Book Reviews - Attila the Stockbroker, Gong, BBC Sessions, Skin Alley
by Dave Thompson
By Attila the Stockbroker
Cherry Red Books (ISBN 978-1-909454-87-3)
When Attila the Stockbroker first appeared on the UK punk scene at the dawn of the 1980s, it is unlikely that many folk saw him sticking around. There were, after all, already several self-styled poets spitting acerbic rage and humor into the audience; someone even coined a name for it, the all-too-accurate “ranting,” and Attila, a menacingly proportioned skinhead with a repertoire that embraced dead cats, Albanian football, Soviet take-overs, Depeche Mode fans and fellow ranter Seething Wells’s foreskin, was just one more lone star shouting the odds before the headliners came on.