As far as gigs are concerned, early January is as barren as the trophy cabinet at Selhurst Park.

This has given me the time to get really stuck in to my autobiography and I thought I'd share this snippet with you - the true tale of my first encounter with the politics of the radical left.

During the miners' strike of 1972, when there was a three-day week and power cuts, I was sure their cause was right.

Hearing that pompous git Tory PM Ted Heath and his upper-class cronies whining about the miners "holding the country to ransom" made me very angry.

I knew that miners were people who did a very dangerous job, earned low pay and produced the fuel which was the cornerstone of our daily lives.

That got me thinking.

Some time a year or so later I resolved to make my first radical contacts and, wandering down Gloucester Road in Brighton one day, I came across something that proclaimed itself in large letters to be The Brighton Workers Bookstore.

I went inside and, sure enough, there were loads of books.

Books by Karl Marx (I'd heard of him!) Lenin (him too) Stalin (him too, but wasn't he supposed to be a bit nasty?) Mao (ah, the Little Red Book, I knew about that) and some bloke called Enver Hoxha (who?).

A large pamphlet proudly proclaimed Albania - The Only Socialist Country In Europe!

I'd never heard of Albania and certainly wasn't aware that it was in Europe.

I knew a song called The Misty Coast Of Albany by Tyrannosaurus Rex but given Marc Bolan's hippy-bollocks lyrical bent I doubted very much that there was any likelihood of a connection with revolutionary Marxism.

Characteristically, even at that early age, I took the bull by the horns.

"Where's Albania?" I asked the bloke in charge. "And why is it the only socialist country in Europe? What about Russia and places like that?"

When I walked into that shop I had never heard the word "revisionist" before.

But by the time I left some two hours later, clutching a handful of pamphlets and copies of The Worker - the weekly paper of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) - I had heard the word "revisionist" many, many times. More times than I would ever have believed possible.

I now knew that Albania stood alone as a beacon of socialism in Europe and that it was allied to the People's Republic of China, even if I still didn't know exactly where it was.

And I knew that the Soviet Union and its allies were revisionists. Even if - despite listening very hard and concentrating very hard too - I had, if I am honest, still very little idea what "revisionist" meant. But I knew it wasn't a nice thing to be.

I went home and got out a map. Soon I knew exactly where Albania was. Aged 15-and-a-bit I started to read about comrade Enver Hoxha, how he led the Albanian communist partisans to victory against the nazis and about his battles with the Yugoslav revisionist plotters. If you were a revisionist you were always a plotter, it went with the territory. I started listening to Radio Tirana and I began to understand the importance of efficient tractor production, something that really hadn't occurred to me before.

Gigs of a non-revisionist nature start again this week.

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