Well who better to go and see live on Mayday than ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER: the 80's scourge of Thatcher and all round Marxist Leninist south-coast poetry behemoth. The fact he was playing round the corner from home only sealed it for me. What I forgot to check before going was who was putting on the show. It was only on getting into the Good Ship that I realized I was at a fundraiser for The Morning Star the UK's favourite communist daily tabloid.
Of course they thought they were holding it in a run-down inner city neighbourhood rather than in a club that's almost opposite the new Vintage wine shop that had all the good comrades buying bottles of red at £1600 a pop to drink on the train home. But that's beside the point.
Anyway, I arrived while SEAN TAYLOR was playing his right-on political folk like a latter day Woodie Guthrie or, in the case of the first song I heard in full, Richie Havens as he did a nice tribute and decent version of Freedom. Obviously the guitar playing wasn't a patch on Richie's, but how could it be?
He then pleased a lot of the comrades in the audience by playing Coal Not Dole so they could all re-live the "glory years" of the miner's strike. It was as suitably angry a song as the subject matter demands.
As he started the next song, Texas Boogie, three older comrades stood in front of me and started talking and getting louder and louder, talking about all the great punk gigs they promoted back in the day and the venues they ran. I can tell you more of what they said than Sean sang, so much so that I had to ask them to take the chat to the other end of the Good Ship. Thankfully the guy who (I think) was promoting this show got the message and shut up and got his pals to shut up too!!
That was a very good thing as it meant I could hear the decent attempt at All Along The Watchtower Sean finished with: a request of sorts from one of the older ladies who wanted him to play something for her generation!!
Next on after a short speech from the Morning Star's editor was one of the paper's writers ANNA CHEN who describes herself as being "Dagenese" ie: half Chinese half Dagenham and whose set was filmed by Charles Shaar Murray. Obviously she has some angry political poetry as well as a good piece about Edgar Allan Poe, but the funniest and most poignant piece was I Could Have been A banker and the funniest was the one about a Nuclear Showcase.
With almost no gap it was then time for ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER: an act I now seem to see once a decade or so when back in the 80's I'd see him two or three times a year, mainly at festivals and protests. Nonetheless, he is always good and started the way he meant to go on with The Bible According to Rupert Murdoch: a poem guaranteed to go down well with this crowd and we were off in his strange mix of the ultra-political and football related poetry. I really liked Asylum Seeking Daleks, after which he explained how he is now The Morning Star's equivalent to Peter Hitchens, which to those of us who don't read the Morning Star regularly is totally believable.
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Too much Pressure is something we all understand and Attila has a good way of explaining it. As he does the importance of William Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist and the effect that book had on him. Hopefully, it didn't didn't turn him into one of the Looters he is then telling us about. Ahead of the stunning council elections the next day he did a very angry piece about the UK Independence Party and about how you can't separate the UK from Europe. A good poem with the right message that the EU needs to be massively reformed for the people but just walking out in a sulk is not a solution. Absolutely.
Save the Public House is of course about the sad closure of so many of our great pubs and how we need them to be thriving community hubs. We all need the right Terms & Conditions and amazingly it often concerns things like making sure Attila is placed in the right category along with his heroes Cliff Richard and Fugazi. OK, maybe Heroes is putting it a bit strongly, but they are brothers in the fight of the straight edge of Fugazi and the God-bothering of Cliff and the beer swilling of Attila. Either way Fugazi, Cliff Richard and Me is a poem worth finding.
And Smith must Score and the Goldstone Ghosts made welcome returns as Attila recalled the happy years he spent as Brighton & Hove Albion's stadium announcer and of course the clubs years in the wilderness through bad ownership. Which just left time for a sing along to The Libyan Terrorists From Hell before he closed the show with something about students that my notes make no sense of whatsoever.
But hey, this was a good fun, right-on night out and every now and again I'm happy to be at a Morning Star benefit show.
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