One of the Rock Against Racism gigs I had organised at university had featured a memorably named Harlow punk/R&B outfit called Pete The Meat & The Boys, and we had become friends; they’d asked me to be their manager, though I wasn’t ready for that. Guitarist Richard Holgarth told me that if I wanted quick money there were some well paid Christmas seasonal jobs going at the Gilbeys alcohol distribution depot in Harlow, and he could fix me up with a bed at his mate Chris's house. So off I went to Essex to work night shifts, pushing boxes full of various types of booze on and off a conveyor belt and taking full advantage of the ‘breakages’!

I thought I’d be in Harlow for a couple of months. Little did I know then that I’d eventually be based there, on and off, for more than twelve years...

... musically, at least, there was loads going on, probably because - as everyone said - there was bugger all else to do. In the true spirit of punk, the Harlow scene had started its own record label, Stortbeat, run by members of local outfits The Gangsters and The Sods (just as the River Mersey runs through Liverpool, so the River Stort runs through Harlow!) Given extra encouragement by the prospect of a record release, more bands were forming, and even though at that time there were few gig opportunities in Harlow itself, there were regular punk nights featuring Harlow bands at a disco called Triad in Bishop’s Stortford, a few miles away.

One evening I was sitting in the local punk hangout, which at the time, rather bizarrely, was the foyer bar of the Playhouse (the local theatre) having a beer before starting my night shift. A long-haired bloke in a Ramones T-shirt turned up handing out leaflets for a gig he was doing at Triad that weekend with his new band, supporting the Poison Girls.

‘Poison Girls?’ I said. ‘I know them – they’re from Brighton. I’ll come! ‘What’s your band called?’

‘Newtown Neurotics. It’s our second gig. I’m Steve, by the way’.

Newtown Neurotics - what an absolutely brilliant name, I thought. We had a good chat, I made sure I turned up in time to see them that weekend, and the band were as good as their name: for a second ever gig, it was great.

CHAPTER 2

THANKS, PEELIE

Back in Harlow the Front Line, as the local punk fraternity was called, was growing all the time: there were fully operational bands, bands who were just starting and ‘bands’ who only ever existed as toilet graffiti! Three of the newest ones had just got themselves a gig at a local playbarn, as Harlow youth centres were called, and they were happy to add me to the bill. Newly christened as Attila the Stockbroker, I made my debut on a sunny September evening in 1980 at Bush Fair Playbarn in between sets by The De-Fex, The Condemmed and The Unborn Dead. They were noisy as hell. So was I!

There wasn’t time for me to go home and change after the evening’s commute back from my job in London, so I asked my flatmate Steve to take my mandolin along for me and I did the gig in my work suit. It must have seemed very strange indeed – a bloke in a suit with a tatty green carnation shoved in the buttonhole, hammering out his songs on a tinny little electric mandolin put through a phaser unit, shouting poems in between the songs. But, rather against my expectations, I went down really well and was immediately offered another gig, at a Rock Against Thatcher night in the recently opened Square One youth club in the town centre, which, as The Square, is still hosting gigs 25 years on.

This was just the incentive I needed to write more material, and I soon came up with a new poem: a deadly alliance between the Tory press’s two greatest nightmares at the beginning of the Eighties – The Russians and that old favourite, then as now, The Social Security Scroungers...


RUSSIANS IN THE DHSS

It first was a rumour dismissed as a lie
but then came the evidence none could deny:
a double page spread in the Sunday Express –
The Russians are running the DHSS!

The scroungers and misfits have done it at last
The die of destruction is finally cast
The glue-sniffing Trotskyists’ final excess:
The Russians are running the DHSS!

It must be the truth ‘cos it’s there in the news
A plot by the Kremlin, financed by the Jews
and set up by Scargill, has met with success –
The Russians are running the DHSS!

So go down to your Jobcentre – I bet you’ll see
Albanian students get handouts for free
and drug-crazed punk rockers cavort and caress
In the interview booths in the DHSS...

They go to Majorca on taxpayers’ money
Hey, you there, stop laughing –I don’t think it’s funny
And scroungers and tramps eat smoked salmon and cress
Now the Russians are running the DHSS!

We’ll catch that rat Scargill with our red rat catcher
We’ll send him to dinner with Margaret Thatcher
And we’ll make him stay there until he’ll confess
That he put the Reds in the DHSS!

Then we’ll hang ‘em and flog ‘em and hang ‘em again
And hang ‘em and flog ‘em and more of the same
We’ll GAS all the dole queues and clear up the mess:
Get rid of the Reds – AND the DHSS!


This poem, one of my best known to this day, eventually found its way onto the celebrated Cherry Red punk compilation album ‘Burning Ambitions’ which sold thousands – with the result that, even now, ‘What’s the DHSS, Attila?’ is one of the questions most asked of me by pissed punks on my travels abroad. (One day soon, I guess, I’ll be asked it here too, along with ‘Who was Scargill?’, and my ambition is to live long enough for someone to ask me ‘Who was Margaret Thatcher?’) I still perform it occasionally for old time’s sake, even though it is obviously completely out of date.

After my Rock Against Thatcher appearance I was invited to do a couple more gigs, also well received: emboldened, I entered the Harlow Council Rock Contest, even though I wasn’t a band, and to my absolute astonishment, got to the final - beaten in the end by my old mates Pete the Meat and the Boys. I had more material now, poetic sneers at the mainstream music scene like ‘I Don’t Talk To Pop Stars’ and ‘Pap Music For Wreck People’. As well as the poems I was writing new songs: by the end of 1980 I’d ditched my early efforts and cover versions in favour of the anti-capitalist pyromaniac anthem ‘Burn It Down’, ‘Factory Gods’, a rant against organised religion, ‘Fifth Column’, strangely prescient of Thatcher’s use of the police as her private army during the miners’ strike a few years later, and ‘World War Three’, an anti nuclear thrash based on a poem by Roger McGough. Oh, and ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’ – nuff said. And I was still going on stage in my suit.

So a set crammed full of biting socio-political comment from Day One, then? Well, yes and no. I was certainly doing my best, but, if I’m honest, in those very early days there’s no doubt whatsoever that the high point of an Attila gig for most of the audience was a song about a dead cat.

By 1980 the Newtown Neurotics were doing quite a few gigs outside Harlow, and, wherever possible, I’d pile into the Transit van along with them. One February night that year we had just been dropped off very late back at Steve’s flat in Spencer’s Croft (that was the name of the estate we lived in) when we saw a cat lying in the road. It had self-evidently just had a terminal encounter with a motor vehicle and all nine of its lives had been used up in one go. Not wanting some poor unfortunate child to be greeted with the sight of a defunct, squashed and bloody family pet the next morning, we picked it up and placed it in some nearby bushes, and expected the council, or its owners, to clear it away: but they didn’t. The cat stayed exactly where it was (obviously, since it was dead) and as winter turned to spring, it came alive again. In a wriggly, maggoty, larval kind of way.

Word got round the local punk scene about The Spencer’s Croft Cat, as it was soon called, and people started making pilgrimages to the bushes to have a look: some didn’t just look, they poked it with sticks and things and watched the maggots crawl out. It remained unburied, and in no time at all had icon status. Its collar disappeared: I’m sure some punk rocker took it! Soon new Cat-inspired versions of political chants could be heard from the punk faction at demonstrations in the Harlow area, puzzling the hell out of the people around us.

‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat is a Dead Cat! Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat!’

‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat has got Maggat! Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat!’

What’s it got? Maggat! Who’s got maggat? The Spencer’s Croft Cat! When’s it got it? Now!’

The ‘small print’ on the poster advertising my very first gig was a prime example of this. Alongside the Crass-inspired slogan ‘Fight War Not Wars’ was a drawing of a spade and the words ‘Bury the Spencer’s Croft Cat’. Indeed, ‘Bury The Cat’ became a favourite graffito all over Harlow, up there with the ubiquitous ‘Mick and Nick - Ant People’ (I’ve often wondered how Little Mick and his girlfriend felt when Adam and the Ants changed from bondaged-up sleaze-punk sadomasochists into teenybopper pirates!)

Soon I’d written a song, predictably entitled ‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat’, in its honour. ‘Lying in the bushes, gone but not forgotten, its name may not be Johnny but it certainly is rotten...!’ Then I was offered my first ever London gig, supporting the Newtown Neurotics, Sods and Rabbits at the long-departed Music Machine. I thought I should do something special to mark the occasion, and bought a couple of pints of fishing maggots, with the intention of showering the audience with them in the middle of the song to illustrate the Cat’s condition (good idea, eh?) But I let the Cat out of the bag, as it were, and only managed to throw one larval handful before Roger from the Rabbits crept up behind me and tipped the remaining maggots over my head. I had a thorough wash and shook out my clothes, but bluebottles kept turning up in the flat for days afterwards...

To this day, that song is still requested across the world, and to Robina’s chagrin, if I’m asked for it, I still play it - now elongated to include ‘Dead Cat Strut’ (after ‘Stray Cat Strut’ by the Stray Cats) and ‘It’s Decomposing’ (after ‘What You’re Proposing’ by Status Quo). The Cat never was buried, though the bushes where it lay have been long since cleared away and an old people’s home built on the site: yes, there is one corner of Spencer’s Croft which will be forever feline. And, I kid you not, a bloke from New Zealand once travelled all the way to Harlow to pay homage there...

Of course, I shouldn’t be talking about this. I should be building up a picture of the hard-nosed radical street poet, unmoved by humour and frivolous songs about dead cats. In this country, if you get on stage you’re supposed to fit into a category: ‘poet’, ‘singer- songwriter’ ‘comedian’, whatever. And if you want to be ‘taken seriously’ by the people that matter, you are supposed to do ‘serious’ or ‘funny’, one or the other. Well, I don’t. I’ll still do an angry song and follow it with a silly poem if I feel like it, or vice versa. I don’t fit into boxes!

The saga of The Cat did have one very important and serious effect though: it ensured that for the next ten years, Harlow would really feel like and be my punk rock home, just as Brighton/Southwick was and always will be my family and football home.

And then, in January 1981, I got my first press feature.

In the Harlow Gazette.

‘CITY GENT’S MANIC TOUCH’ was the headline.

‘By day a mild mannered worker in a London stockbroker’s office, he changes into his alter ego Attila in the evenings, playing ‘manic’ folk’.

(‘Mild mannered’? Me?)

But this local journalist’s attempt to rewrite the Superman story in local hackese bore immediate fruit: I got a call from a wannabe impresario called Ray Santilli, who said he’d like to manage me. There and then, he promised me a showcase A&R gig at the famous Dingwall’s jazz club in London and an interview with the Daily Mirror, though he’d neither seen me, met me nor heard me perform before.

‘Yeah, right’, I thought.

The next thing I knew the Daily Mirror were on the ‘phone wanting to do a photo session with me, in my suit - and a bloody Viking helmet. Then I got confirmation that I was booked at Dingwalls, and Ray Santilli said he’d pay for a coach so that the local punks could come and cheer me on, to impress the A&R people (jazz A&R people!) he was inviting to come and see me. I couldn’t work out why he was doing all this, and I thought it was time to meet him. (Though I didn’t say so, I thought the Viking helmet was a really, really naff idea as well).

‘But Ray’, I said. ‘You’ve never seen me do a gig. You don’t know any of my stuff.

It’s not jazz. It’s left wing performance poetry and rude, loud, very primitive punky songs, thrashed out on three chords on a cheap little semi-acoustic mandolin put through a phaser unit. It’s indescribable really. I can’t sing, the mandolin sounds really tinny, and I’ve only been doing this for four months. I’ve got an awful lot to learn! No-one’s going to sign me, honestly! Especially not if they’re into jazz!’

‘It doesn’t matter what you do’, he said. ‘You’ve got a great stage name, and it’s a great story. Leave the rest to me.’

‘Well, Ok, I’ll do the photo session for the Mirror, and the gig, but I want free beer for the Harlow Front Line punks as well as the free coach to Dingwalls!’

I got it.

I did the photos, in my suit and a Viking helmet. I looked an absolute plonker, and even though you might think that a national newspaper feature four months after my first gig would be everything I could have ever wanted, I was mighty relieved when the editors decided not to run the piece.

The gig? A Monday night showcase at a cavernously empty Dingwalls. Fifty Harlow punks (the entire audience, apart from a posse of bemused A&R types) polished off Ray’s free beer on the coach trip down and went absolutely berserk all the way through my set. They cheered my poems to the rafters and sang along to ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’ as though their lives depended on it. Some invaded the stage to sing backing vocals on ‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat’.

‘Dead, dead cat – and it’s got MAGGAT!’ they shouted. ‘Bury the cat. Bury the cat. BURY, BURY, BURY THE CAT!’

The A&R men left half way through, shrugging their shoulders in disbelief, and Ray Santilli disappeared soon after. I know he didn’t know what to expect, but I’m sure he didn’t expect what he got, if you see what I mean...

Postscript! Out of interest, while writing this, I put ‘Ray Santilli’ into Google. Here’s what I got: ‘Ray Santilli is a London-based film producer, who on 5 May 1995 presented for the first time his alien autopsy footage to media representatives and UFO researchers. It was suggested that the body belonged to one of the aliens picked from the supposed Roswell UFO crash site in 1947.’

Something tells me it’s the same bloke!

Why wasn’t its photo in the Mirror, Ray? And it’s a shame the alien was dead. You could have got it a gig at Dingwalls...

Back in my decidedly un-jazz world, I carried on gigging, going down a storm on the back of a lorry at a Right To Work Campaign march through Harlow – they promised me another spot at a demo in London - and doing spots at every punk rock gig I could.

Then it was time for my first recording, which took place in the Newtown Neurotics’ driver/roadie John Mortimer’s bedroom on an old tape to tape machine. I did 5 songs: ‘Burn It Down’, ‘Factory Gods’, ‘World War Three’, ‘Spencer’s Croft Cat’ (because I knew as long as that was on the tape, people would buy it in droves!) and ‘T5’ (which took its title from the number of the bus I caught to the station every morning on the way to work). I called the tape ‘Phazing Out Capitalism’, after the effects unit I put my mandolin through. It was released – ie: we duplicated a couple of hundred copies - on Steve’s recently formed No Wonder label, with a very silly advert for the other releases, by the Newtown Neurotics and Spermicide from Belgium, on the other side.

Now a bona fide recording artist (!) I’d had enough of the Stock Exchange job: eleven thoroughly unpleasant eleven months were enough and I chucked it in.