While many of you lot were at Tolpuddle, Robina and I were at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Blazing sun all day, thunderstorms at night (the right way round at a festival) and a thoroughly enjoyable weekend both on and off stage.  

A very different demographic from Tolpuddle though! A sign informed us that we could only retrieve our deposits on champagne flutes and carafes from Milly’s bar. Robina was woken at 8am by two little girls loudly discussing the difference between a tipi and a yurt. And my miners’ strike poem was heckled by a drunk banker. 

I love preaching to the unconverted — he withered under the streams of invective and was gone. One-nil.

We saw a brilliant, surreal and very funny film there: Art Party, directed by Bob and Roberta Smith and Tim Newton — a kind of documentary/fantasy about the art community’s response to Gove’s “reforms” which have downgraded the place of art in the school curriculum.  

The producers are looking for people to show it and have an accompanying party around the time the GCSE results come out…  More details at www.cornerhouse.org/film/cinema-listings/art-party

Last Thursday I hosted Robb Johnson and Roy Bailey’s first world war song suite Gentle Men at Ropetackle, our local community arts centre in Shoreham. 

I had never seen it before and it had a huge personal resonance for me because my father Bill fought in WWI and my great aunt Rose, who lived next door to us, lost the love of her life in that war and lived with a photo on the mantelpiece for the next 60 years. A fantastic, moving piece of writing. 

From there to the Kentish coastal town of Deal for a lovely gig at a new pub venue called the Lighthouse where Marc and Nicky are doing what needs to be done in so many places — putting on original performers in a town infested by cover bands. There really should be some kind of quota system where only so many people in the country are allowed to play Hotel California at any one time…

Then my band Barnstormer and Robb Johnson’s Irregulars played the 21st Century Marxism social at the City Pride in Farringdon. 

I was looking forward to meeting one of my old GDR heroes, Hans Modrow, but he didn’t come. I did meet the YCL though, and Liz Payne the CP women’s organiser and her husband and a great — and rather alcoholic — evening was had by all. 

And last Sunday was also poignant for me as I did a set alongside the excellent Grace Petrie and Grant Sharkey at the very last Acoustic Insurgency gig at the Grosvenor pub in Stockwell, south London.  

Another vibrant community pub wrecked by “gentrification” — a special one since my father lived next door in the early part of the last century and my grandfather did too until he died in 1953. 

Despite the sad occasion it was a lovely evening shared with many old friends and comrades — including Dagenham Pete, aka Pixie (pictured left with me in his “don’t annoy the crazy person” T-shirt), who saved my arse in the early 1980s when I was attacked by a load of fascist boneheads during the worst of times for right-wing violence at gigs. 

Looking back now, it’s incredible the amount of aggro that went on.

This weekend I’m off to Amsterdam with my band, then Germany. Auf Wiedersehen, comrades! 

www.attilathestockbroker.com