WONDERFUL time on tour for the last few weeks: West Midlands, Scotland, Germany, East Midlands. Time and tide wait for no-one, and they caught up with me recently on the front page of the Isle of Bute News following my gig there. It was very well-intentioned and complimentary but the headline chilled me to the core. 

“Veteran comedian wows Rothesay crowd”

Now, I am not a fan of either the V or C words, and to see them combined in such a way was too much. 

“Veteran” makes me sound like an ancient, unreliable Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which breaks down all the time, when actually I’m a force of nature who just needs more sleep than I used to and has to take lots of tablets. And as for “comedian” — I LOATHE being called one of those. I am the founder of the Anti-Comedy League. My slogan is “Love Humour, Hate Comedy.”

I love making people laugh, but I also set out to make them think, cry and experience the whole gamut of human emotions. And when I’m trying to be funny, humour is what I’m about, not “comedy.” These days that particular C word for me has one meaning: a ghastly corporate “career path” which starts with some predictable one-liners at a try-out spot in a franchised club full of stag and hen parties, progresses to an evening Radio 4 slot about as funny as a Mahavishnu Orchestra album played at the wrong speed, and ends up with a brain-rotting game show and a slot advertising “beer” best described as the urine of Satan. No thanks. 

But I must emphasise that this is not a criticism of the Isle of Bute News, who will have been entirely unaware of my vagaries in this regard, and gave me a very favourable review. Certainly better than the one vouchsafed to me by a certain Don Watson in his 1983 NME review of my first album Ranting At The Nation where he informed the world that he would rather gnaw through his own arm than listen to it again. 

I used that line in my press releases for years. 

Now for some reviews of my own, because it’s albums of the year time. And this year there can be only one winner.
 
1. Lilli Bolero by the Cleaners from Venus, a pseudonym for the stirring, moving, always melody-sodden and lyrically incisive Wivenhoe composer and poet Martin Newell. I love albums where every track is different, where stories are told and emotions laid bare, and this is a work of genius. It’s all brilliant, but favourites are the title track, a big swipe at Nigel Farage referencing an anti-Catholic “patriotic” song from 1688 (we did a “Word Barrage against Farage” together in Clacton just before the general election) and  After Passing which is the best autumn song I’ve ever heard.  

2. Handwriting by TV Smith. Former Adverts singer turned solo singer/songwriter (at my suggestion, 35 years ago) has been releasing wonderful, incisive albums for decades and this is his finest of all, a wry observation on the IT age verging on a modern-day Luddite manifesto. The title track predicts a dystopian future where the only way to avoid AI surveillance is to use PEN & PAPER, and Blank Screens ploughs the same furrow: “I want blank screens, radio silence/ Instead of these bad dreams, hate and violence.” A wonderful album.  

3. Sledgehammer Songs by Joe Solo

The indefatigable champion of Pauline Town’s We Shall Overcome independent working-class self-support network, the Martyr (of) the Unrepairable Washing Machine who manages to raise thousands of pounds a year for vital causes on top of the day job. The slogan “Art is a hammer not a mirror” transferred to vinyl. Raise Your Voice And Sing, Keeping On, the title track and above all This Guitar Refuses To Apologise — his defiant response to Bragg’s This Guitar Says Sorry. You get the picture. An actual class hero. 
 
 4. POPtical Illusions by John Cale. His early albums were masterpieces of melody and menace, his later entirely laudable experimentalism often too much for this huge fan, but his latest offering is stuffed full of tunes and Davies & Wales will be on my car player a lot as I tour his homeland in February. 

5. Honourable mentions to The Magnificent 40 by my utter heroes The Men They Couldn’t Hang (a 40-year retrospective, so not really a new release) and Far Rockaway by Phil Odgers and John Kettle, a beautifully performed selection of Phil Ochs’ songs. Now I never “got” Phil Ochs at all, but many here will, and these versions are ace. Beery Clashmas and a Hoppy New Year.

For further info please visit www.facebook.com/attilathestockbroker and/or attilathestockbroker.bandcamp.com/merch.