The process proved ridiculously easy. I invited Martin and Dan from the Fish Brothers to appear on a local radio show I was hosting at the time, Adur FM. Named for their capacity to consume vast quantities of alcohol, the Fish were – and remain to this day - an entertaining and unique combination of punky toilet humour and cranked-up Victorian music hall songs, fronted by the charismatically obese Martin ‘Fish’ Cooper. I’d always had a lot of fun when I’d seen them live, they were consummate musicians even when paralytic – and the fact that they were already playing Victorian music hall punk with aplomb indicated to me that the concept of medieval punk wouldn’t be a problem for them at all.
We had a load of fun on the show and in the pub: I put it to the pair of them that they should join me in my project. They were well up for the idea and suggested their drummer came in as well, a local character named M.M.McGhee. McGhee’s real name is Martin Wilson: he had been given his alter-ego by fellow Brighton resident and punk legend Captain Sensible, in whose band both he and his guitarist mate Dan Woods had played from time to time. (The M.M. stands for Mass Murderer, by the way, but don’t worry: he neither is, looks nor acts like one, he’s lovely. It’s just one example of the good Captain’s unique sense of humour.)
The Fish proved to be every bit as good musicians as I thought they were and they picked up the batch of songs I had prepared in no time. Now we needed a bass player: McGhee mentioned our project to Captain Sensible and to my astonishment he volunteered for the job. We knew each other as fellow denizens of Brighton real ale mecca pub The Evening Star and I was aware that he liked my stuff – but I didn’t think for a moment that he’d join my band. I was chuffed, not least because I knew what a fine musician he was: I knew he had a lot on his plate and that it probably wouldn’t be long before he was off, but it was a nice touch. He fitted in perfectly and by the autumn of 1994 we were ready for our first gig.
I was incredibly pleased with the band: my vision of a combination of medieval music and punk was coming true. A driving, Clashy core, courtesy of a rock hard rhythm section: McGhee is the best drummer I have ever heard, let alone played with, and the Captain’s bass lines were magic. Martin Fish provided solidly effective rhythm guitar, with superb technician Dan’s melodic lead lines slightly reminiscent of both Mick Jones of the Clash and the mutually admired Jan Akkerman of Dutch ‘classical rock’ outfit Focus (the Clash and Focus, plus the East German band Horch whose tour I had organised five years earlier, and my old Sussex friends Crucible, were my main points of musical reference for the sound I wanted us to have). I sang and played violin, mandola, recorders, crumhorn and shawm. I’ve always been a jack-of-all-trades where musical instruments are concerned, competent on many, brilliant on none: fortunately medieval music is modal, therefore very simple, and punk rock has three chords, sometimes four, so I wasn’t going outside my technical comfort zone. Dan did the main backing vocals: he has a beautiful voice. Martin joined him with his gruff bass tones when needed.
Did I mention recorders? Yes! The recorder is indeed one of England’s earliest instruments: much maligned to be sure, due to its sad fate of being the first instrument that kids - including those without the slightest vestige of musical talent - encounter at primary school. I had learned descant, treble and tenor recorder with gusto from the ages of about six to ten, alongside the violin, and after some determined practice discovered to my pleasure that I had sufficient natural ability to get a reasonable sound out of all of them, and musical parents prepared to tolerate the moments when I didn’t. This stood me in good stead thirty years later. Many of my classmates were not so lucky or dedicated: a badly played recorder or violin is one of the most excruciating sounds on the planet, and I sympathise wholeheartedly with those parents who had to suffer the results! But mistreatment by seven year olds should not be grounds for the rather ‘naff’ reputation the recorder suffers from today: it is part of our heritage (indeed, for the musical period I was making reference to it was essential) and played properly it can sound wonderful.
Shawm and crumhorn, both medieval instruments with the same simple fingering as the recorder and both sounding (intentionally) a bit like a duck being slowly strangled, completed the small arsenal of wind instruments at my disposal. I also had the beautiful mandocello which Horch had given me as a thankyou present after their tour in 1989: it sounded like a lute, and (thankfully) tuned like a mandolin or mandola, which meant I could play it. Although not a stage instrument, it would play a role in the studio when we came to record our first album. As for the songs: ‘Sarajevo’, ‘Cheering the Plough’ ‘Horns’ and ‘The Blandford Forum’ were the first of a swathe I’d deliberately write with the band in mind, augmented with older solo numbers which worked well, such as ‘Tyler Smiles’, ‘This Is Free Europe’ and ‘Market Sektor One’.
But the centrepiece of the set, from our first gig to the present day, was and remains the English Civil War trilogy ‘March of the Levellers/The Diggers’ Song/The World Turned Upside Down’. This is based on the story of the Diggers, the first English socialists who made their stand in the tumultuous times at the end of the Civil War following the execution of Charles 1, setting up ‘illegal’ settlements to work the land and grow food for the poor. It begins with a recorder-based instrumental I had first included on my second solo album ‘Sawdust and Empire’ in 1984, merging into an acapella rendition of Diggers’ leader Gerrard Winstanley’s famous declaration in 1649, ‘You noble diggers all, stand up now, stand up now….’ and ending with a literally barnstorming version of the song that the great Leon Rosselson wrote about the Diggers, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, with a rap section in the middle in which I tell their story. From the very first performance this was our main signature piece and set opener, and it remains so today.
The band lacked just one thing – a name.
One day I was looking at the sleeve of my first album ‘Ranting At The Nation (More Poems About Flatfish And Russians)’ and had what I thought – not for very long, thankfully – was a wonderful idea.
It wasn’t.
I decided to call our new band Flounder, and have a flatfish as our logo.
I’m a coastal dweller and sea fisherman with a Pythonesque streak: to me a flounder is a flatfish, simple as that. The fact that ‘flounder’ has another meaning – to fail miserably – didn’t even occur to me, unbelievably enough, and the lack of reference to the ‘medieval punk’ aspect of the music passed me by too. I still can’t work out why. Posters with the aforementioned logo were printed and two gigs booked: our debut on November 5 at the much loved and very rock ‘n’ roll Jericho Tavern in Oxford, selected because I wanted to make our first gig as geographically accessible as possible to fans from all over the country keen to be there, and a home town one on the 21st at the old Concorde venue next to the Palace Pier on Brighton seafront. These were warm up gigs for our first German tour, set for 4-18 December.
I can still remember our first gig: a healthy crowd, augmented somewhat by the fact that the good Captain was our bass player, enjoyed a celebratory firework display before the ponderously named ‘Attila the Stockbroker and Flounder, featuring Captain Sensible’ took to the stage. Although everything was very raw, the sound was well and truly as intended, and we went down an absolute storm. As we did at our second gig, the home town affair in Brighton - marred only (but substantially) by the fact that a local crusty who’d played in the support band pogoed onto my shawm and broke it. I was not pleased. (It wasn’t a sixteenth century original, needless to say, but a modern wooden facsimile. That’s not the point.)
By this time the German tour had been organised and posters printed. But we weren’t called Flounder in Germany. Oh, no. The name of the band on our first German tour was even worse.
‘Attila the Stockbroker und die Erbrechenden Rotkehlchen’.
Attila the Stockbroker and the Vomiting Robins.
There was a reason (excuse?) for this. My spoken word piece ‘The Bible According To Rupe
rt Murdoch’ featuring the line ‘And the earth itself wept, and little robins vomited, and cuddly furry animals threw themselves under trains’ had been brilliantly translated into German by George from Halle several years before, and performed as such had become one of the centrepieces of the regular solo tours I had been doing in Germany before the formation of the band. Loads of people thought that it was very funny, and when it came to the name and the posters for the new band’s debut tour there, I was told that being called ‘The Vomiting Robins’ (or rather the German equivalent) was a nailed on piece of genius. Especially since our bass player was notorious rock ‘n’ roll lunatic Captain Sensible.
In my defence, I had my doubts. Not enough doubts, though, obviously…
But not long before the tour was due to start, I had the inevitable phone call from the Captain. He couldn’t do it. I had known it would come to that sooner or later, but hoped we’d manage the German tour together: it was not to be, he had to get back to captaining his own ship again. I was disappointed, of course, but not at all surprised or angry, and we were prepared: Dan, a talented bassist as well as guitarist, moved to bass, and I had even more melodies to play on my plethora of instruments.
That first 14 date tour of Germany was absolutely brilliant. Nick Bond, a friend of the Fish, drove us over in his van and the network of autonomous left wing cultural centres welcomed us with open arms from north to south, Hamburg to Leipzig (especially Hamburg where the St. Pauli crew turned up in force). No-one seemed that bothered that Captain wasn’t with us, even though his name was on the posters, and even among the hardcore punks the medieval tinges to the music touched a chord in a country with such a deep musical heritage. On the way to Hannover we stopped at the world famous Moeck recorder factory and I treated myself to a full set – five of them, from the tiny sopranino to the metre long bass – to replace my plastic ones. It was a big financial outlay, but the band celebrated our twentieth anniversary in 2014 and those recorders have been with me all that time. To initiate my new recruits, a couple of days later on the tour when we had some free time I took the big bass, the tiny sopranino and my fiddle and wrote a long instrumental, ‘The One That Got Away’, another ever-present band signature piece from that day to this.
We returned in triumph. We had all got along famously, the gigs were well attended and great fun and we all couldn’t wait to do it all again. At the end of that first tour I remember being incredibly astonished and happy that the process of forming the band had been so simple (no newspaper ads, no endless auditions) and the end result so wonderful. But the problem of the name was still there. I was determined that we weren’t going to be called Flounder, or the Vomiting Robins for that matter, for one moment longer. I wanted a ‘sensible’ name that wasn’t boring and that summed up the essence of what we were about. I thought, and thought. And then it came to me: the perfect name for the band was one which had been staring me in the face for ages. It was the one I had come up with for the series of monthly poetry/music shows I was organising at the Barn in Southwick, the one that adorned the posters and leaflets I distributed every month.
BARNSTORMER!
That was that.
Dan, a very talented artist and illustrator, designed a logo of two crossed flaming torches with the name in an ancient-looking script: I came up with ‘renaissancecore’ as a description of the music, and the first Barnstormer T-shirt was born. And then in early 1995 I went right back to my roots and recruited another recorder player for the band: my old mate Tim Vince, formerly of the aforementioned Sussex medieval rock band Crucible, who had played recorder on the short instrumental ‘The Fall of King Zog’ on my first album, and who, incidentally, had been taught piano by my mum. I wanted to beef up the recorder sound into a two part harmony, which meant that Tim didn’t have much to do on the minority of the songs that were just punky rather than medieval-punky, but he didn’t mind, and he was in. He would soon start to play a very important extra role in the band, driving us all over the place – first in his old Volvo and later in a second-hand Post Office delivery van.
And on one unforgettable occasion he actually fronted the band. On a 1997 German tour I was on crutches, having ruptured my hamstring playing football, and doing the gigs sitting down. After a few beers in Bremen I forgot myself, stood up and literally felt something snap: from that moment I was in agony and simply couldn’t continue. I went backstage and writhed in pain, the back of my leg turning black, while the rest of the band tried to carry on with Tim singing, despite the fact that he didn’t know half the words to the songs, and couldn’t sing in time. The result was so funny that even though I was in absolute agony I found myself laughing as well! Fortunately I managed to finish the rest of the tour and Tim’s services weren’t required again. (He didn’t stay Tim Vince, incidentally: he was nicknamed Tim O’Tay, which meant that from time to time earnest German leftists would come up and say ‘Tim, are you Irish?’ to which we’d reply ‘no, he’s named after a brand of anti-dandruff shampoo.’)
Tim made his debut with Barnstormer at the Barn in Southwick in February 1995 at a benefit I was roped in to organise against the live animal exports which were taking place through Shoreham Harbour at the time (roped in against my better judgement, to be honest). Jo Brand headlined. She walked onstage and said ‘Actually, I like a bit of veal, me!’ Audience response varied from nervous giggles to outrage: I pissed myself laughing. I wonder how many of those protestors had lifted a finger when Shoreham Port bosses tried to ship in scab coal during the miners’ strike…
A coincidental continuation of the meaty theme. Barnstormer did a few UK gigs and another German tour in the spring of 1995 (driven this time by the friendly but scary Eliot, whom we met at our gig at the Boat Race in Cambridge) and then went into the studio to record a demo cassette for home release and an EP for German label Mad Butcher Records, a committedly anti-fascist label, then in its infancy and now hugely successful, set up by my old mate Mike Wilms, who did actually used to be a butcher. ‘A’ side was ‘Sarajevo’, a stark punk-with-a-Balkan-tinge lament for the unity and brotherhood of Tito’s Yugoslavia, now torn apart by sectarianism and genocidal war. ‘B’ sides ‘Cheering the Plough’ and ‘The Siege Of Shoreham’, were both very medieval-punk, the latter another instrumental using the bass recorder, the title a reference to the fact that the port protests meant that half the Met was currently camped on our doorstep.
The UK cassette release sold out in next to no time – there were only a couple of hundred made - and the EP sold well in Germany on the back of another tour there later that year, driven and engineered by a lovely, friendly bloke, another Tim, whose commitment to the band both as driver and sound engineer was so total that we nicknamed him ‘Tim Herogod’ to distinguish him from Tim O’Tay. The band played at my 15th anniversary gig as Attila on September 8 1995 at the Garage in London alongside Blyth Power, radical comedian Mark Thomas and my old sparring partner Seething Wells and in early 1996 we did another swathe of gigs around the UK. Then it was time to record Barnstormer’s debut album.
In that year we did over 50 gigs together. I was really pleased with the way things were going but still, obviously, loved being a performance poet (and still had to earn a living: all band earnings were split, so nobody got that much) so was doing all my solo poetry gigs on top of the band ones. It was a very busy time. We chose Foel Studios in Llanfair Caereinion in the heart of Wales, and recorded our first album there in the summer of 1996 with the aforementioned Tim Herogod and studio owner Dave Anderson (one time bass player in Hawkwind and Amon Duul II) sharing engineering duties. With reference both to the furore in our home port and the medieval tinge to the music, I called it ‘The Siege of Shoreham’. Dan did a beautiful coat of arms for the cover and a great cartoon of the band for the inside sleeve and it was released later that year on Roundhead Records, my own label formed for the purpose, with Puffotter Platten doing the honours in Germany and, a bit later, East Side Records, old comrades from the GDR
days, doing a vinyl version too.
It really was everything I had hoped it would be. Punky and powerful, but different: nobody sounded like Barnstormer. Opening with two medieval-punk instrumentals, ‘Bombarde’ and ‘The One That Got Away’ and then crossing from melodic punk to medieval-punk all the way through, with the Balkan-punk tinged ‘Sarajevo’, the bass recorder-led title track and two mandocello/recorder based acoustic instrumentals, ‘Worms’ and ‘The Torchbearer’ to add still more contrast. The centerpiece was without doubt the Diggers’ trilogy – and it ended with the defiant ‘And I Won’t Run Away’, my adaptation of a song written by an old musical hero of mine, former Doctors of Madness singer Richard Strange, a perennial set-closer in the live show. To keep the continuity with the other side of my work going, I put poems on there as bonus tracks: the already-mentioned ‘Zen Stalinist Manifesto’ and ‘Joseph Porter’s Sleeping Bag’ and the Bellocian anti Tory lament ‘Victoria Road’.
It got some good reviews, mainly in Germany, where there is a huge network of fanzines and political publications, and over the next few years we really established ourselves in the German underground scene with two tours a year, venturing into Holland and Austria as well. We did quite a few gigs in the UK in that initial period, including two appearances at Glastonbury, but then as now our main following was over the Channel: having established myself as a performance poet for fifteen years that was how I was seen in the UK, and given the vastly better way that bands were treated abroad both me and the rest of Barnstormer were quite happy for things to stay like that. From that day to this, we’ve played UK gigs that we knew would be special, and the rest of the time done our stuff over there.
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