Attila the Stockbroker is the stage-name of English punk poet, multi instrumentalist musician and songwriter John Baine (born 21 October 1957). He performs solo and as the leader of the band Barnstormer 1649 (who combine early music and punk). As well as numerous concerts, eight books of poems, and an autobiography, he has released over forty recordings (albums and singles).

Launched into public consciousness by legendary UK Radio One DJ John Peel in 1982/83, he has spent over 35 years touring the world as a self-sustaining DIY one-man cottage industry. He toured East Germany four times before the Berlin Wall came down and twice more immediately afterwards, was involved in the first ever punk performance in Stalinist Albania and had to turn down playing in North Korea because he was already booked to tour Canada. He once stood in for Donny Osmond at a gig. He was targeted by fascists during the early Eighties and as well as the physical stuff once had a 10 minute stand up political argument with notorious Nazi band Skrewdriver singer Ian Stuart in the middle of a Black Flag gig at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street.

Having got an encore as the support act, he was thrown out of his own gig by the bouncers on the orders of the main act John Cale, one of his all time musical heroes. His support acts? They’ve included Manic Street Preachers, Julian Clary, New Model Army and Billy Bragg.

He has led his ‘medieval punk’ band Barnstormer for 20 years as well as the solo stuff – but he did his first ever punk gig as bass player in Brighton Riot Squad in 1977 in Brighton’s legendary Vault, where coffins and skeletons from nineteenth century Huguenot plague victims kept coming through the walls. Running the door at someone else’s gig there, he once used a nineteenth century baby’s lead coffin as a cashbox.

Reviewing his first album in the NME, Don Watson said that he would rather gnaw through his own arm than listen to it again! Didn’t deter Attila though: that was 32 years ago. Didn’t deter New Zealand either: when he arrived for his first tour in 1991 both national TV channels were waiting to greet him at the airport. And when Attila argues with a journalist he knows the score because he is one too, having written for NME, Sounds, Time Out, The Guardian and The Independent among others. He contributed a regular column in the UK communist newspaper The Morning Star.

His autobiography is social history and personal story combined: a cultural activist’s eyewitness journey through the great political battles and movements of recent times. Rock Against Racism/Anti Nazi League, Miners’ Strike, Wapping dispute, Red Wedge, Poll Tax, campaigns against two Gulf Wars: Attila has been there, done the benefit and worn the T shirt. There are memoirs from all over the UK and mainland Europe and his many tours of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, and the centrepiece of the book is the story of his time performing all over East Germany as the campaign for democratic socialist change grew: history observed at first hand.

In the UK he had done every Glastonbury Festival since 1983 and organizes his own beer/music extravaganza. Glastonwick, in his native West Sussex. He was at the heart of a 15 year campaign to save his beloved Brighton & Hove Albion FC from oblivion. In his book he tells of a happy childhood ripped apart by his father’s death and, forty years later, of how he and his wife nursed his mother through her battle with Alzheimer’s.

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https://www.youtube.com/user/attilastockbroker1
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_the_Stockbroker
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