Of course, the big jokes about Glastonbury have always been the same ones: the toilets and the weather. Having had a performer’s pass for every festival I’ve been spared the worst excesses of the toilets, though with the massive increase in personnel in all departments these days there are sometimes quite a few ‘convex’ ones in the backstage compounds too (yuk!) As for the weather: after 25 festivals I have seen it all. My first two sum the whole thing up: baking sunshine at the first, mudbath carnage apocalypse at the second. I have a wonderful memory from the second one. John Peel and myself spotted each other simultaneously. We were only about a hundred yards apart, but a huge sea of cloying black mud stood in the way: determinedly, we waded towards each other, shook hands, and then waded off to find a bar.
I love Glastonbury. Thanks to Haggis McLeod and all the lovely stage crew who give us all such a great time every year. And here’s a poem I wrote. (Sorry, Robina, I know the memory still makes you cringe…)
TWO GLASTONBURY ERRORS
Now I’ve performed at Glastonbury since 1983 –
Precisely 25 so far, though each feels new to me
I’ve seen it grow from hippy roots into a massive splurge
You get the lot, from ranting poets to quids-in corporate dirge
And that’s OK. Each to their own. Us old school hardcore purists
And all the mobile-cashpoint-weekend-hippie Glasto tourists.
I have a thousand memories of sunshine, rain and flood
Joe Strummer on the main stage, John Peel in the mud…
No time for all. Two special stories, and a rare old mixture.
The beer-befuddled memoirs of a punk rock Glasto fixture.
The first concerns a gruesome and apocryphal event
Concerning those unfortunates ensconced in the Dance Tent
One afternoon when Glasto staff were cleaning out the loos.
The bloke inside the toilet truck had two buttons to choose –
The one emblazoned ‘Suck’ and the other labelled ‘Blow’…
Wrong button, wrong place and wrong time. The end result?
Oh, no.
The second is more personal and close to home, I’d say.
My wife and I were wandering one sunny Saturday
Amidst the close-pressed masses of a modern Glasto crowd
When she had a whim to do something to make her husband proud
Give me a lift, despite my beers, and really set me up
So she gently reached behind herself to make a loving ‘cup’
But my stopping by the beer tent quite undid her wifely plan
And the loving cup was given to an unsuspecting man….
Her fingers knew at once the heinous nature of her error
And she dashed off in embarrassment, confusion, pain and terror!
I’ve never asked Robina if the grounds for her surprise
Were because her chosen target was over- or undersized…
Or was it just a different shape? Well, that’s as it may be.
Long live Michel Eavis, and long live Glastonbury!
Incidentally, if you are one of those who think Glastonbury these days is too big/too corporate/whatever and you like the idea of a 550 capacity festival with over 80 real ales and ciders from small producers and 3 days of original, spiky music and poetry with tickets at £52 including camping – well, we run one in West Sussex and have done for the last 20 years (so far) as many of you will know. More about GlastonWICK later…
Back from Glastonbury and the gigs were still coming thick and fast. Absolute stormer at Exeter University. A very snooty crowd at the ICA and another at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Journalism, too – reviewing New Model Army, by now making big waves, and support act The Three Johns (English White Boy Engineer: an absolutely classic song) for Sounds. Interviewing Ed Ball, main man of TV Personalities spin off band The Times. I loved The Times’ classic English mod-pop and they made some fine albums which I still listen to today. As an ex stockbroker’s clerk I took part in the ‘Stop the City’ demonstration in London in September, precursor of today’s Carnivals against Capitalism, and met anarchist icon Ian Bone at the bottom of a scrum of bodies outside some den of exploitation or another. A good guy, Ian. His book ‘Bash the Rich’ makes riveting reading and apparently is going to be turned into a film. I can’t wait.
When given the chance I was still determinedly preaching to the unconverted, whether snobby upper class types or the other extreme – hostile, racist white working class youth. A social worker got in touch with me, asking me if I would do a gig at Barton Hill Youth Centre in Bristol for a bunch of ‘problem’ fourteen to sixteen year old boys. Sure, I said. I thought I’d start by making them laugh, at the same time confronting their prejudices head on, so I gave them ‘Jingo Bells’, my piss-take of the attitudes of right wing ‘En-ger-land’ football hooligans…..
THE DUTCH the Dutch they’re much too much we’re gonna kick them in the crutch flick bogies at the slimy wogs and trip them up with their own clogs we’ll twist their ears and break their glasses stick their tulips up their arses foul their windmills with our bowels and vomit into their canals THE DANES the Danes we’ll bash their brains and wire their willies to the mains boycott their bacon and their prawns and go and piss over their lawns the scabby Scandinavian scum got scrotal scabies of the bum they live on fish-heads and weak tea their lager tastes like canine pee THE SWISS the Swiss they stink of piss no race more tedious than this with cuckoo clocks and huge amounts of money in their bank accounts they may be rich but we don’t care we’ll shave off all their pubic hair and make them live in Belgium - that’s the right place for the boring prats THE FRENCH the French they smell like tench we’ll chase them all into a trench get loads of garlic on our breath and suffocate them all to death we don’t like onions snails or Proust so smeg off frogs we rule the roost you may be existentialists but we’re dead hard and we get pissed the CZECHS the Czechs they’re scared of sex they’ve all got crabs and skinny necks their cars are shit their beer’s too strong we’re not gonna stay there for long there’s absolutely zilch to do there’s no Black Label and no glue so we’ll just wreck the place and go and leave them to their queues and snow the FINNS the Finns live out of tins they all look like the Cocteau Twins their scenery’s not very nice ‘cos most of it’s a mass of ice so don’t go there it’s much too chilly you’ll end up with a frozen willy it’s a godforsaken hole obscenely close to the North Pole THE KRAUTS the Krauts they think they’re louts but I’ve seen nastier Brussels sprouts they strut around like football yobs but they’re all talk and cheesy knobs they live on pickled vegetation what a bloody stupid nation all their nipples are bright green the strangest folk I’ve ever seen THE SWEDES the Swedes they’re fucking weeds and all their cities look like Leeds they walk around with plastic bags and noses stuck in porno mags they live on fish just like the Danes but they’ve got even smaller brains their language sounds like double Dutch their land smells like a llama’s crutch THE GREEKS the Greeks we’ll slap their cheeks and lock them up in bogs for weeks puke in their restaurants and bars and write rude slogans on their cars we’ll get a load of herpes scabs and stick ‘em all in their kebabs and write a note IN PUKE to say ‘CLUB 18-30 RULE OK!!’ THE POLES the Poles eat toilet rolls their underpants are full of holes they have to queue over an hour to get a mouldy cauliflower they whine and whinge and gripe and moan and play the hairy pink trombone they’re always wanking in the loo there’s fuck all else for them to do THE YANKS the Yanks ……duh…..many thanks for bringing in your bombs and tanks and crossing many a foreign border to bolster up the New World Order you’re foreigners but you’re alright ’cos you speak English and you fight or so it tells me in ‘The Sun’…… COR! BEING A MORON IS SUCH FUN!!!
They smiled! They laughed! They cheered me to the rooftops! Until the last line, which was met with stony silence. They thought the whole thing was serious: I suppose that they took my short hair and Doc Martens to mean I was
‘one of them’. When I made it quite plain that I wasn’t, and that what I was doing was ‘satire’, they decided, with some justification I suppose, that I was taking the piss out of them and started to get nasty. I was confident: although there were lots and lots of them, they were mostly half my age and half my size, and surely they wouldn’t attack someone who was basically a kind of visiting lecturer, would they?
I tried to win them round with football poems (‘We’re the City Boot Boys, we hate Brighton, fuck off!’) and rude poems (worked for a few seconds, then they remembered that they’d already decided they didn’t like me, so the ones who laughed were elbowed and told to stop by the others). And then I did what I often did back then in such a situation, I just gave up and went for full-on confrontation with my anti-fascist poem ‘Andy Is A Corporatist’ - and a substantial mob moved forward to attack me.
Fortunately the social worker had the common sense to intervene (‘I think that’s the end of the session now’) before escorting me to her office - and locking the door, which was then kicked repeatedly. ‘Miss, what are you protecting him for, he’s a c**t!’ She was made of stern stuff, though, and I was soon on my way. Before and since, that place had a horrible reputation of having gigs wrecked by fascist boneheads: mine was wrecked by their younger brothers. I hope Barton Hill is different now.
October-December 1983. Back to my old stomping ground, Kent University, again in triumph, and then my third gig of the year at Manchester University. Support was Seething Wells… and a young singer/songwriter from Barking called Billy Bragg. It was the first time I saw him play and the first time I met him properly, although not for long, because he had to dash off to do another gig somewhere else that night. Having got his big break by being taken under the wing of the massively influential ex-Pink Floyd manager Pete Jenner, he was working here, there and everywhere. I was impressed with his set - with his chunky electric guitar sound he was like a one-man punk band - and his lyrics were great. As a bloke I remember him being quiet, a bit phased by the rumbustuous horseplay which regularly took place whenever Swells and I were in each other’s company, and calling Jenner ‘boss’ a lot.
Then the Jump Club in Oxford, another five-show stint round the New Variety circuit in London, a support set for rising stars The Alarm at the Savoy Ballroom in Tufnell Park, my first show of many organised by local poet Ledger de la Bald at the lovely, friendly Bricklayers Arms in Parkestone, Poole run by Geoff and Ruth and another first show of many for the Northampton Musicians’ Collective. Imperial College London, Hatfield Poly, Hull University, a gig at the Albanian Society (!) a spot at Michael Horovitz’s wonderful, ubiquitous and eccentric Poetry Olympics and a third visit of the year to Holland for three shows. And just to round off the year, my last gig of ’83 was an end-of-term gig at a school in Crawley where some local fascists turned up to have a desultory pop. Nothing much happened though. Even by fascist bonehead standards, it’s pretty sad to try and start a fight at a poetry gig in a school, isn’t it?
And in the last few hours of the last day of what had been an inspirational, eye-opening and exhausting year for me, I started to write a song which I still consider to be one of my best, all these years later. I’d come back to my mother’s in Southwick for New Year to see her and to celebrate with my friends. In the early evening of New Year’s Eve I was wandering along the harbour seafront between Southwick and Shoreham to meet them there in the now-demolished King’s Head pub.
1984 was hours away. In his famous novel of the same name Orwell describes a Britain turned into Airstrip One – a huge, unsinkable aircraft carrier for a foreign power. His prediction was coming true: American Cruise missiles were arriving at RAF Greenham Common and the Women’s Peace Camp had been established there in protest. (As mentioned earlier I had done a gig there in late 1981, just before it became an all-women camp.) As I made that familiar walk I was thinking about the challenges ahead - and the words and tune of a song started to form in my brain.
Many, many beers later I made the same familiar journey back, somewhat unsteadily, and as I did so I came up with the first verse. The rest was completed back in Harlow: it took a while and sadly wasn’t done in time for my second album, which was a real shame. The Newtown Neurotics covered it, John Peel played it, Steve Lamacq loved it. I’m still very proud of it.
THE BALLAD OF AIRSTRIP ONE
Another New Year and too much beer and a puke into the sea
Though the lights of Shoreham Harbour still look the same to me
And some bloke on the radio is saying things that I heard before
And he’s going on about Orwell and it’s getting rather a bore
And out there in the darkness there’s a Yankee with a gun
But we’re too wrecked to care right now ‘cos the New Year’s just begun
We’re having fun
Down on Airstrip One
The Harlow lights shine brightly as the wheels eat up the road
But the motorways are runways now and they’re carrying a deadly load
‘Cos the monsters are all mobile and there’s anarchy in the air
And the driver’s name is Sutcliffe and he’s too far gone to care
And if you think your Kentish prayers are mightier than the gun
I’ll tell you that you’re dreaming ‘cos the coundown’s just begun
But we’ll still have fun
Down on Airstrip One
Some folks are angry and some folks are cool
Read all the newspapers, don’t be a fool
Video nasties and sugary tea
That’s the way to get away scot free
On Airstrip One…
There’s some choose civilisation and a promise unfulfilled
And there’s some choose extermination – when it’s someone else who gets killed
A gesture of insanity and a word left to the crabs
Five thousand years of history and now they’re up for grabs
So send that fucking cowboy riding off into the sun
And send with him the culture of the dollar and the gun
Then we’ll have fun
Down on Airstrip One
The cowboy, of course, was Ronald Reagan: as I wrote the song I thought that the campaign to get our country back from the clutches of his evil empire would be the big one of 1984. How wrong I was. We were three months away from the biggest trade union dispute since the General Strike of 1926, a virtual civil war that would see whole sections of the working class and progressive movement described by Margaret Thatcher as ‘the enemy within’ and one with repercussions which would still be felt to this day.
And then some.
FIVE
MINERS’ STRIKE, WAPPING, RED WEDGE
No thunderclaps or anything like that to start off Orwell’s portentious year: for me just a hangover on New Year’s Day and then some university gigs in the North West with, sandwiched in between, my first appearance at Sandy Gort’s groundbreaking ‘Stand and Deliver’ club in Ashton Under Lyne.
Sandy, christened ‘Slimy Git’ by lead singer Muttley, was the manager of Macclesfield’s infamous Macc Lads when I had discovered their original demo tape lying around in the Sounds office a couple of years previously and, thinking it hilarious, gave them their first national media publicity. I don’t know if I can be credited with discovering the Macc Lads, or if I should be proud of it if I was! They were, erm, a very rude pastiche of the drunk, sexist Northern male: their first album, for instance, was called ‘Beer & Sex & Chips ‘n’ Gravy’.
They could be very clever and very funny – but, like the kids at my gig in Barton Hill Youth Centre, some of their audience took what they were singing at face value. I don’t think Muttley & Co handled it all that well, to be honest. But myself and my friends had some good times in Macc in the early days, my late, great friend Roy Chuter ‘starred’ in one of their videos and another late friend, Neil Dickinson aka Neil Axminster, supported them many times with his band All Over Th
e Carpet and then became their road manager for years.
‘Stand and Deliver’ was a great performance space, doing exactly what it should – encouraging new, young writer/performers to take the stage. Soon it would be taken over by young singer/songwriter Darren Poyzer and award-winning playwright Kevin Fegan and between 1986 and 1990 it helped launch the careers of Manchester-based artists like Steve Coogan, Caroline Aherne, Henry Normal and more, playing the same kind of role in the Manchester area subculture as the New Variety circuit did in London.
I went up to Newcastle at the beginning of Feb to do a spot on seminal indie show ‘The Tube’ for Tyne Tees TV – ‘Nigel Wants To Go To C&A’s’, as mentioned earlier - and gigged at Sheffield Poly and Swindon Town Hall, then at Balliol College Oxford, alma mater of my poetic mentor Hilaire Belloc. Then to the opposite end of the class divide: a return to the North East and the legendary Bunker in Sunderland, home of Red London and their close mates Red Alert. Darlington Arts Centre, Teeside Poly, Peterlee Musicians’ Collective – a fine bunch, I’d be back there sooner than I’d have expected - Durham Uni, Salford Uni. This South Coast poet was establishing firm links with the punks and activists in the mining communities of the North East, bonds which would be strengthened still further during the coming months and, as you’ll hear, endure to this day. And I went to see John Cale at the Lyceum in London, where he was recording a live album. I didn’t ask to be the support act though.
Then I got a call from David Fielder at huge publishing house George Allen & Unwin, asking if Swells and I, as leaders of the new ranting poetry movement, were interested in doing a book for them. Yes please, I said, on both our behalves, and went for a meeting with him. Swells didn’t come: by this time he had new ideas up his sleeve.
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