I HATE 2019 already and we’re only just into February. This is my second obituary column in two weeks.

I’d just about recovered from our guitarist Dan Woods’s beer-sodden wake when I had the most heartbreaking exchange of messages with legendary radical comic Jeremy Hardy, whom I’ve known for 35 years. He died four days later.  

Why do the good, life affirming ones go, and the evil ones still fester among us? I know the answer of course — human biology. But human biology can be a bastard.

I first met Jeremy on the New Variety gig circuit, the pioneering alternative cabaret organised across London by Roland and Clare Muldoon in the early 1980s. 

Fired up by endless punk gigs and quite a few confrontations with the far right, I was loud, in-your-face and confrontational on stage and convinced that as a radical left entertainer that was the only way to survive.

I watched Jeremy with awe as he deconstructed Thatcherism and the issues of the time with the same passion as I but in a charming, self-deprecating and very “English” way.

It was incredibly impressing and I wondered how he’d cope when the miners’ strike benefits came along and, instead of the relatively sedate cabaret audiences, he was sharing rowdy punk gigs with the likes of the Redskins.

No worries — he charmed them too and went on to work his subversive magic on radio and television, especially Radio 4, for three decades.  

Some of the stuff he got away with was amazing and an object lesson to yours truly, more or less banned from that esteemed station, that getting the key to a door and opening it politely is a more productive approach than trying to kick it down in a pair of size-10 DMs.

 I admired him so much that I asked him to be special guest at my autobiography launch in 2015 and headline our Glastonwick music festival two years later. My wife and I shared many a happy Glastonbury with him and his wife Katie and our heart goes out to her and his family.  

A Red salute to a friend and comrade.

 I’ve been touring mainland Europe solo and/or with a band at least once a year since the early 1980s and I'm on the road again in Germany with my “early music meets punk” band Barnstormer 1649 on a tour to Essen, Osnabruck, Bremen, Berlin, Hamburg, Bielefeld and Mainz.

These dates, and a solo tour of Norway and Finland in March, finish on March 28, a date now overshadowed by what is to come post-Brexit.

And what is to come? We simply don’t know. Like our local port chief executive who doesn’t have the faintest idea what regulations will come into place after March 29, or my relative’s employers, a previously successful start-up planet-friendly IT project now shedding investors and laying off workers due to Brexit uncertainty, we musicians and entertainers have absolutely no idea of what the future holds in store for us.

 I’m 61, and remember only too well what it was like before the single market area was established in 1992. Customs “checks” ending in strip-searches because you’re in a scruffy old van, not driving a Mercedes and wearing a suit and are therefore, obviously, transporting half a ton of heroin.  

“Carnets” for instruments and merch where everything must be documented down to the last spare string and plectrum. Literally.  Local police imposing their personal prejudices when they realise from your T-shirts that your politics are on the radical left. It’s bollocks. Brexit bollocks.

 I loathe globalisation and neoliberalism as much as the most dedicated Lexiter and support a European union of the people, not the bosses, as they claim to do.

But, as a musician, all Brexit is going to do is send the bosses into my instrument cases and my pockets. And it makes me puke.