘Australian Decomposition’, a gruesome account of all the squashed wildlife I saw driving along the motorways over there. People always appreciate it when a foreign performer makes the effort to add some local colour to his performances, whether it’s brusque politicians or maggoty wombats…)

  After a long direct flight I arrived in Auckland for the New Zealand leg of my tour on February 25 – and the first thing I remember doing, having dumped my stuff at the guest house where I was staying, was taking a trip to the tip of the harbour and eating fresh oysters which I detached from the rocks myself. One way of dealing with jetlag! The next day I flew to Christchurch on the South Island, where I was met by David Eggleton for a gig at the Harbour Lights Café, also sadly demolished by the 2011 earthquake: I spent a couple of days in Christchurch, did a student orientation show at Canterbury University with legendary Kiwi poet Sam Hunt and then flew to Palmerston North on the North Island for another student orientation gig with Sam at Massey University. Sam was an interesting guy and a great performer – still is I expect.

  My uncle and his family lived in New Plymouth, not that far from Palmerston North, and I made my way there to see them, a kind of advance party for my mum who would be there a few weeks later. Then up to Auckland for one of those bizarre gigs that happens from time to time: a local stockbroker put me on at lunchtime in the Finance Plaza in central Auckland, and I went down really well, bizarrely. And then, in a massive contrast, the big one: a headlining show at the famous old Gluepot Hotel. Sold out, packed to the rafters, punk as fuck, back to the early Eighties, great fun…

  Down to the South Island for three gigs in Dunedin, one at Sammy’s Nightclub, a lunchtime show at Otago Polytechic and an evening one at the Crown Hotel in Dunedin with David Eggleton, and then a three hour trip to Invercargill at the very bottom of the island for an utterly deserted gig at the Glengarry Hotel. I may have made some waves in New Zealand, but they weren’t even ripples by the time they reached Invercargill. If the popular conception (totally unfair on the major cities, pretty accurate elsewhere) is that New Zealand is like England in the fifties, Invercargill is fifty years behind that!

  So in just ten days I had covered the whole country and had another fantastic tour: as well as all the gigs there had been lots of interviews and, of course, an awful lot of beer had been drunk and conversations had. I was exhausted – and there was still Australia to come. Still, at least I knew I’d be well looked after in Oz: for part of the time there, I’d have my Mum with me.

  This second Australian tour, spanning about a month, was the most intense period of performing I’ve ever done, thanks to Frank Cremona’s sterling efforts. At that time, university unions had a budget to put free student entertainment on at lunchtime, obviously great news for a touring performer, and I did stacks of them, in addition to all the regular pub/club gigs. Sydney, Woolongong, Melbourne, La Trobe, Monash, Canberra and Flinders in Adelaide, Queensland University in Brisbane, maybe more. I lost my diary at the end of the tour, so this part of the account really is all from memory, and there’s no memory clearer than what happened towards the end of the tour when I arrived in Adelaide…

  It was really hot. I dumped my stuff at the hotel and headed for the beach, which was pretty much deserted: nothing odd about that, I thought, it’s the afternoon of a working day. The water was clear and inviting: without a second thought, I stripped to my trunks and jumped in. But my peace of mind was suddenly shattered by a bloke running towards me, waving furiously. He was yelling something at the top of his voice - as he got nearer I could make out what it was.

  ‘Sharks, mate! Get out now! Sharks!’

  I have never swum fa
ster in my life and was out of that water quicker than you could say ‘Jaws’!

  ‘Didn’t you see the signs?’

  No, I hadn’t seen the signs, I said – I was too busy being a stupid Pom confronted with a sandy beach and a lovely blue sea, and coming from the Sussex coast the concept of shark attacks really hadn’t occurred to me. I reflected ruefully on the thousands of fish I had hooked and brought home for dinner in a lifetime of sea fishing, and how horribly poetic such an end would have been. And then I went off to do a gig at Flinders Uni.

  This tour was much more extensive than the first, taking in South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland as well as Victoria and New South Wales – I remember an unbelievably hot gig at Brisbane’s legendary Zoo club – but the most high profile stuff once again took place in Melbourne and, above all, Sydney. On arrival there from Auckland I was welcomed once again by hosts Steven and Cathie, and a week or so later my mum arrived for her first visit to Australia, soon to be followed by my friend Mike Williams, both staying at the Herricks’ with me. Mum didn’t come to many gigs – too late, too noisy – but she did see a couple, and in between we did a lot of sightseeing and she had a great time. Believe it or not, she also starred in one of my TV appearances: with great unflappability she interviewed her punk poet son on a grotty bit of beach next to a sewage pipe. The producer’s idea, not mine, I hasten to add. To make up for it I bought her a big bunch of flowers on Mothers Day in Melbourne.