Lives of the Poets: Attila the Stockbroker

This image is courtesy of Repeat Fanzine.

On a wet and windy November evening, Attila the Stockbroker is onstage, ranting.

It’s November 6—the previous night was full of fireworks and bonfires, as the British celebrated the arrest of Guy Fawkes for his plot to blow up Parliament, 404 years previous. But tonight, in front of a packed hometown audience at a local arts center in the English coastal town of Shoreham-by-Sea, the poet called Attila drums up Fawkes’s effigy not to burn it but to celebrate it.

“I’m sitting at Guy Fawkes’s table / as Bush and his muppet connive / and I’m filled with unspeakable anger / and I’m thinking of 1605. . . .”

Tonight there are easily 200 mostly middle-aged former punk-rock fans in attendance—a turnout largely due to an appearance by the cult band The Men They Couldn’t Hang. At many of the more than 2,500 shows he’s performed, Attila the Stockbroker (born John Baine) has read and sung his work to far fewer. But in England or Australia, Norway or Germany, the United States or Canada, there is an audience waiting for the ranting poet to perform—as there has been for quite a while.

For the past 30 years, as Attila the Stockbroker, Baine has taken aim at a series of right-wing bogeymen—before Bush and “his muppet,” Tony Blair, it was Thatcher and Reagan, conservative judges and fascist punks; these days, it’s as likely to be bankers as MPs. As one of the founders of “ranting poetry,” Attila has shared stages with the luminaries of Britain’s punk-rock movement, graced the covers of a national magazine, and turned down invites to the world-renowned literary festival at Hay-on-Wye.

But unlike so many of punk’s poets and musicians, when the spotlight turned to another pop-culture fad, Attila kept right on going. Thanks to a tireless do-it-yourself attitude—and a relentless ego—John Baine has been able to claim “poet” as his sole occupation for three decades. (It was at his last day job, a brief stint translating French for a London stockbroker, that Baine’s attitude earned him the nickname “Attila.”) He’s been a poet by trade without the aid of an institutional backer or even, for much of that career, a publisher. With sales of his latest self-published volume of poems approaching the 1,000-copy mark, it seems unlikely that he’ll be slowing down anytime soon.

* * *

“When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”

When another Sussex poet, Hilaire Belloc, wrote those words relating England’s cultural life to the pub, he could have been thinking of the Duke of Wellington on Shoreham’s coastal road. Warm and friendly despite its refurbished newness, serving marvelous locally brewed ales, the Welly struggles to remain untouched by England’s trend toward foodie pubs and chain bars. It’s the perfect spot to meet Attila the Stockbroker—the patron saint of stubbornness, dedicated to an alternative, leftist vision of English history that ignores kings and queens, Charles and Di, in favor of Diggers and Levellers, Wat Tyler and Joe Strummer.

“In the world of well-respected poetry, poetry is a book,” says Baine. “It’s ‘the slim volume.’ But I take my tradition back to before the printing press—to troubadours who wandered around England spreading the news, to the oral tradition.”

Delivered in his rapid-fire way of speaking, with an accent indicative of the working-class towns around the cities of Brighton and Hove, Baine’s monologues are chock-full of what might seem, to American ears, cultural contradictions. He quotes from poets and punks alike and judges them similarly, not only on their verse but on other, more laddish criteria. His greatest compliment, as bestowed upon the writer Simon Armitage, for example, is “he can hold his ale.” His most foul criticism is of “page poets” who garner rave Times Literary Supplement reviews, but who get in front of an audience to read and are “worse than Crystal Palace.” And when Baine names the bugbears of his life—Margaret Thatcher, for example—his face twists into a scowl of actual physical pain, relieved only by another pull of his Sussex-brewed Dark Star ale.

In 1977, when he was 20 years old, Baine saw the oral tradition manifest itself in radical new ways onstage. Inspired by leftist-rock pioneers the Clash, Baine joined a series of punk bands as a bass player, eventually moving to Belgium with one of them. But standing in the background thumping four strings was never Baine’s goal.

“I knew that being a bass player in a band wasn’t going to be it for me, because I was far too loud, arrogant, creative, whatever,” says Baine. “But I knew that I wanted to earn a living from words, and I’d seen—from John Cooper Clarke—that you could get up there and do poetry.”

Performance poet Clarke had been the first to bring the spoken word onstage with punk, performing his work before concerts by the likes of now-legendary bands such as the Sex Pistols and Joy Division. So when Baine returned to England around 1980, he decided to abandon rock bands in favor of writing songs to sing himself—accompanied only by his “little tinny mandolin.” And when some of the verse he wrote didn’t work out as songs, he began to simply leap onstage with punk bands, performing his equally political and humorous poetry between tunes, under the nickname his onetime employer had granted him: Attila the Stockbroker.

Baine is uncharacteristically modest about his early poetry, claiming it to be mostly “a steaming pile of crap—but it was energetically performed crap!” But as a record of an era, one could do far worse than his early oeuvre in gauging the temperature of a nation’s underculture at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s ascension. Riots in the streets, nationwide strikes, the elevation nearly to the mainstream of the fascist National Front political party—by the time of the 1984–85 strike by the National Union of Mine Workers, Britain had come, according to many historians, to the brink of civil war for the first time in 400 years.

It’s a world mapped out in poems by Attila such as “Andy Is a Corporatist,” about the use of the punk scene and soccer stands as a recruiting ground by British fascists; “Russians in the DHSS,” about the red-scare tactics that equated the unemployed with communists; and “Contributory Negligence,” a fantasy about being picked up hitchhiking by a judge who’d made headlines for releasing a rapist:

He wanted me to beat him up
it was an open invitation!
Late at night he picked me up
an act of open provocation!
High Court Judges are a blight
they should stay home in nice warm beds
and if they must drive late at night
should never pick up Harlow Reds!

Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper Clarke were by no means the only poets mining the vein of discontent in Britain’s subcultures. Dub-reggae-inspired poets such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson documented the black immigrant experience, just as writers such as Tony Harrison and Adrian Mitchell took up the left’s banners in their poetry and plays. But for a while in the early 1980s, Attila and fellow so-called “ranting poet” Seething Wells (the late writer Steven Wells) became the talk of Britain with their punk attitude, radical views, and uncompromising verse.

“For a couple of years I was pretty well known, even in terms of the mainstream,” says Baine. “Most people who had any interest in alternative culture would’ve known who Attila the Stockbroker was in, say, 1982-83. ‘Ranting poetry’ was flavor-of-the-month in the music press, which was very influential at the time—I was on the front cover of the Melody Maker!”

But the music press was as fickle as it was influential, and by late 1983 the spoken-word trend had died in their eyes. When Attila the Stockbroker moved from cassette tapes and singles to a full-length poetry album, the media were unimpressed—even if the album did manage to break onto the charts, a feat that seems unimaginable even today.

“When my first album came out, the bloke at the [New Music Express] said he’d rather gnaw through his own arm than listen to it again—which is classic, actually,” says Baine, laughing. “The difference between me and most people is that the moment someone told them they were shit, that they’d had their 10 minutes and they should fuck off, they did. But for me—self-doubt? Don’t know what it is. Embarrassment? Don’t do it. Lack of confidence? Missed that one too. I don’t need anybody apart from the people who turn up at my gigs and enjoy it. As long as that happens, the rest can fuck off.”

Baine has an infectious attitude that, for the small but dedicated group of Attila the Stockbroker fans, is almost as important as his words themselves. Luke Wright first got to know Attila in 2004, when the two shared the bill at a reading at the Glastonbury Festival. Wright was then the rising star of British performance poetry, Attila his longtime hero.

“I was so excited,” says Wright, whose performance-poetry group Aisle16 was then only months away from earning worldwide acclaim for their Edinburgh Festival performance. “Attila was one of those guys I’d always wanted to know: I’m from a solid middle-class, ‘home counties’ English upbringing, and here I am, a poet, a staunch left-winger—and that’s all down to people like Attila [whose work] introduced me to a whole alternative lifestyle.”

* * *

In October 1996, Attila the Stockbroker was going door-to-door in a tiny village in Lancashire, northern England, handing out his poems. He wasn’t alone: scores of Brighton & Hove Albion fans, the football (that is, soccer) team John Baine has followed since he was six, were blanketing this village of 2,000 souls with a new piece entitled “To the Good People of Mellor, Lancs.”

In the poem, Attila lays out for the people of Mellor the history of Brighton’s lower-league but much beloved team, and how one businessman from Mellor—a man named Bill Archer—was then threatening the team’s existence by attempting to sell their stadium for conversion into a retail park. The fans, with Attila at the head, had traveled 300 miles to Mellor to take direct action in seeking redress.

“One way that we got a lot of favorable publicity in our fight [to save the team] was by completely inverting the normal concept of football fans,” says Baine. “‘Football fan’ to the middle-class equals ‘hooligan,’ ‘beer,’ ‘violence.’ So what do we do? Poetry.”

The campaign was illustrative of Attila the Stockbroker’s entire poetry philosophy: to take poetry into venues and before audiences that rarely experience it. It’s a philosophy summed up by the piece Baine wrote in celebration of his quarter-century as a poet, “My Poetic Licence.”

Poetic licence? 28 years I’ve had one
And they don’t come easy, they’re not handed out for fun
You have to earn it, work and sweat and move
Not get stuck in a dead poet bore groove.
I earned mine in dirty scummy punk clubs
Rock gigs, arts centres, festivals and dodgy pubs
And yes, once or twice I’ve had to fight—
But when a fascist hits a poet, the poet’s doing something right!

Baine quotes one of his mentors, activist and poet Adrian Mitchell, as having said, “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” Baine says his yardstick has always been “I want to be able to walk into almost any environment, like a pub, and if someone said to me, ‘Get up on that table and perform a poem,’ people would look and listen and it would strike some kind of chord.”

After the successful fight to save Brighton & Hove Albion, Baine was named the team’s “poet in residence” and received an Arts Council England grant to write poems and read them in his new capacity as the team’s home-stadium PA announcer. It provided just that yardstick—a chance to expose sports fans, not always known for their love of “the slim volume,” to poetry from a writer who shared their passion for the team.

“Poetry has an awful reputation for being narrow, for ignoring most people, and for proudly existing in a wine-glass-strewn ghetto,” says Baine. “‘Goldstone Ghosts’ [written when the team seemed destined for disintegration] is something I’m most proud of. With that poem, I have reached thousands of people who would never think of reading poetry. People who would think most of my stuff—as I’ve been told!—is ‘left-wing bollocks.’ But that one poem, even the most hooligan-esque Brighton lads don’t slag it off. And that, for me, really means something.”

The “wine-glass-strewn ghetto” is one Baine experienced firsthand in his 1980s heyday. After his first book, the Belloc-inspired title Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters, was published as part of The Rising Sons of Ranting Verse by major British house Unwin in 1985, and when Scornflakes came out with cutting-edge imprint Bloodaxe Books in 1992, Attila the Stockbroker became a short-lived fad at Britain’s literary festivals. He was unimpressed.

“Once you’ve been the ‘scary big-booted punk poet’ once or twice, that’s really it,” says Baine. These days, “in the world of [literary] poetry, ‘Attila the Stockbroker’ is less than nothing. But all I’ve ever wanted to do is do things on my own terms, earn enough to live on, and be able to say ‘fuck off’ or ‘well done’ to anybody I want to. I publish all my own books, release all my own recordings, book all my own gigs. I don’t rely on anybody else for any aspect of what I do, and it works.

“You know how some people clean toilets, or lecture at university, or drive a bus to earn their living? Well, I’m a poet.”