ANCIENT HISTORY

Text of the sleeve notes for my spoken word CD 'Poems Ancient and Modern'

An Ancient History Of Attila The Stockbroker

So how did it all begin?

Funny thing is, although I have written poetry all my life (and did my first gig aged nine at Manor Hall Primary School in Southwick, West Sussex where I grew up, reciting the Cautionary Tales of Hilaire Belloc, my mentor to this day) I never expected poetry to become such a big part of my life! From the beginning it was music, music all the way.

T.Rex, Mott the Hoople, Velvet Underground, David Bowie - and then punk. For me as for thousands of others, punk changed everything. I had to be part of it!

I'd messed around and jammed before, and played with bands a few times, but it was during the first heady days of punk (I was 19 in 1977)that I knew above all that I had to get on stage - I thought then, singing and playing my songs in a punk band. Yes, like thousands of others I was fired up by punk rock, and in any case I didn't think it was possible to get an audience as a poet. But I was a bass player - an inventive bass player inspired by Free's Andy Fraser, writing songs with stirring melodies and fiery lyrics, but a bass player nevertheless. A big handicap for an extrovert would-be frontman who, like so many before and since, found the singular technique required to sing and play the bass in my chosen style impossible - and so reluctantly handed his songs over to other people, and stood to one side compensating by playing bass lines far too flashy to be appropriate for punk... ..And the bands I was in kept splitting up anyway! When I left the last of these, Contingent, the really sussed Brussels band I had been playing in through the spring and summer of '79, I returned to England with a lot of good memories, a few poems and a determination to go solo.

I moved to Harlow in Essex in late 1979, sharing a flat with Steve Drewett of inspirational local punk band The Newtown Neurotics, whom I had met a year or so before at their first gig. I registered with an employment agency and because I can speak French I was offered a stopgap 'job' as a clerk/translator in the Stock Exchange. I hated it. They hated me. One day someone called me Attila. A light came on in my head. The rest, as they say, is history!

The 'job' lasted precisely eleven months - eleven months too long - and is the last one I ever had. Apart, of course, from being Attila the Stockbroker. That one has, to date, lasted eighteen years. Eighteen wonderful years!

Anyway, back to the story. I'd played the violin from a very early age, and had got myself an electric mandolin because it tuned the same and I could teach myself a few simple chords to write songs. As I say, I had a few poems that I thought might work well on stage, and by then John Cooper Clarke had proved that it could be done. I came up with some songs on the mandolin to supplement the poetry and did my first gig as Attila the Stockbroker on September 24th 1980, supporting Harlow punks The De-fex and The Unborn Dead (total respect, Little Dave!) in a local youth centre. After 'work'. In my 'suit.' Somewhat to my surprise, I went down quite well.....

I entered the Harlow Rock Contest and came fourth. Some people said that the organisers wanted to place me first but thought they couldn't 'cos I wasn't a band. I played a Rock Against Thatcher gig at Square One, the local Harlow venue (now The Square, known and respected on the circuit for years but now threatened with closure - shame!) and went down a storm. I'd started out doing more songs than poems, but the poems were at least as well received and the balance began to change. New poems were sharper and more suited to the immediacy of live performance. The earliest ones you'll hear here. 'Russians in the DHSS.' 'Russians In McDonalds.' 'A Bang and a Wimpy.' A few more gigs. I left the'job'. Then things started to happen......

In late 1981 I met Seething Wells (now, and for many years, Steven Wells of the NME) when we both shouted our poems off the back of a lorry at a demonstration organised by the Woolwich Right To Work Campaign. That evening there was a 'Poetry Olympics' event at the Young Vic in London, headlined by Paul Weller, who at the time was dabbling in poetry. Swells and I decided to try and blag a spot, organiser Michael Horovitz kindly agreed, and we tore the place apart. Neil Spencer of the NME was there and gave us rave reviews. A music press 'movement' (or rather a Warholian fifteen-minute fad) was born. 'Ranting poetry'. Swells' phrase. Paul Weller was impressed and Swells and I supported the Jam at the Hammersmith Odeon....

Around the same time we (Swells and I) had done a benefit gig for the Socialist Workers' Party in Wandsworth, and a mate of ours, 'Red' Saunders, made a recording of it over the top of an old reggae cassette and decided to release it as an EP. 'Rough Raw and Ranting' . 'Fine', I thought. 'But who's going to buy that ? Poetry on a record?' We sold a few copies at gigs........

A couple of weeks later I was down in Southwick visiting my mum and as many times before and since I was fishing off the East Arm of Shoreham Harbour, about 11pm, listening to John Peel. I'll never forget the moment. 'It can't be!' But it was. 'Russians in the DHSS'! On the John Peel Show! I nearly dropped my rod in the sea....

Peelie played that EP to death. It sold thousands and got in the indie charts. I signed a deal with Cherry Red Records and they released the 'Cocktails' EP. It sold thousands more and got to the higher echelons of the indie charts. I did a Peel session, then another one, and with about twenty poems and ten songs to my name was on the front cover of Melody Maker. (The night that issue came out I performed in Aldershot to 20 people. Oh, the power of the press!)

I started to write for Sounds, covering punk. Nom de plume: 'John Opposition.' Naff or what? People began turning up to gigs all over the country, in droves, just to see me! I made my position quite clear. Anti fascist social surrealist radical performance poet. The Clash meets Hilaire Belloc. I was attacked on stage by Nazis at Skunx, a punk/skin club in London. We fought back. Someone (who shall be nameless) from the Redskins was there. 'Under the table you must go...' My first mandolin met a noble end, smashed over my head by a Nazi bonehead. I bought its replacement, a mandola (an octave lower, better for songwriting) which I immediately named Nelson, and to date we have done more than two thousand gigs together. (The best of the songs I wrote on Nelson are on the other retrospective CD 'The Pen and the Sword.')

Towards the end of 1982 I recorded my first (mainly spoken word) album, 'Ranting At The Nation......'

And then, just as quickly as it had begun, the fad ended. The NME did not like my first album. (Subsequent to its publication, I made it abundantly clear that I did not like the NME journalist who wrote the review.) Something else ('new pop', I think - Nigel Wants to go to C&A's!) was occupying the 'minds' of the music press - and just like thousands of bands and artists before and since, by the end of 1983 Attila the Stockbroker and ranting poetry were apparently already last year's thing. Two years after I'd started. Just as I was beginning to write my best material. The equivalent of touting an apprentice carpenter as the best chippie

around while he's learning his trade, and directly he's qualified telling him he's rubbish. It's happened to thousands of talented artists, and they've given up, chucked it in, dreams shattered, spirits broken.

Fashion. What a way to run popular culture!

Did I care?

I didn't give a flying lamb's nipple.

I just got on with it. Unlike most performers I guess, I'm a natural organiser (some would say a total control freak!) And in any case, I had a left-wing punk rocker's disdain for the falseness and vapid machinations of the conventional entertainment industry. I'd already promoted lots of gigs for Rock Against Racism while at Kent University, so I decided to take my future - off stage as well as on - in my own hands.

And so I have, from that day to this. Eighteen years. Writing poems and songs and the occasional article for the national press, organising countless gigs every year both for myself and other performers I respect, running my performance poetry fanzine Tirana Thrash in the early days('83-'86) doing benefits for all the great '80s battles especially the Miners' Strike of '84 and '85 and the Wapping dispute a year later, organising festivals, making albums and CDs (13 in all including this one and 'The Pen and the Sword', its sister release, my best songs) on small independent labels,publishing books (3 so far) performing all over the world thanks to my wonderful network of friends and contacts (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, East Germany countless times before the Wall came down...now there's a long story....!the rest of Germany, Holland, France, Scandinavia, Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Basque Country ) running poetry/music events here in Southwick, and latterly fulfilling my lifelong ambition and fronting Barnstormer, the first band I formed specifically to play my songs and realise my dream of combining Renaissance music and punk.

And I've had my share of radio and TV coverage.....when it's something I think is worthwhile, and I can do what I want. I'm happy to be part of the media circus as long as it's on my own terms. It's fair to say that as far as radio is concerned I've far more interest outside the UK than here, thanks to college and community radio, a vital outlet for underground culture in most other countries in the world but thanks to the narrow idiocy of Uk broadcasting authorities, something which simply doesn't exist in this country.

As you will see from this live collection, lovingly selected from the vast canon I've accumulated over the years, my poetry continues to cover a fairly extensive range of human emotion and experience(!) I make no apologies for that. Life is about love, death, Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, flatfish and dirty sleeping bags. And lots more besides. My poems reflect my life.

And I hope, as you read this, that your life fulfils you as mine does me. Sounds trite, but it's not. I'm having a wonderful time. Total respect to everyone, from September 24th 1980 to this very day, who has enabled me to enjoy the wonderful privilege of earning a living doing what I love - writing words and music. Long may it continue!

Attila the Stockbroker, May 25 1999.


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