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A month of ice-breaking, philanthropy and barn-storming

Attiila’s rushing round the countries to gigs this week

October is the coolest month, especially for gigs. Snowed under at the moment.

Started off with an edgy one — the leafy old Chiddingly Festival in East Sussex — I don’t always preach to the converted, you know.

As I performed the likes of my poem Never Forget, commemorating the great miners’ strike of 30 years ago in very partisan terms, I could sense the tension in parts of the audience.

But by the end they were on my side well enough because the rude poems broke the ice and the long one I wrote for my mother during her six-year battle with Alzheimer’s sealed it. I especially enjoy gigs like that.

Then a celebration of 100 years of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, an absolutely rip-roaring night at the old, cavernous and packed Carlisle pub in Hastings — “Mugsborough” to Tressell and where he lived and the book was set.

The crowd were in good voice and raised the roof, thankfully not literally, with my modern-day “philanthropists’” lament Prince Harry’s Knob.

Then I met up with long-time poetic sparring partner Murray Lachlan Young for a gig at Shoreham Wordfest, our local poetry festival. Murray is a beautiful performer in every sense of the word — his material is brilliant and he looks like a well-matured Adonis, which means that the female and gay sections of the crowd can enjoy him in distinctly different ways.

I’m bald and look like an old punk rocker, which I am, so I don’t really fall into that category.

In Leicester I did another Ragged Trousered Philanthropists celebration with well-known children’s author Alan Gibbons, who did a superb lecture on the aims and impact of Tressell’s work over the last 100 years.

A local school theatre group performed the Money Trick — a dramatisation of Marx’s theory of surplus value — to great applause and, as at the Hastings show, countless copies of the book found new readers, always a good thing. It’s the best book in the world.

In this year of anniversaries it’s time for another one.  I formed my band Barnstormer 20 years ago next month and, in between all the solo gigs, we’re currently on a celebratory tour of England and Germany.  We’ve done four shows in Leeds, Sheffield, Stourbridge and Bath already and today we’re doing our home town gig at the Hope in Brighton alongside Nottingham’s fine punk-folkers Ferocious Dog before setting off in early November for a couple of weeks in Germany.

Last week I was at Jim’s Cafe in Colne, where kind organiser Patricia baked a massive and delicious sponge cake in my honour, and I followed that with an hour on the North Sea Stage at Musicport Festival in Whitby where, I’m happy to say, I got a standing ovation at the end of my Alzheimer’s poem. My mum would have been so proud.

One particular feature of the old and atmospheric port of Whitby is a small alley called Arguments Yard and I took my talented photographer stepson Pat along with me and we did a couple of videos and a photo session there.

Arguments Yard will be the title of my forthcoming autobiography, out next year.  No surprises there.

 Before the Brighton show on Saturday I did  a couple of gigs in Wales.  Thursday at the lovely, friendly Druid pub in Goginan near Aberystwyth, then Friday at The Garage in Swansea as part of the Dylan Thomas Festival. I was, and am, honoured.

Do not go gently!

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