IN MY last column I signed off with a nasty lurgy on the ferry to Dunkirk, heading for Germany and my 20th anniversary tour there with my band Barnstormer. Little did I know what was in store — but not for me.

Despite having a horrible temperature and feeling ghastly, the gigs started very well with a great show at the Anyway bar in Essen on November 5, 20 years to the day since Barnstormer did our first gig with renowned punk hero and old mate Captain Sensible on bass. Not a lot of people know that.

Then to the Substanz alternative anti-fascist centre in Osnabruck, where it’s fair to say the vegan food — pumpkin soup and oven chips — didn’t go down as well with us as the band did with the audience. Lots of the German left scene is vegan. I’ve never got the connection personally but then I’m a meat-guzzling, coastal-dwelling sea angler, so I wouldn’t.

Then to Dusseldorf in the Ruhr, where four songs in Ruhrpott cult movie DoppelPack, released in 2000, have given us a firm following in Germany’s working-class industrial heartland. By this time I was starting to feel better but it was still my third gig in a row with no beer, a rare event indeed.

As I improved, our normally ebullient and friendly guitarist Dan was feeling worse and worse — very quiet, clutching his stomach and going to bed straight after we’d finished.  

He thought he’d got a bladder infection and had been given antibiotics before we started the tour. They didn’t seem to be working.

Saturday saw the long journey to Berlin for a gig at our favourite venue in Germany — Schokoladen, a former chocolate factory in the heart of the old East.  

I’d done five tours of the GDR before the Wall came down and performed many times at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin and this gig was deliberately planned for the day before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The place was packed and the atmosphere electric. When I did my German language song Marktsektor One, about the evictions, the factory closures,  the unemployment and devastation which followed the forced incorporation of the GDR into the “new Germany,”  the whole place sang along.  Recent opinion polls suggest that a majority of East Germans were happier before the Wall came down than they are now and an awful lot of them were at the Schokoladen last Saturday.

Then to Darmstadt — which in German literally means “intestine town.” Sadly fitting, since by now guitarist Dan’s guts were really painful. We took him to hospital but it was a Sunday and there was no A&E department.  On Monday, in Mainz, he started off feeling better but towards the end of our gig he collapsed.

So first thing Tuesday he was off to hospital.  Exhaustive tests revealed a punctured bowel full of pus which, if left a couple more days, would most likely have killed him. Just in time, because he was put on a draining system. I have been known to use the phrase “pusbag” as a term of abuse but never actually seen the real thing. I have now. Not pleasant.

And, with Dan in hospital, we did the final six gigs of the tour as a three-piece.  

Everyone understood. It sounded a bit strange but then our music — punk tinged with medieval music — is a bit odd anyway. 

Highlight of the rest of the gigs was a cracking night playing under the stand at FC St Pauli in Hamburg. 

Now we’re home. Dan is coming back next weekend, getting stronger every day.

All’s well that ends well. But, bloody hell, that was close.

Attila is apppearing at the Red Quiz Night marking the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike, 7pm, Saturday 29 November at the Constitution pub, 42 St Pancras Way, London NW1. £15 waged/£5 unwaged. All proceeds to the Morning Star. Tickets: 07719 383322.