Michael Baxter | Seething Wells & Attila The Stockbroker - Radical Wallpaper Records - 1982 @mickeypenguin | Uploaded March 2020 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
I am pretty sure that I never had the pleasure of seeing Seething Wells ranting live, but I certainly witnessed Attila several times in Harlow and around London, normally with The Newtown Neurotics during the 1980's.
After a hiatus of some decades, in 2014, I saw Attila perform again on a barge docked at Battersea with Blyth Power headlining. Fifteen years later in 2019, I saw Attila perform at the Dublin Castle, again with Blyth Power headlining. Both wonderful performances.
The text below ripped off Attilla’s website.
I moved to Harlow in Essex in late 1979, sharing a flat with Steve Drewett of inspirational local punk band The Newtown Neurotics, whom I had met a year or so before at their first gig.
I registered with an employment agency and because I could speak French I was offered a stop-gap job as a clerk / translator in the Stock Exchange. I hated it. They hated me.
One day someone called me Attila. A light came on in my head. The rest, as they say, is history!
The job lasted eleven months - eleven months too long - and is the last one I ever had. Apart, of course, from being Attila the Stockbroker.
I did my first gig as Attila the Stockbroker on September 24th 1980, supporting Harlow punks The Defex and The Unborn Dead in a local youth centre. After 'work'. In my 'suit.' Somewhat to my surprise, I went down quite well.
I entered the Harlow Rock Contest and came fourth. Some people said that the organisers wanted to place me first but thought they couldn't 'cos I wasn't a band. I played a Rock Against Thatcher gig at Square One, the local Harlow venue and went down a storm.
I'd started out doing more songs than poems, but the poems were at least as well received, and the balance began to change. New poems were sharper and more suited to the immediacy of live performance. The earliest ones you'll hear here. 'Russians in the DHSS.' 'Russians In McDonalds.' 'A Bang and a Wimpy.'
A few more gigs. I left the job. Then things started to happen.
Steven and myself first met when we were both performing on the back of a lorry at a Right to Work demonstration in London in November 1981. Coincidentally, Paul Weller was headlining a poetry event at the Young Vic theatre that night and I persuaded Swells to come and 'crash' it with me and try and blag a few minutes.
Organiser - Michael Horovitz, gave us ten minutes between us, and the audience loved it. So did Paul Weller - two weeks later we were supporting the Jam at Hammersmith Odeon.
NME editor Neil Spencer was there to review the gig and was impressed as well, sending budding writer and soon to be Redskins leader Chris Moore to do a big review of us at another gig a few weeks later. A music press 'ranting poetry' fad was born. And so was a pugnacious punk poetry partnership...
Around the same time we had done a benefit gig for the Socialist Workers' Party in Wandsworth, and a mate of ours, 'Red' Saunders, made a recording of it over the top of an old reggae cassette and decided to release it as an EP. 'Rough Raw and Ranting'. 'Fine', I thought. 'But who's going to buy that? Poetry on a record?' We sold a few copies at gigs.
A couple of weeks later I was down in Southwick visiting my mum listening to John Peel. I'll never forget the moment. 'It can't be!' But it was. 'Russians in the DHSS'! On the John Peel Show! John Peel played that EP to death. It sold thousands and got in the indie charts.
I signed a deal with Cherry Red Records and they released the 'Cocktails' EP. It sold thousands more and got to the higher echelons of the indie charts. I did a Peel session, then another one, and with about twenty poems and ten songs to my name was on the front cover of Melody Maker.
Steven and I gigged together, wrestled, drank, argued, and shouted together, watched bands together, went on demos together. But underneath the roaring exterior Swells never really enjoyed being on stage: many is the time I remember him throwing up before we tackled an audience.
I guess it was this, plus his realisation that he could reach many more people writing for papers like the NME than as a ranting poet, that made him make the transition, first to Susan Williams, social surrealist feminist rock critic (many fell for it!) and then to the Steven Wells.
I started to write for Sounds, covering punk. Nom de plume: 'John Opposition.'
People began turning up to gigs all over the country, in droves, just to see me! I made my position quite clear. Anti-fascist social surrealist radical performance poet. The Clash meets Hilaire Belloc.
I was attacked on stage by Nazis at Skunx, a punk / skin club in London. We fought back. Someone (who shall be nameless) from the Redskins was there. 'Under the table you must go...' My first mandolin met a noble end, smashed over my head by a Nazi bonehead. I bought its replacement, a mandola (an octave lower, better for song writing) which I immediately named Nelson, to date we have done more than two thousand gigs together.
I am pretty sure that I never had the pleasure of seeing Seething Wells ranting live, but I certainly witnessed Attila several times in Harlow and around London, normally with The Newtown Neurotics during the 1980's.
After a hiatus of some decades, in 2014, I saw Attila perform again on a barge docked at Battersea with Blyth Power headlining. Fifteen years later in 2019, I saw Attila perform at the Dublin Castle, again with Blyth Power headlining. Both wonderful performances.
The text below ripped off Attilla’s website.
I moved to Harlow in Essex in late 1979, sharing a flat with Steve Drewett of inspirational local punk band The Newtown Neurotics, whom I had met a year or so before at their first gig.
I registered with an employment agency and because I could speak French I was offered a stop-gap job as a clerk / translator in the Stock Exchange. I hated it. They hated me.
One day someone called me Attila. A light came on in my head. The rest, as they say, is history!
The job lasted eleven months - eleven months too long - and is the last one I ever had. Apart, of course, from being Attila the Stockbroker.
I did my first gig as Attila the Stockbroker on September 24th 1980, supporting Harlow punks The Defex and The Unborn Dead in a local youth centre. After 'work'. In my 'suit.' Somewhat to my surprise, I went down quite well.
I entered the Harlow Rock Contest and came fourth. Some people said that the organisers wanted to place me first but thought they couldn't 'cos I wasn't a band. I played a Rock Against Thatcher gig at Square One, the local Harlow venue and went down a storm.
I'd started out doing more songs than poems, but the poems were at least as well received, and the balance began to change. New poems were sharper and more suited to the immediacy of live performance. The earliest ones you'll hear here. 'Russians in the DHSS.' 'Russians In McDonalds.' 'A Bang and a Wimpy.'
A few more gigs. I left the job. Then things started to happen.
Steven and myself first met when we were both performing on the back of a lorry at a Right to Work demonstration in London in November 1981. Coincidentally, Paul Weller was headlining a poetry event at the Young Vic theatre that night and I persuaded Swells to come and 'crash' it with me and try and blag a few minutes.
Organiser - Michael Horovitz, gave us ten minutes between us, and the audience loved it. So did Paul Weller - two weeks later we were supporting the Jam at Hammersmith Odeon.
NME editor Neil Spencer was there to review the gig and was impressed as well, sending budding writer and soon to be Redskins leader Chris Moore to do a big review of us at another gig a few weeks later. A music press 'ranting poetry' fad was born. And so was a pugnacious punk poetry partnership...
Around the same time we had done a benefit gig for the Socialist Workers' Party in Wandsworth, and a mate of ours, 'Red' Saunders, made a recording of it over the top of an old reggae cassette and decided to release it as an EP. 'Rough Raw and Ranting'. 'Fine', I thought. 'But who's going to buy that? Poetry on a record?' We sold a few copies at gigs.
A couple of weeks later I was down in Southwick visiting my mum listening to John Peel. I'll never forget the moment. 'It can't be!' But it was. 'Russians in the DHSS'! On the John Peel Show! John Peel played that EP to death. It sold thousands and got in the indie charts.
I signed a deal with Cherry Red Records and they released the 'Cocktails' EP. It sold thousands more and got to the higher echelons of the indie charts. I did a Peel session, then another one, and with about twenty poems and ten songs to my name was on the front cover of Melody Maker.
Steven and I gigged together, wrestled, drank, argued, and shouted together, watched bands together, went on demos together. But underneath the roaring exterior Swells never really enjoyed being on stage: many is the time I remember him throwing up before we tackled an audience.
I guess it was this, plus his realisation that he could reach many more people writing for papers like the NME than as a ranting poet, that made him make the transition, first to Susan Williams, social surrealist feminist rock critic (many fell for it!) and then to the Steven Wells.
I started to write for Sounds, covering punk. Nom de plume: 'John Opposition.'
People began turning up to gigs all over the country, in droves, just to see me! I made my position quite clear. Anti-fascist social surrealist radical performance poet. The Clash meets Hilaire Belloc.
I was attacked on stage by Nazis at Skunx, a punk / skin club in London. We fought back. Someone (who shall be nameless) from the Redskins was there. 'Under the table you must go...' My first mandolin met a noble end, smashed over my head by a Nazi bonehead. I bought its replacement, a mandola (an octave lower, better for song writing) which I immediately named Nelson, to date we have done more than two thousand gigs together.
