Patrik Fitzgerald single reviewed in Record Mirror, 24 March, 1979 by Kelly Pike.
Patrik Fitzgerald: ‘All Sewn Up’ (Polydor)
“When you were a boy you always wanted to be someone, you knew you never would be but you thought about it lunchtimes. Think about it twice, it’s far less trouble to be… nice.”
Plaintive little song from the professional street kid Patrik. A sharp poignant observation on everyday life. Hear it.
Patrik Fitzgerald’s Poems reviewed in Jamming, number 8, 1979.
Patrik Fitzgerald: Poems
The first book of poems I know of that’s come from a new wave artist. Put out by Tower Hamlets Art Project (THAP) 75p may seem a lot for 30 small pages, but it’s better than paying £3.00 for 10 Buzzcocks songs, isn’t it?
It’s hard to review a book. Basically, this is a collection of Patrik’s well-known and not so well-known (to me) poems, with a few pictures here and there. Well known stuff like Make It Safe (‘Come and get your punk in Woolworths/Bondage trousers twelve pounds/Mohair jumpers sold next to cardigans’), The Paranoid Ward, and I Wandered Lonely, but practically all lesser-known, though just as impressive, stuff like The Alien In Tottenham Ct. Rd, Do Something Constructive, Robotic and especially The Pigs At Gigs (Bouncers).
All in all, 17 poems and 3 bits of prose makes a very worthwhile book. Patrik Fitzgerald may now be on Polydor, but he’s always been witty, honest, and accusing when he need be. For anyone who’s ever liked him (or for anyone who wants to), go and get this now. And let’s hope more books like this come out, and soon…
Billy Bragg’s first record in Jamming!, number 16, 1983.
Billy Bragg: Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy
(Utility/Go)
Richard Branson recently achieved his lifetime ambition – to own Genesis and Peter Gabriel. By merging Charisma into the Virgin empire, all other acts on the label have been left to fend for themselves, and one Billy Bragg, with an album just out, managed to sneak away to pastures new with Go! Discs. ‘Life’s A Riot …’ – a seven-track 45 rpm 2″ – has just been re-released by said independent to coincide with Billy’s Tube appearance and growing reputation.
Billy Bragg is one of those solo artists thrown up from time to time whose talent is so apparent, yet method so unusual, that major success is always there to be grabbed, but sometimes infuriatingly out of reach. The last great example was Patrik Fitzgerald; Bill Bragg, though different in so many ways, could prove a similar case.
Billy’s voice is most instantly comparable to Weller’s; his guitar, a rabid jangle of dislocated chords, is his only companion; and his lyrics are biting and to-the-point, yet full of wit and humanity. Check out ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’ and in particular ‘A New England’ for perfect examples of how to sound angry, compassionate, young, and yet also very tongue-in-cheek and witty. Elsewhere, ‘Lovers Town Revisited’ and ‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’ are two more impassioned examples of Billy’s grievances with the modern world.
Although I think £3 for a twenty-minute record that obviously had minimal recording costs is a bit off-putting, there is no doubt that Billy Bragg is on his way to becoming a cult hero of the ’80s. The interesting point will come when the public get bored of hearing just him and a guitar; then we’ll see whether Billy can create a more populist career for himself, or fade into obscurity, as did Patrik Fitzgerald in the same situation. I await with interest, but in the meantime, I enjoy.
Tony Fletcher
Michael Horovitz in Sounds, 13 March 1982, puts in a watercolour of a letter after an article on that years Poetry Olympics.
Comrade Paul Butterfield gets a mention, who was often at the Orient with his dad.
Bushell’s rampage with Attila the Stockbroker (Sounds February 27) sabotages the credibility of its promotion of Attila by being so scornful of everything and everyone else spat on in passing. Just seven examples for the record:-
1: To kill a few myths before rumour becomes ‘fact’: by Attila’s own definition of the ‘gig-crash’ – “jumping on stage uninvited and having a go, invariably half-cut”, he and Seething Wells most certainly did not “crash the Poetry Olympics at the Young Vic ‘for a crack'”.
If you ask Attila I’m sure, being an honest lad, he’ll confirm that the two of them (hitherto completely unknown to me) came up and asked if they could do a short spot. As this would be cutting into the advertised poets’ time, but not wishing to reject two apparently serious young contenders out of hand, I in turn asked McGough, Paul Weller & the rest, each of whom was gracious enough to agree.
2: It wasn’t “the blubber mountain Nuttall” over whom comrade Butterfield hurled his booze, but me. Since this anorexic seizure of the stage was merely prolonging the delay before my introduction of Bushell’s hero & mine, Attila (else why would I be presenting him at prime-time on my show?), it’s hard to see how Butterfield’s veritable gig-crash can be blown up to the stature of “the prole v-sign to the whole farcical event” Bushell’s account suggests.
And the yells of “Shame! Stinker! Lout! Off! Off!” he correctly reports came from “the offended portion of the crowd” who disliked the look of Butterfield or felt his contribution to be a crashing bore much as Bushell himself did most of the others. I found Pierre’s little vision of the Thames full of shit quite a laugh myself. But the argument against unscheduled additions is they rob the punters of their due from the performers they’ve actually come to hear.
3: Attila’s notion of busting “the gates of the Poetry Establishment with a pen in one hand and an axe in the other” is unworthy of him, and the last thing that’s going to fan “the smouldering embers of a working class poetry explosion” in Britain. The image of embers implies there’s been something of a conflagration – which there has. But if the pen is to prove mightier than Maggie’s iron-thatched farm, let alone the international capitalist military-industrial complex, it’ll be because the entrenched bully-boy Divide-&-Rule policies of the guvnors and owners are overwhelmed by the enduring power of the living ideas & voices of its opponents.
You can bet your life if it comes down to a clash of brawn, the axes that prevail will be those ground by yer ruling classes & swung by their hirelings, the brainwashed mercenaries worldwide. if the giant steps taken against that continuing direction by the likes of Joan Littlewood (Mother Courage of Stratford East), Tom Pickard, McGough, Patten, Weller & the rest are themselves assailed as The Enemy or The Establishment by would-be new wavers, the net result is surely that all true poetry & revolutionary aspiration gets that much more easily wiped out by the Tory Philistinism & economic demoralisation virtually all the oral poets are continuing to fight.
4: I chose the Young Vic & Stratford theatres for these Poetry Olympics shows exactly because they’re two of the most working class & multiracial (& least sectarian or class-ridden) venues in London. So far from representing a “bourgeois, snobby, out of touch… alien world of dirty looks” the Theatre Royal’s a deliberately community orientated anti-racist youth centre, built up over the years with the bare hands & heads of Littlewood, Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, Frank Norman & loads more. This tradition of a people’s theatre was extended the night your reporter looked in & left again with his Bushell of prejudices intact – extended by Attila, but also by the black/alternative/racial/rock communicators James Berry, Jeff Nuttall, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Patrik Fitzgerald & several others.
5: OK, none of us is getting any younger, but for Bushell to assume that because a few of the above may be around their middle years, we’re necessarily also “middle-class, smug, self-satisfied, & stiflingly self-congratulatory” when he admits he only started to listen the fourth time he left the bar for the auditorium, to Butterfield and Attila, leaves him hoist by his own petard his presumed ‘radicalism’ too is gonna be ’emasculated’ if he pays attention to no-one but his mates. At risk to their self-approbation, he & his might pause to consider the possibility that to be a poet or revolutionary at 20 is to be 20, to be them at 40 is to be a poet & revolutionary – as Mitchell, Nuttall, Heathcote Williams (who didn’t get a hearing at Stratford cos of the time waste of all the aggro & interruptions) still turn out to be.
6: Bushell applauds Attila for standing at the mike “in leather jacket, football scarf & DMs, spouting forth about there here and now. If he’d been in the theatre for the others, as distinct from reacting against their clothes, he’d have been able to tell your paper what each of them read & sang about present day realities too. Why should a conformist of one kind mean more than any other – more than that it’s wearer’s mentality or desired public might be uniform – propaganda for proper geese? I wear cords cos they cost £2 on Portobello Road, whereas leather gear’s pricey these days, being chic, I’ve also written quite a lot of soccer poetry, but that doesn’t mean I wear soccer clothes to perform it in, or want to spout it to soccer fans only.
7: The Stockbroker’s claim that JCC made his forerunners “redundant in ’77” by showing that “poetry should be for the people and could be put across to anyone” is unhistorical to say the least. Coops drew on the spadework of the Beats & Dylan & Henri & all of us concerned (like Attila) with “making the audience part of it” – just as we ourselves had benefited from the pathfinding inroads of blues shouters & Dylan Thomas & the Russian revolutionary bards. No real poet is ever made redundant by any other – it’s what makes poetry more like music than say, machine-part assembly. Lennon’s Working Class Hero didn’t replace Ginsberg’s Howl any more than Elvis Costello does Presley. What’s real in art is always contemporary – though the mass of what’s contemporary is not, alas, always real.
Michael Horovitz, Poetry Olympics, Piedmont, Bisley, Stroud, Glos.
Patrik Fitzgerald’s first album in Melody Maker, 19 May, 1979.
Patrik Fitzgerald
“Grubby Stories”
(Polydor Super 2383 533)
Patrik Fitzgerald is more a journalist than he is a poet.
Running through his catalogue of grubby stories faster than an excited voyeur turning the handle of a peepshow, Fitzgerald disgards the fripperies of imagery in favour of the straight, if biased, reporting technique.
Equipped with a battered acoustic guitar and an equally battered acoustic voice, Fitzgerald explains what it feels like to be young, punk and unhappy. 17 times.
Sometimes he does it with a band (borrowing Buzzcock John Maher on drums and doubling up Peter Wilson for keyboards and production), once acapella (as with “Make It Safe”, a bitter reflection on the despiritualisation of punk), but mostly with just him on guitar.
Low on melody and bland on irony, this record will be of great value to sociologists and people with short memories.
Frances Lass
The lad himself live in 1980.
A film about punk poet and singer Patrik Fitzgerald from 2009.
Patrik Fitzgerald’s poem about the inevitable commercialisation of rebellion, from his 1979 album Grubby Stories.
Patrik Fitzgerald’s book Poems was published by Tower Hamlets Arts Project in 1979.
Michael Horovitz gets into a tizzy over Blake Morrison writing about Tony Harrison, from the London Review of Books Vol. 4, Number 8, May 1982.
SIR: In what monkish cell has Blake Morrison been conducting his explorations into contemporary verse? He alleges, without telling your readers what they are, that ‘there are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century … Harrison seems to have the field to himself.’ This would be admissible only if you’d had your ear to the grounds of middle or upper-class literary coffee mills. Which is not to say that Harrison isn’t a genuine or working-class poet – nor that working-classness necessarily or always matters very much.
But since Morrison invokes these grounds, and a concern with thinking, let me commend the food for further thought on this subject to be found in plenty in the poetry of Attila the Stockbroker, Jim Burns, Aidan Cant, Anne Clark, John Cooper Clarke, Joolz Denby, Patrik Fitzgerald, Mark Hyatt, Roger McGough, Barry MacSweeney, Brian Patten, Tom Pickard, Tom Raworth, Alan Sillitoe and Seething Wells; and in the poems, as well as the songs, of pre and post-punk songwriter-singers, such as Syd Barrett, Pete Brown, Kevin Coyne, Ray Davies, Roy Harper, Richard Jobson, John Lennon and Paul Weller – amongst many, many others. None of them is haut bourgeois (indeed, most of them wouldn’t know, or want to know, what that means): but each is, or was, like Tony Harrison, in full possession of ‘first-hand knowledge of the material they deal in’.
Michael Horovitz
New Departures, Bisley, near Stroud
Blake Morrison writes: I have yet to see a Michael Horovitz letter (and I have seen many) which does not reel off at least a score of names which are said to prove the existence of some renaissance in contemporary British poetry. The names vary from week to week, but the ones cited here do little to persuade me that I was wrong in singling out Tony Harrison. For this is an issue of quality rather than quantity, and the ‘genuine working-class poet’ is, as I understand it, not only genuinely working-class but of genuine poetic stature. None of Horovitz’s candidates meets that requirement, not even what he calls the ‘pre and post-punk songwriter-singers’ (in what useful sense can the likes of Roy Harper and Syd Barrett be called pre-punk – this is rather like calling a Thirties poet a pre-Forties poet?). Like Horovitz, I don’t believe that ‘working-classness necessarily or always matters very much.’ But it does matter in Harrison’s case because it is the subject of Continuous. And if one is going to invoke class one should be accurate and not assume that all rock musicians are by definition working-class. John Lennon was brought up in a semi in a respectable neighbourhood, and punk has had more to do with bourgeois art schools than with working-class council estates.
standupandspit 