ARGUMENTS YARD
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Those New York builders had obviously thought it would be funny to dump two Limey innocents right in the middle of the hood.
Coming out of the station, we found ourselves in the middle of a huge housing project, the kind of place really luridly violent rap videos get filmed in. We walked for about twenty minutes and stood out like a sore thumb – everyone was looking at us. ‘This can’t be right’ I said to Robina, but it was a lovely sunny day and there weren’t that many people about, so we thought we’d make for the beach, which we did. It was more or less deserted and there were used needles lying about. ‘This ISN’T right!’ we said to each other, and my street sense told me that we’d better get our arses (or rather asses) back to that station pretty promptly, which we did.
When we arrived back at Bryan’s and told him the story he looked really shocked – he’s a social worker, and we’d been dumped in a place where social workers only go in packs. They may have thought they were just having a laugh, but those builders were bastards, and we were lucky.
Our other memorable New York experience on that first tour was infinitely less dangerous, if more embarrassing for my wife. Another musical pilgrimage (Lou Reed and Ramones again) took us to Coney Island, where we went to the acquarium and, wandering round it, came upon an enormous walrus right at the front of his tank, surrounded by a large group of onlookers. He was rubbing his leg between his flippers.
Hang on, I thought. Walruses don’t have legs.
‘BLOODY HELL!’ I said to Robina, far, far too loudly. ‘THAT’S HIS F***ING KNOB!’
The people around us laughed. Robina looked at me despairingly.
(In my defence, it was enormous.)
Sadly, the rest of the gigs on that tour followed the pattern already established: Manitoba’s proved to be the exception rather than the rule. I got rather shirty with Bryan, and I’m sorry I did: he was only doing his best. TV Smith tells me that when Bryan organised stuff for him later it went a lot better, so maybe it was just me. Anyway, at that point I’d more or less put the US in the same bin as Romania: been there, seen it, don’t need to go back. And then I met David Rovics.
It was the late Pete Crook, Brentford and Bragg fan and avid seeker-out of new radical music, who put me on to him: the power of that new world, the internet, one click and you’re there. A radical singer/songwriter in the Phil Ochs mould, very folky and hippy-looking when I first encountered him (that would change) with incredibly sharp, intelligent, inspirational songs: wonderful, incisive lyrics allied to memorable tunes. I emailed him, we swapped lyrics and ideas and it became obvious that in terms of DIY organisational skills and general determination to spread the word on our own terms we were blood brothers. We decided to team up: I organised our first UK tour together for the spring of 2002. (The first of no less than 14 to date, in the UK, US and mainland Europe.)
That first tour was good, but is eclipsed in my memory by the second one I set up for us, which came just as the Iraq War against Saddam Hussein had begun, ‘victory’ had been claimed by Bush and Blair and Iraq occupied. Some victory! The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis: the turning of their country into a brutal, sectarian charnelhouse, huge swathes of it currently ruled by the unspeakable fascists of Islamic State. And the justification for this murderous carnage? It was alleged that Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ - later proven not to be the case. Even more ludicrously, George Bush had claimed that Saddam, a Baa’thist and avowed secularist who repressed Islamism with psycopathic force and to whom Al Qaeda was a deadly enemy, had been involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre. That’s rather like claiming that Hitler’s Third Reich had been backed by the Jews. It says a lot about the cretinous insularity of large swathes of the USA that a majority of people there believed this nonsense.
Over a million marched against that war in London, thousands more in other British cities, millions more across the world. But Blair took not one blind bit of notice. Democracy, eh? Blair should be in The Hague on trial for war crimes, not a bloody Middle East Peace Envoy.
On March 19, 2003, I was in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, while in the North doing a series of gigs. I love history and have always used the daytimes while on tour to visit places of interest: I had gone there because I knew that the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, Guy Fawkes (‘the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions’) had lived there, and the castle had been besieged by the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War.
The previous evening the British parliament, including most of the ruling Labour Party, had - in one of the most craven acts in our political history - voted to support Bush and Blair’s war, despite the huge demonstrations and the opinion polls which showed the vast majority of the British public was opposed to it. I’d gone for a pint in the Mother Shipton Inn by Mother Shipton’s Cave and as I sat down with my drink I saw a plaque on the table in front of me. ‘This table belonged to Guy Fawkes during his time in Knaresborough’ it read. In the next twenty minutes I wrote this song, and sang it to Robina down the phone later that day.
GUY FAWKES’ TABLE
I’m sitting at Guy Fawkes’ table
The day Parliament voted for war
Though the mass of the people opposed it
And it flouts international law
I’m sitting at Guy Fawkes’ table
While American thugs flaunt their power
Egged on by a sad little muppet
And his craven and cowardly shower.
CHORUS
Aneurin Bevan, your party is dead
And the time for a new one is nigh
Will the last person Left please turn out the lights?
New Labour, just fuck off and die!
They won’t be caught up in the carnage
They’ll be pontificating right here
Their kids won’t be Iraqi conscripts
Moved down while they’re shitting with fear
Saddam was the Yanks’ chosen ally
On a whim, they now say he must fall
So they’ll carpet bomb defenceless soldiers -
But that’s not ‘mass destruction’ at all….
CHORUS
I’m sitting at Guy Fawkes’ table
As Bush and his muppet connive
And I’m filled with unspeakable anger
And I’m thinking of 1605
One message, Dishonourable Members
Who endorsed an illegal attack -
No, I don’t want to bomb you like Guy did
But I’d love to send you to Iraq!
CHORUS
We need a new socialist party -
But not the Judean People’s Front
Not another small sect, but a movement
With the power to change and confront
We need an electoral system
Which gives every voter a voice
‘Cos we’re fed up with voting for traitors
And we have the right to a choice!
CHORUS
Now Blair’s gone I’ve changed the chorus to ‘Aneurin Bevan, your party’s been stolen/The time to reclaim it is nigh’. It’s still ‘New Labour, just fuck off and die’ though. I’m not writing the Labour Party off: it’s Blair’s vision of ‘New Labour’ I find so contemptible, the idea that the once great party which built the Welfare State should become a pale pink version of the Tories to placate the likes of Rupert Murdoch. We want Old Labour back. A party which stands up for the poor and dispossessed, instead of worrying itself sick what the money markets and the Tory press will say, and doesn’t suck up to reactionary scumbags like Bush. I still hope. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.
In an age where Islamic State in particular, and Islamic fundamentalism in general, is wreaking such havoc, it is worth pointing out that since the 1970s the West has been energetically backing these lunatics all over the place, and, latterly, deliberately deposing the secular dictators who were bulwarks against them. I remember ITN reporter Sandy
Gall’s dispatches from Afghanistan, hailing the antecedents of the Taliban as ‘freedom fighters’, while Ronald Reagan called them ‘the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers’. The US started funding Islamist extremists in Afghanistan BEFORE the Russians invaded: the socialist government there was instigating land reform, educating women and abolishing child marriage and the West were giving guns and money to people who threw acid in women’s faces and planted bombs in schools. I’ll never forget this quote from an Afghan woman doctor:
‘Life was good then. Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go wherever we wanted and wear what we liked. It all started to go wrong when the muhajedin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think that these were the people the West were supporting…’
Funny? Sad? It was murderous, imperialist geopolitics: all in the name of ‘anticommunism’: backing medievalist lunatics on the basis of that sad old fallacy, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. And remember that when the funding started there were no Russians in Afghanistan, just a modernising Afghan government doing many of the things the West would welcome there today!
The ‘collapse of communism’ in the late 80s took away the secular socialist alternative for millions of exploited people of Muslim background, increasing the attractiveness of radical Islam as an ideology of so called ‘liberation’.
After this the West facilitated the rise of Islamic State in Iraq by deposing Saddam and in Syria by arming Islamist rebels against the secular Assad. They bombed to oblivion the substantial number of ordinary Libyans who supported Gaddafi and handed their country over to competing Islamist militias. No, I’m not saying that any of these dictators were good people, but I am saying that life in all the countries they ruled has got a hell of a lot worse for just about everyone there since the West engineered their overthrow, and that the West has quite literally shot itself in the foot at the same time by paving the way for the Islamists whom they claim to hate so much to gain control. Anyone care to disagree?
Anyway, back to David Rovics and that tour in 2003. I was fired up and angry, so was he: we were almost chronicling the war day by day. His most topical song of very many was without doubt ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’, which is what the clueless Bush propagandists had called the attack on that hapless country for a few hours - until they realised their acronymic mistake!
‘Operation Iraqi Liberation
What does that spell?
Operation Iraqi Liberation…
O, I, L!’
Says it all really. We were a great contrast: though his words spit fire he is polite, quiet and melodic. I’m not. Some of his audience thought I was too loud and rude: a few of mine perhaps that he was a bit of a hippy. But the gigs went really well, and we knew we were a good team: he invited me to tour the US with him, and so, in March 2004, Robina and I went back.
The tour was due to start on March 5th in Minneapolis, so I booked a flight which would give us a day or so to relax and recover from jetlag before we got going. I chose Icelandair: a couple of hours’ stop in Reykavik, at least we could say we’d been to Iceland. But the plane was delayed, we missed the connection and got a free night there in a lovely hotel, courtesy of the airline: we wandered around a very clean city with steam coming out of the ground, no trees and unbelievably expensive, utterly disgusting beer. (They seem to have dealt with the bankers well though: good on Iceland for that!) The delay meant that we lost the planned day’s rest and had to dash through snow-covered Minneapolis straight to the gig, jetlag in full swing: normally I’d deal with jetlag by applying several pints of decent ale to it in quick succession, but that plan was foiled by the fact that the gig was in a church.
David had explained to me about this. Lots of progressive gigs in the US take place in Universalist and Congregational churches: the Right certainly doesn’t have the monopoly on religion there that a lot of UK Lefties would probably assume. The acoustics were great. There was a good crowd. But there wasn’t any beer (at future church gigs I’d smuggle some in with me) and it wasn’t the kind of place the punks would come: lots of nice, earnest, middle aged Lefties and a few younger people. The occasional rude word wasn’t a problem, however, and we went down just fine. That description covers the gigs in Madison and Detroit – they were in churches too. I knew that not many people in the States knew my stuff, but I knew there were some, nearly all from the punk scene, and I got the impression that perhaps they simply wouldn’t have known I was there, because of the venues and networks involved.
There was one place where they did, though - a community centre in Pittsburgh, where there was a healthy turnout of punk and skinhead Attila fans and a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll atmosphere. The others were in folk clubs, cafes, community centres, a high school, a couple of universities and – hooray! – in St Louis, in the taproom of a small independent brewery: the huge surge in American ‘craft beer’ was just beginning at that time.
Everywhere apart from Pittsburgh the audiences were very… nice. Much less beer-sodden and a lot more ‘polite’ than in the UK (even at the brewery gig!) Respectable radicals, a bit shocked by my energy, passion, punk thrash mandola and use of language, but appreciative nevertheless. I hardly ever use the word ‘nice’ but that is the only adjective that seems right to describe it. I didn’t feel I’d really connected with my core audience, somehow, but I’m not complaining at all: it was just very different to any tour I’d done before. David was an absolutely superb organiser and a great host, everything ran smoothly from a financial point of view and a video done of my set at the Heartland Café in Chicago was so good I released it as my first DVD.
Then we did another three UK tours together, plus a few gigs in Holland: and in 2006, I went back to the States once more, this time to the West Coast, David’s side of the country since he lives in Portland, Oregon. This time David made more of a conscious effort to connect with the punk and burgeoning craft beer scene, and there were cracking gigs at the Ukiah Brewery in Ukiah, the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco and anarchist publisher/distributor AK Press’s headquarters in Oakland, California alongside the churches, community venues and universities: at many of the other gigs there was a craft brewery nearby, which I’d sample with gusto. (American beers are rarely below 7% and often well above it, though, so I had to be careful before gigs.) David drove me to the very door of the superb Sierra Nevada brewery in Chico, California, where I was hoping for a look round, but it was closed. Never mind…
It’s funny really. When I told people in England I was going to tour the US, people would say to me ‘Watch yourself, John, those rednecks have got guns, you know!’ as though I was booked to play a string of suburban sports bars in the Deep South or something. I am more or less certain that I didn’t meet a single right wing American during any of my three tours. Now there’s an achievement.
Will I go back? I don’t know. It’s a huge place, and to be honest I felt a bit lost there: the network of autonomous social centres that exist all over Europe, or even of friendly pubs that we have in the UK, doesn’t seem to exist. If alternative performers and organisers have to use churches for their gigs, no disrespect to the churches but there’s something wrong in the scene as far as I’m concerned. But if David invites me again, I’m reckon I will. As long as the brewery gigs outnumber the church ones by at least 3 to 1!
His songs are brilliant, and he fits in perfectly there (as I say, he’s polite, sings beautifully, is a wonderful guitarist, doesn’t swear and doesn’t mind playing places where there is no beer – although deprive him of his coffee and he goes nuts). Since that last US trip we have done another six tours here together, the last in the UK in 2011 and in Denmark in 2013: we’ve taken the brilliant Welsh-based singer Tracey Curtis and my gravel-voiced Aussie alt country mate Rory Ellis round with us on a tour each as well. I’ve had an effect on David too: the hippy shirts are gone, he dresses in black these days, and he’s been
known to have a beer or two alongside his hippy herbs. After fourteen tours together we’ve given it a rest for a bit, but he’ll be playing Glastonwick this year, as he has many times in the past, and I’m sure we’ll be back on the road together again at some point. Cheers for all the good times, comrade. I’m glad I took the piss out of your hippy shirts: you’re the best radical black-clad-hippy-folk-punk singer on the planet.
New millennium well under way, new challenges always afoot: I could go on and on, but I won’t. I’ve talked a lot about recent years in the later stages of this book. It’s time to start tying a few loose ends up now, ready for the final three chapters which have specific themes running parallel with everything else…
In early February 2003 I released the imaginatively-named ‘Live in Belfast’ solo spoken/word album on my Roundhead label (though the front cover was a photo of me in New York taken by Robina). It’s still available online and at gigs to this day. To commemorate the late, great Joe Strummer, whose influence runs like a vein though this book and the lives of millions and who tragically died on Dec 22nd, 2002, I organised ‘Joe Strummer Remembrance Sunday’ at the Concorde in Brighton on 9th November 2003. We raised £2,140 for Strummerville, the charity set up in his memory.
More gigs together in the UK and Europe with my old friend and inspiration, acoustic punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald: likewise with my Aussie alt-country mate Rory Ellis and Geoff Berner, the astonishingly original klesmer-punk accordionist/songwriter from Vancouver. Invited by the British Council to European Championship hosts Portugal in 2004 for some football-related performances: as you’ll find out in the chapter after next, that wasn’t a problem! Barnstormer third album ‘Zero Tolerance’ released. 2005: 25th anniversary BBC Radio 4 programme, a ‘Poetry Please’ special hosted by Ian McMillan called ‘Giving It Lip’: 25th Anniversary gig at the Concorde in Brighton as part of a big UK tour. 2006: toured Holland with Penny Rimbaud from Crass. Weird. Supported The Fall in Antwerp. Really weird: Mark E Smith detuned his own band’s instruments on stage. Apparently he does that a lot. First of three solo poetry/music appearances in Norway (Trondheim and Oslo) alongside Patrik Fitzgerald, spawning my ‘Live in Norway’ CD released in 2007 (Crispin Glover Records). And October 2007 saw my 50th birthday. Robina surprised me with a wonderful book full of messages from friends and fellow-travellers from all over the world.