A Poem A Day: 5 – First String Offensive by Atilla The Stockbroker

by steww

Juvenilia. We’ve all done it. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Nowadays we swear at people on Twitter, back when we were spotty adolescents we wrote poetry. It’s a phase. Had I been choosing my daily poetical diet in a less random fashion I may have skipped today’s lucky dip and searched out something from the poet’s more mature work, but I’m not so here we are.

The book is The Rising Sons Of Ranting Verse and is cunningly split into two halves, each printed upside down to the other and featuring the work of Atilla The Stockbroker and Seething Wells. I don’t know what Atilla calls himself these days but I know Seething went on to become Steven Wells a music and sports journalist of some renown. I saw both of them live at Pilton festival (or Glasto as it is hideously referred to these days) back in the eighties when ranting poetry was a thing. I also saw Atilla the Stockbroker in, of all places, the Victoria Hall Radstock where he was deeply embarrassed at me buying his book with a cheque as he had to tell me his real name. You needn’t have worried comrade, I don’t remember it. Atilla’s half of the book is called Cautionary Tales For Dead Commuters and it was on his poem, First String Offensive that the book fell open.

For whatever reason he felt the need to explain that the poem was written ‘at a time of great musical disillusionment’ when he was aged seventeen. Both his youth and the subject matter can easily be divined from a first reading of the piece, but despite its callow author and lack of subtlety the poem is still great fun.

Make no mistake, these guys were not writing complex works to be savoured slowly from a creaking leather armchair while the fire hissed and sparked and the reader sipped a fine aged single malt. These poems were (and the clue is in the book’s title) written to be ranted. It helps to read them fast and loud, anguished and aggressive. The ranting, political poets may have been sent up in their day by Rick on The Young Ones, they may have gone on to ‘proper’ jobs writing for the Guardian or acting in Red Dwarf and Corrie but make no mistake they had a place in the culture of the nineteen eighties and we looked forward to visiting the poetry tent at the festival just as much as seeing Aswad or The Pogues on the Pyramid Stage. Apart from anything else you could find space to sit down and it was dry. These days artists like Scroobius Pip have continued and developed the theme. The poetry is often spoken over  beats and scratches but rest assured their work owes a debt to Atilla and co.

Today’s poem is an angry response of a young man watching and listening to an orchestra. He doesn’t like the clothes (penguins) or the conductor (poseur, Hitler) the music (sterile conformity) and contrasts the old fashioned stuffiness in the concert hall with the ’emotion, fashion and vision’ taking place outside. The part which made me smile most of all was how polite an angry young man Atilla presents in this poem as he waits for the interval before banging his seat and stamping out on ‘angry feet’. Presumably he was just too cross or too well brought up to contemplate getting up and leaving while the violins were still sawing away up there.

Funnily enough he reminds me of a favourite family story my mum and dad used to tell. They’d taken me to see an opera, actually an operetta to be precise. Gilbert and Sullivan, although I forget which one, and after a particularly painful couple of minutes from one of the female leads I looked around appalled at my fellow audience members as they broke out in applause. Were the adults in the room all stark raving mad I wondered? Obviously they hadn’t worked out what I a mere child had sussed in seconds. I couldn’t hope to influence the entire crowd but I leaned in to my parents and hissed “Don’t clap – she’ll sing again”. It never for a moment occurred to me that they might actually enjoy this noise and wish it to continue.

I’m glad I pulled the book from the shelf, it brought back many happy memories and I intend to read some more. If you’re interested Radio Rap is as relevant today as it ever was then. The only thing that has changed is Steve Wright now pollutes Radio 2 instead of Radio 1.