ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  I got more TV coverage reciting a spooky poem dedicated to horrible Aussie Thatcher wannabe politician Bronwyn Bishop in the old King Street Cemetery in Newtown, and as on my first trip had loads of exposure on college and community radio and the national broadcaster ABC. But the clincher was alternative station JJJ, which was regularly playing tracks from ‘668 – Neighbour of the Beast’, and I was thrilled when, a few days after my arrival, I was invited in to do a session for ‘Live At The Wireless’, their equivalent of a John Peel session – except that, as I mentioned earlier, it went out during the day. The UK equivalent would be me to be given carte blanche to do exactly what I wanted for 20 minutes in mid afternoon on Radio One. All my local material was included, of course – it was just a few days before the election and my Keating song took pride of place, along with some topical political asides. Loads of people heard it and the result would be some amazing gigs, including one which to this day I consider one of my two all time favourites…

  The other result of that JJJ session would be one of the most ridiculous things which ever happened to me performance wise: my one totally abortive foray (never to be repeated, I’m sure!) into the mainstream world of ‘celebrity broadcasting’. I was asked to appear on Channel 7’s ‘Tonight Live with Steve Vizard’, the Australian equivalent of ‘Later with Joolz Holland’ or the US ‘David Letterman Show’ I guess, which meant flying from Sydney to Melbourne and back again for a one off appearance. But I was told that it was worth it, because Mr. Vizard, who had apparently enjoyed my ‘Live at the Wireless’ session, wanted me to perform ‘The Bible According To Rupert Murdoch’ live on the show, which had high ratings.

  I must say I had misgivings, but tickets were booked: however, when I got to the airport the plane had been cancelled. Just my bloody luck! Undeterred, I managed to get on another flight and arrived at the studio on time, to be told that for some reason Vizard wasn’t doing the show as planned and Bob Geldof was hosting it instead. Not to worry, though: I’d be on as agreed. I rehearsed the piece, everyone was happy: then Geldof refused to have me on, though he wouldn’t say so to my face of course. He just procrastinated until there was no more time, leaving the producers angry and embarrassed and me ready to lump him one if I got the chance, which, of course, I didn’t. Presumably I wasn’t famous enough, or maybe he just didn’t like my stuff. Whatever. All I’ll say is that if I’d bumped into him that night he’d definitely have needed some Band Aid!

  Some people don’t understand when I say that I have absolutely no interest in being a ‘TV celebrity’: surely, they say, you want to be as famous as possible to get your political/social ideas across to the maximum number of people? I certainly do want to get my ideas across and reach as many people as possible, but I want to do it on my own terms. The likes of John Peel and JJJ have offered me that, as has Radio 4 in the UK and ABC, CBC, Radio New Zealand and college and community radio across the wider English-speaking world, and it’s exactly what I want and need. I have no interest in fitting in to the mainstream, where - as in that studio in Melbourne - I am just another sausage in a machine to be chewed up and spat out or, in that case, spat out without being chewed. Sausage machines suck. In a manner of speaking…

  Anyway, I flew back to Sydney, met Mike who had just arrived from England and prepared for the big show – the coming Friday night, eve of the Australian General Election, at the Annandale Hotel, a big venue where I had supported Weddings Parties Anything on my first tour. Everything had come together and the gig was sold out. 400 people, a brilliant night, along with the Galaxy in Auckland the best gig I’d ever done anywhere. And, against all the odds, Paul Keating won the election for Labour.

  Bollocks to you, Bob Geldof.

  Then Mike drove myself and my mother to Melbourne, where we stayed in a lovely seafront flat in St. Kilda: I played the legendary Punters Club and we went over to Hobart for a couple of gigs at the Wheatsheaf Hotel before another show at the Perseverance, more radio, back to Sydney, Mum flew off to New Zealand to see her brother Mick and his family and Mike flew home. I went off to Brisbane and Adelaide (as scarily documented above) before meeting up with Mum in Sydney again a couple of weeks later for the flight back to Heathrow, having done about 30 gigs in 30 days, including all the lunchtime university shows. I was utterly knackered, but that Australian/NZ tour remains, I think, my favourite one of all time.

  Seven years later, in April 2000, I was back for a third time. By then Weddings Parties Anything had split up and singer/songwriter Mick Thomas had embarked on a solo career: I had set up a UK tour for him the previous year and he returned the favour with ten or so dates in the major cities. By then a lot had changed in the Australian music scene: the halcyon days of JJJ as an indie pioneer were over, it was a lot more commercial and less inclined to support left field artists like myself, and many of the great inner city pub venues had been taken over by the nemesis of live music over there, the poker machine or ‘pokie’. Introduced in the 1990s, these slot machines became a sure fire revenue source for hard pressed pub owners and either pushed live music out completely or – incredibly – forced performers to play their gig opposite rows of the things, with people stuffing coins into them, oblivious to the music being played. Absolutely soul-destroying. My good mate and superb urban blues singer Rory Ellis has told me loads of horror stories about this: he regularly tours the UK just to get away from the bloody things!

  The gigs I did with Mick were great, though, lovely old pubs like the Hopetoun Hotel in Sydney and Dan O’Connell in Melbourne, Brunswick Music Festival, more shows in Canberra, Yarraville, Ballarat, Geelong, Hobart, to name a few: decent crowds everywhere, it was lovely to meet up with old friends again, and Mick remains to this day one of my favourite songwriters, a man who writes about the culture and history of his homeland with intelligence and humour. We had one unforgettable night in Newcastle, New South Wales, where we supported the Whitlams (by now a hugely successful commercial caricature of their former selves) at the university and ended up going for a post-gig drink in a pub near our hotel called ‘The Duck’s Nuts’ where a Green Day covers band were attempting to entertain twenty drunk pensioners at about 1am. The resulting poem, ‘Punk Night at the Duck’s Nuts’, a completely true account of the proceedings, remains a gig favourite to this day and features in my 2008 collection ‘My Poetic Licence’.

  And in 2011 that poem got a sequel. Due to the need to support my mother during her long battle with Alzheimer’s it was eleven years before I finally made it back to the Antipodes, but when I did I took my wife Robina with me for a month-long tour-come-holiday, well deserved after the exhausting emotional strain of the previous few years. We flew into Melbourne and this time hired a car, which not only gave us a lot more flexibility but also allowed us to experience the sheer vastness of Australia and venture into the bush, where we saw wild kangaroos and, to my great pleasure, some lovely and very poisonous snakes. For the very first gig on the tour Robina and I arrived exhausted on St Patrick’s Night in the no-nonsense coastal town of Portland, Victoria for a show at the Richmond Henty pub hosted by Chris ‘Critta’ Cuneen. It, and he, were nuts. Lovely, but NUTS. And there I found a piece of home: the pub was named after the Henty family, pioneering settlers from Worthing, very near us, who arrived in Portland in 1834. In Beechworth, a beautifully preserved old goldrush town with its own microbrewery (hooray) famous for the exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang, we met up with my old friend Grant Collie, curator of the local museum, who let me try on the legendary bushranger’s armour.

  Most of the gigs on the Australian leg of the tour (as in Portland above) were organised by Justin ‘Keeno’ Keenan, singer of The Go Set, a young (ish) punk-folk band very much in the vein of Weddings Parties Anything, writing clever, powerful songs about Australian history and politics, with me as their support act. It was huge fun but the turnouts were ridiculously varied, from hundreds of people at the Northcote Social Club in Melbourne, the Yackandandah Folk Festival and Punkfest i
n Brisbane to 25 lost but enthusiastic souls in a huge barn in, you guessed it – Newcastle. At that gig the support band Sydney Girls’ Choir (not from Sydney, not girls, not a choir: a young bunch of kick-ass rock’n’ rollers from Woolongong) actually took to the stage to an audience of five. The events of that night inspired the aforementioned sequel poem to ‘Punk Night at the Duck’s Nuts’ entitled ‘Newcastle-The Replay’ which was included in my 2013 poetry collection ‘UK Gin Dependence Party and Other Peculiarities’. As so often, you simply couldn’t make it up.

  Two of the best gigs on that tour were solo ones in a more ‘poetic’ setting: one at the wonderfully-named Drunken Poet in Melbourne and an absolute stormer in the beautiful surroundings of Apollo Bay Festival. But the highlight of the whole month was without doubt the sold out show at the Thirsty Dog pub venue in Auckland, set up by local promoter Tim Edwards. We headed over to NZ for a week, stayed with my cousin Aileen and her growing family in Hawera and with Robina’s friends Sue and John McMenamin in Wanganui, I did shows in New Plymouth and Hamilton and then it was up to the capital for a lovely, friendly gig where many of the people present remembered the utter punk rock mayhem of my first appearance twenty years earlier. Older and maybe wiser, but still up for a great night out.

  Thankyou to everybody who helped me through four memorable Antipodean tours, especially Steven Herrick who got the ball rolling and along with wife Cathie provided marvellous hospitality, Frank Cremona, Mick and the Weddoes, Justin Keenan and the Go Set and David Eggleton, Otis Mace and Tim Edwards in New Zealand. We had some very happy times together. Here’s to the next one.

  NINE

  BARNSTORMER & GLASTONWICK: MY OWN BAND AND MY OWN FESTIVAL …

  In 1992 ‘Scornflakes’, my second book of poems, was published by Newcastle’s Bloodaxe Books, illustrated this time by my friend Womble aka Dave Trent, the punk dentist and talented cartoonist who had joined us in East Germany. His brilliant fanzine ‘Wake Up’ had been supporting radical performers of all types for several years now. Bloodaxe was, and remains, one of the most successful and respected publishers of poetry in the UK: I did however always have the impression that their desire to publish me was based more on the fact that I had a big following (for a poet) rather than any particular respect for my work.

  ‘Scornflakes’ had all the crowd-pleasers of the last few years in it – and ‘crowd-pleasers’ was the crux of the matter. I’d be the first to agree that, for my first fifteen years or so at least as Attila, the majority of my poems were far better suited to the stage than the page – many more people were always going to buy my book after I’d brought the poems to life at a performance than in the relatively sterile surroundings of a bookshop. That’s what many of my solo albums/CDs have been recorded live as well – the atmosphere provided by the audience is an essential part of the listening experience.

  The book followed its Unwins predecessor in having a 5,000 print run, selling far more copies at my gigs than in the shops and eventually being remaindered, with me buying the thousand or so remaining copies designated for pulping at a knockdown price and selling them myself. It sold out years ago, meaning that both my first two poetry books sold 5,000 copies - which in poetry terms makes them bestsellers and then some. ‘Scornflakes’ was the last of those I handed over to a publisher, since I saw little point in paying 45% of cover price, or whatever it was, to buy my books when I sold most of them myself at gigs anyway: these days, of course, the internet is a very important part of the operation too. Since then I haven’t really bothered with bookshops when it comes to selling my poetry collections: all bases are covered now, thanks to electronic media, because anyone, anywhere who can’t get to a gig can buy my work direct from me.

  I’ve published my last five poetry books myself, as Roundhead Publications (one author) the print arm of Roundhead Records (one artist). I always smile when I come across articles claiming ‘poetry doesn’t sell, all our books make losses’ and bemoaning the cutting back of arts grants to small presses as ‘making poetry publishing impossible’. Take my most recent book ‘UK Gin Dependence Party and Other Peculiarities’ published – deliberately – two weeks before Christmas 2013. I say ‘published’: 2000 copies turned up on a big pallet outside the front door and were consigned to various spare corners of the house. I did an email to my mailing list, a few posts on Facebook and Twitter, and four or five Christmas gigs. By the end of January I’d covered my costs. And, needless to say, I’ve never had a publishing grant in my life.

  The key to the reason small presses publishing page poetry find things such heavy going may well be found in the wonderful quote from Adrian Mitchell which adorns my T-shirt on the front cover of this book: ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. If your work doesn’t strike a chord with people – or worse, is so obscure that they don’t even understand what you’re going on about – they’re not going to buy your book. You may well get a great write up in some pseudo-intellectual literary publication - the kind that won’t touch the likes of me with a barge pole - but I know where I’d rather be, thanks very much.

  For this book, my life’s work, I see things very differently. I’m very much hoping that I’ll reach a much wider audience with it than I have for my poetry books, and obviously want it to be distributed and reviewed as far and wide as possible. For that, I need a publisher: and no one better than Cherry Red, for reasons already explained.

  1992 saw my first CD/vinyl release in Germany (apart from ‘Airstrip One’ on the 17th Political Song Festival compilation LP, published by GDR state label Amiga in 1987). ‘This Is Free Europe’, featuring the best of my recent studio recordings, was released by Dortmund radical label Terz, and they followed that with ‘Live Auf St Pauli’ in 1993, recorded at the Marquee after a home match in the spiritual home of punk rock football. I was doing loads of gigs all over Germany now, east and west, twenty or so a year (plus more in Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia) my command of the language was improving all the time and my old friend George from Halle had translated quite a lot of poems for me. At gigs I would perform a couple of songs and poems in German and briefly explain the themes of the others in German before I performed them in English: this worked very well. I’d also do what amounts to a stand up comedy routine about the unbelievably funny town and city names you get in Germany: Hassloch (hate hole), Darmstadt (intestine town), Hodenhagen (testicles town), Hasslich (ugly) and Katzenhirn (cat brain) being five of incredibly many. You just couldn’t make them up – and I haven’t!

  More and more, however, I was starting to think how great it would be to return to my punk rock roots and play my songs with a band - not just in Germany, but all over mainland Europe. The punk/alternative scene in most of Europe is very different to the UK: there is a network of hundreds of left wing autonomous youth and cultural centres all over the place, with the notable exception of France. They are run by volunteers and touring bands are treated a billion times better than here, with free food, beer and accommodation a given (absolutely not the case in the UK unless you are several rungs up the corporate ladder, as any musicians reading this will confirm!) And, of course, if I had a band I could perform in countries where I couldn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak English very well: music is common to us all.

  In the UK much of my set was spoken word and as a DIY performer the simple need to earn a living meant that working solo was more or less a necessity. But the sets I played in mainland Europe were different, being more song-centred, and the fact that musicians were well looked after, thus keeping touring costs down, made it an idea worth considering. I had a clear idea of the sound I wanted: since early childhood I had been fascinated by early music - I’d put some short instrumentals on my first two albums - and my idea was to form a band mixing medieval music and punk, in much the same way that the Pogues had combined Irish music and punk. It was an idea which stayed in my mind for a couple of years before coming to fruition in 1994.

>   But before starting my own band, I was to have a go at managing one, and after that, I’d set up my own performing arts series and, together with a bunch of dedicated friends, start a beer/music festival which continues to this day…

  As a thirteen year old, Paul Howard from Harlow had come to my first gig at Bush Fair Playbarn back in 1980. Twelve years later he was a talented singer-songwriter with a beautiful singing voice and a great band called The Tender Trap, featuring among others (the others being Mark ‘Walshy’ Walshe on guitar and Andy Macdonald on bass) drummer Simon Lomond from the Newtown Neurotics. Their sound could best be described as passionate pop/soul: like me, Paul was (is) a huge Dexys fan and there was certainly a lot of them in there, but his songs and his sound were all his own. They were very raw, though, and had hardly played a gig outside Harlow. I’d just had my fifth album ‘Donkey’s Years’ put out by Musidisc, a French label with a branch in the UK: I knew the label had money to invest in a young up and coming band, took them a Tender Trap demo and to my delight managing director Francois absolutely loved it.

  Soon I’d arranged a meeting and, more or less by default, became their manager. I negotiated the best deal I could for the band, another for Paul’s publishing rights as songwriter (both substantial by my standards!) and we celebrated with a signing party at Joy’s in Sydenham where each member of the band managed to fit a dozen eggs in their underpants and Paul ended up completely paralytic, fast asleep in a long-redundant baby’s cot stark naked apart from a sock draped round his knob. Rock n roll, eh?