ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  Joy and I had never lived together, and the difference in our ages and lifestyles meant that this had always suited us both: she had made me very welcome in her home, and I had become incredibly fond of her daughter Mary, son Jake, grandsons Francis and Adam and granddaughter Amy (especially Francis, who by then was aged about eight and was like the son I had never had). From the early to mid Eighties onwards I had had three homes: the road, Steve’s flat in Harlow, and Joy’s - three and a bit if you count my regular visits to my mum’s to see her, watch the football, catch up with my mates and the local music scene and go fishing. Peripatetic and then some, but it suited me down to the ground. I was very happy.

  But after I bought my harbourside bungalow something changed. I still spent a lot of time on the road, and a lot of time at Joy’s, but when I was in Southwick, if I’m honest, I started to feel lonely. I was getting on for forty, and when I was in Southwick I felt like a bachelor living in a bungalow. On one level this was ridiculous: Joy regularly came down to see me, I was incredibly busy gigging, I hardly had time to feel like that. But I did. Part of me wondered what it would be like to have a ‘normal’ kind of family life, to be part of a full-time, ordinary couple, to be with someone of my own age, with a similar past, someone I could look to the future with, grow old with. I never, ever thought there was anyone like that out there for me and had always coped fine with those feelings, though they never entirely went away. Joy and I were happy, I was part of her family.

  Then, out of the blue, my life changed for ever.

  In the autumn of 1997 I’d had a call from Tony ‘Dusty’ Miller, a teacher at Lancing College, asking me to come and perform for the students there: he told me that his friend Robina Blann, a local teacher and lay preacher, had recommended me as a performance poet who would go down well with the kids. I’d met Robina briefly a couple of times through my mother, and she had come to my gigs: Mum and Robina were great friends, both church organists and piano teachers and both involved in the same ecumenical church group. Robina rang me, saying she was coming to the Lancing College show, and offered me a lift. On October 15, 1997, she knocked on my front door. I opened it to see a huge Volvo sitting outside. (Completely logical: she had four kids who constantly needed ferrying around.)

  ‘Hi Robina’ I said. I saw the car, and thought I’d make one of my usual cavalier quips. ‘Bloody hell, what’s that, a f***ing hearse?’

  ‘Well, if it is, I’m driving, so it must be your funeral.’

  I was really very impressed: something clicked, there and then. In the course of the evening I became even more impressed, and by the time we said goodbye that night, having spent a couple of hours after the school gig talking in the local pub, I realised with a growing mixture of excitement, disbelief and foreboding that something had happened which I had always thought absolutely impossible. I had met somebody whom I knew could be absolutely right for me, for the rest of my life, and it was already apparent that she felt exactly the same. But she was married with four kids, and I had my own commitment.

  Robina and I didn’t see or contact each other again for another two months: we were both supremely aware of the amount of pain we could cause to the people we loved. But in mid December I had a gig in Hastings, and I rang and asked her if she’d like to take me. That was that.

  I know I caused Joy terrible anguish and as well as hurting her so deeply I lost the respect of her family: we haven’t spoken since. It makes me sad, but I understand why. For Robina things were cataclysmic too: ever the responsible, caring mother, she had hidden the extent of her unhappiness in her marriage from her children, and it was a bombshell. All our lives changed forever. I now have four stepchildren, Tom, Joe, Rose and Patrick. When Robina and I were married they were aged between 15 and 11: they’re now in their mid twenties to early thirties, Rose married to Marcus, Joe to Nicola, Patrick with his long term partner Kim. All doing their own thing, happily independent, my relationship with each different as all family relationships are. I’ve been their stepdad for 15 years, and I’ve always done my best: it’s not for me to say how good that best as been. I love them all. I love their mother even more.

  As mentioned right at the beginning of this book, Robina and I live in the house I grew up in, built by my great-great uncle in 1897, owned by various family members ever since until it was sold by my mother and stepfather in 1974. Incredibly, it came back on the market just at the moment we were selling our respective houses and looking for a place of our own. We were married on October 20, 2000. We’ll be together… yes, just like it says in the marriage service, though she’s a Christian and I’m not.

  Till death us do part.

  And soon after that huge change in my personal life came along, so did another in my working world: not in the same stratosphere in terms of human experience, but a major development nevertheless. I’d been hearing a lot about a phenomenon called ‘the internet’, especially from my friend Steve Drewett, who was a very early user and kept telling me what a useful tool it would be for me: by 1999 I knew it was time I got connected. My Southwick friend Miranda’s son Aidan was an early Mac advocate and salesman (he now has his own very successful company) and he got me set up and explained the basics. IT has never interested me beyond the bits necessary to help me with my work, but it was soon obvious that this new world was absolutely tailor-made for a one-man cottage industry punk poet/musician with a global cult following, and I have done my best with it ever since.

  As anyone from my kind of age group knows, all through the 80s and 90s everything was done by telephone, fax machine and post, and it was all very labour intensive. From the very beginning as Attila I would hungrily gather all possible contacts for gigs, media opportunities etc in a book and spend hours on the phone chasing them up. Once the London agencies, main source of university gigs, had lost interest in me I’d get copies of the latest directories containing the numbers of all the students’ union social secretaries and call them methodically, grab all the touring venue contact numbers out of the ads in the NME and call them too. Then I’d add them to a database for future use, with a ‘yes’, ‘maybe’ or ‘not now’ added (I never gave up completely!)

  Promoters were sent rolls of posters and ‘Walkerprint’ publicity photos stuffed into envelopes with press releases: fans added addresses to mailing lists at gigs, then got postal mailouts. Imagine the time and cost involved in addressing and stamping over a thousand envelopes and printing the leaflets to put inside them with details of gigs, new books/records/CDs etc (some people reading this won’t need to imagine it: you’ll have done it!) And if you wanted to discuss a prospective faraway tour, say in Australia, you had to stay up late and give them a ring, or exchange faxes in the small hours. The life of a DIY poet/musician could be a hard slog in those days.

  How different things are now. Promotional material for a gig? Email. Just attach a jpeg and a biog, click and gone: many promoters will print your poster too if you send a master. Publicity material? Building a fanbase? Personal website, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, downloads, countless music hosting sites, internet radio, email, you name it. Fond memory of gig comes into old fan’s mind. Then: ‘I wonder what Attila is doing now? I saw him in 1983. Is he still going?’ Ponder briefly, move to next thought. Now? Google. Seconds later: Facebook page, www.attilathestockbroker.com with poems, songs, gig list and online merchandise store, Youtube videos, Wiki page, Twitter feed, literally thousands of other pages of varying usefulness. And if you want to contact someone in a different time zone, you email them. They’ll respond when they wake up.

  Countless people who saw me in my music press ‘flavour of the month’ period in the early Eighties and lost touch once I slipped out of mainstream view have resurfaced in the last few years. ‘Great to see you’re still going, Attila!’ Makes me laugh that anyone can think that, having averaged about 100 gigs a year for 35 years, but hey – welcome back. As for mailing lists, forget addressing a thousand envelopes. One click on an email list,
a few posts on Facebook, a couple of tweets, job done.

  The internet was MADE for people like me. But although I can manage the simple stuff (social media, email etc) without any problems I am still the exact opposite of a ‘teccy’. HTML, and associated IT-related acronyms, remain a mystery. My initial website was set up by Klaus Fleischer, TV Smith’s webmaster, in 1999: soon afterwards Marcus Williamson took over the job and has been in charge of it from that day to this. Thanks so much, Marcus.

  ‘The Rat-Tailed Maggot and Other Poems’ my third book, came out in 1998, again illustrated by Womble: it was the first one I published myself, and it sold out of its 2,000 print run long ago. It had definitely been influenced by the work I had done on Hilaire Belloc for my Radio 4 ‘Bellocose’ show and subsequent tour: the first eight poems indulged my lifelong fascination with what most people call ‘creepy-crawlies’ to the full, a kind of follow-up to Belloc’s ‘The Bad Child’s Book Of Beasts’. Here’s the one about the Rat-Tailed Maggot’s more commonly observed larval cousin…

  THE MAGGOT

  The Maggot’s not for recipes, at least that’s my advice.

  It’s true that he looks rather like a wriggly grain of Rice

  But don’t use him in Puddings, don’t serve him up with Curry

  For if you do, your Dinner Guests will leave in quite a hurry…

  He’s best for catching Barbel, Dace, Perch, Gudgeon, Bream & Bleak.

  (To make him wriggle when it’s cold, just warm him in your Cheek.)

  His Pupa’s called a Caster, and is used for Castor Oil*

  That’s why it tastes revolting and makes Small Children recoil…

  And, after several days as Caster, turns into a Fly

  (an Insect you’ll find on Neglected Pets after they die)

  So if you don’t like the Maggot, I have only this to say.

  Just make sure that the Children feed the Hamster every day…

  *this may actually not be true

  This collection also featured other poems you’ll have read here including ‘The Zen Stalinist Manifesto’ and ‘Comic in a Basket’ – and if you think the maggotty poems are revolting, they pale into insignificance compared with ‘Joseph Porter’s Sleeping Bag’. I’m not including that one. If you want to read or listen to it, it’s out there on the internet, still festering.

  That year, 1998, my mum did her last ever tour abroad with me: TV Smith and I were touring Germany, mum came too. Tim has done a series of tour diaries chronicling this and many other amusing and unlikely situations: they come highly recommended. His writing is as brilliant as his songs. The next chapter of this book contains my full tribute to my mum: she was on top form in Germany but a horrible, horrible disease was just round the corner. Little did we know…

  I decided to compile the best songs and poems from my early years as Attila on two CDs, and in 1999 they were released: ‘The Pen & The Sword’ and ‘Poems Ancient & Modern’, both as ever on my own Roundhead Records label. Solo gigs at home and abroad continued apace, Barnstormer were in full flow and preparing for our second album and my personal life was undergoing a huge transformation: I barely had time to think. I’d never learned to drive, being both committed to the idea of public transport and unsure of whether I was safe to be let loose on the roads - but a combination of the increasing piles of books, CDs and T shirts I was lugging around on trains in my sagging rucksack and the desire to help Robina with the practicalities of family life made me decide to give it a go. I had to give it five goes, but at the fifth attempt, on Feb 28, 2000, I passed, and I’ve never looked back: with the amount of merch I have these days there’s no other way! Oh, and I’ve got a really green car. A black green car, naturally.

  2000 was even more manic, my third Australian tour sandwiched between loads of English gigs (including a big anti-racist festival with the Angelic Upstarts) and a solo trip back to Belfast and Derry, a big football event in Rotterdam linked to Euro 2000, recording Barnstormer’s second album, summer festivals including my regular Glastonbury appearances and my 20th Anniversary gig at the Garage in London on Sept 8. Oh, and our wedding on 20th October! The simple fact of gigging solidly for twenty years had given me a regular circuit and a huge database to work from, in the UK and abroad, and Barnstormer was enabling me to take my songs to place where the solo set wouldn’t work. There would be even more opportunities as the new millennium progressed, the massively increasing range of the internet introducing me to new contacts and reconnecting me with old ones. And, through the internet, a new challenge was about to come up: one which rock’n’roll mythology views as the biggest of all, but for me was simply a chance to see a new country at first hand, and decide what I made of it. To leftists everywhere the very home of the devil, to music fans a hugely influential and inspirational country: for fuck’s sake, it had given the world The Velvet Underground. As a leftist and a music fan it was time for me to balance the one against the other.

  Yes, Robina and I were off to the good old USA.

  It came about via my old friend TV Smith. Bryan Swirsky, a New York punk promoter, had got in touch with Tim asking him to do a tour of the East Coast, and he had suggested to me that we do it together: we were promised backing by celebrated New York independent radio station WFMU, who were big fans of both of us. The Spunk Lads, a local band who loved my stuff, said they would back me on a few songs. Seemed like a great idea. Brian sorted 11 shows – off we went.

  Tim, Robina and I arrived in a sweltering New York on the Fourth of July, 2002, ten months after the attack on the World Trade Centre. The aftermath could be seen everywhere: increased police presence, loads of American flags with slogans like ‘These Colours Don’t Run’. I had written a new song, centred on the ironic fact that the attacks were on the same day as the US-inspired coup against Pinochet in 1973…

  DEATH OF A SALESMAN

  You were there in Chile, 11 September ‘73

  Twenty eight years to the day - what a dreadful irony

  Victor Jara singing ‘midst the tortured and the dead

  White House glasses clinking as Allende’s comrades bled…

  You were there in ‘79 in the hills above Kabul

  Teaching a bunch of psychopaths the fastest way to kill

  Just pawns in your global strategy, another little right wing war

  But now you reap just what you sow - the monster’s at the door

  CHORUS

  And you don’t understand why those people are so angry

  And you don’t understand why they don’t go shopping too

  And you don’t understand why your garish colours blind them

  Dismiss, exploit and bully - then you wonder at their hate

  So many cruel deaths

  But these are different, these are American

  Now death counts - death of a salesman

  You use the world as your sweatshop on a bare subsistence wage

  Then along come medieval murderers to exploit the people’s rage

  And Europe takes the profits too, then grovels on its knees

  Saying ‘after you, you rule the world, so do just as you please’

  CHORUS

  We don’t need your religion, whether Allah, money or God

  We won’t cheer on your armies, won’t wield your avenging rod

  We stand for justice, for the future,

  for the millions of women and men

  Who see through the lies and work for the day

  when sanity rules again

  CHORUS

  I had a quick rehearsal with the Spunk Lads, who really had done a good job, and then Robina and I had a bit of time to look around the city. The first two gigs were at the Bowery Poetry Project, hosted by celebrated New York spoken word performer Bob Holman: there didn’t appear to be much advertising and we got a small but enthusiastic crowd. Then Arlene’s Grocery, a legendary rock n roll venue: myself, Tim and about three bands, minimal door charge, punters asked whom they’d come to see, acts paid (pean
uts) accordingly. Bit like new band night in the Eighties at the Rock Garden in London. The Spunk Lads backing me were great, though!

  In Hoboken, New Jersey, we had a thrash metal band on with us - again not many people. Tim and I weren’t anywhere near the tour target of covering our costs from the money we were getting: for a first tour that was all were expecting, the basis on which we’d agreed to come. It is our living after all. I was getting disappointed with the turnouts and the way things had been organised, but Bryan and his partner were good, friendly hosts, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped things would improve.

  And at the next gig they did, big time. We played Manitoba’s, owned by ‘Handsome’ Dick Manitoba, singer of legendary NYC punks The Dictators, on a Monday night: the advertising was great, punk icon Jayne County was spinning the discs, the place was rammed and it was fantastic, the best gig I’ve done in three US tours. After playing with the band I climbed on to the bar and did a real old fashioned ranting poetry set: Tim was brilliant, wonderful night. And then to the home of the New York Antifolk scene, the Sidewalk Café. Surely this was going to be even better! But… another enthusiastic, but very small crowd. A real shame.

  Consecutive gigs in New York meant plenty of time during the day to explore, and of course we did. Perusing the subway map, I saw Rockaway Beach, immortalised by the Ramones: punk rock pilgrimage beckoned. But there were several subway stops all along it. I asked some builders working in the lobby of Bryan’s apartment which was the best one to get off at, and armed with that information we were on our way. As the train pulled in, Robina and I thought it looked a bit rough to be one of New Yorkers’ favourite beach destinations, but, hey, that’s what we’d been told…