I HAVE never, at any point in my life, wanted to be a Tory MP, but something happened last Wednesday week which reinforces the fact that I am totally unqualified to be one. I proved that I could organise a piss-up in a brewery. Specifically, Redchurch Brewery in Harlow.
 
Ever since the senseless destruction of The Square, the seminal music venue which provided a place of sanctuary and support for lovers of alternative culture in the Essex new town which was my adopted home for 10 years in the 1980s,  the tight-knit Square clientele has become a diaspora, spread across the town, putting on gigs in pubs of various degrees of unsuitability because there simply isn’t anywhere else.
 
Having heard that East London brewery Redchurch had relocated there and had a taproom as part of its brewing operation, I approached them with a view to launching my Collected Works there. They agreed and we had a thoroughly wonderful evening, loads of old faces in attendance and ridiculous amounts of wonderful beer consumed.

Local poet Cherry B, whose debut collection A Job Lot Of Rhymes (Flapjack Press) is highly recommended, did a stirring support set. Perhaps, just maybe, I have discovered a new venue in Harlow.
 
From there I meandered east to the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket, set up in the old corn exchange in tribute to the legendary DJ whose support in my early years as Attila is one of the reasons I have been able to earn my living doing what I love for the past 40 years.

As always a warm welcome and a lovely gig, though I missed a reunion with Peel’s widow Sheila because she was self-isolating after a Covid scare. As I sit here there’s an email from her confirming all is OK. Very pleased to hear.
 
And then I went to Diss. Not because I had a gig there, but because it was on the way to my next one, and Diss is one place any self (dis)respecting rapper absolutely has to visit once in their life. And it was there that my two great loves, words/music and football, suddenly collided.
 
My phone rang. It was Tony Gratwicke, assistant manager of my little local amateur football team AFC Southwick. He was giggling. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Ralf Rangnick is the new Man United manager.”
 
“I think I know what’s going to happen next,” I said. I was right. The press descended like a swarm of hungry locusts. For Warhol’s celebrated 15 minutes, Southwick was famous. Our little Sussex port town with its football team in red and white stripes became the epicentre of a rather surreal story.  
 
It wasn’t just that Ralf had spent a season playing for Southwick in 1979-80, or that his “gegenpressing” idea may have originated in the frenziedly physical theatre of English non league football which presented him with four broken ribs, a punctured lung and an extended hospital stay as the result of an away match at Chichester City. It was the fact that 40 years later he had remembered us.
 
When the players and management of the old Southwick FC, now AFC Southwick, rescued the club from oblivion last season, I got involved on the PR and fundraising side.

One day, while watching the lads wallop another hapless opponent on Southwick Recreation Ground, I was discussing fundraising ideas with my mate Levvo and the fact that Ralf Rangnick – internationally renowned manager of Schalke 04 and Champions League semi finalists RB Leipzig - had played for Southwick. 

“You speak German,” he said. “Why don’t you get in touch with him and ask him to donate to the Wickers’ crowdfunder appeal?”
 
So I wrote, in German, to the Ralf Rangnick Foundation, and got a reply back from Ralf’s adviser, the wonderfully named Marco Casanova, sending Ralf’s greetings, a £1,000 donation, and a lovely message.
 
It really does seem as though Manchester United have got a good one here – a manager who remembers and celebrates the grassroots of the game. I have never wished a Man U manager good luck before, but am proud to do so now.  
 
Gigs continued this week, socially distanced, in Luton, Reading and next Monday, Brighton. And next Friday I launch my new dub poetry album in my local, the Duke of Wellington in Shoreham. A lifetime’s ambition achieved – and a thumbs up from my old poetry comrade Benjamin Zephaniah, which warmed the cockles of my heart.
 

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