Poet Attila the Stockbroker on anarchism and football

This video from Britain is called Attila the Stockbroker, Maggots 1 – Maggie Nil (Live@ Miners Welfare, Whitburn, 12/9/09).

By Attila the Stockbroker from Britain:

Materialism without the dialectics

Monday 12 November 2012

Anyone been to the Anarchist Bookfair? It’s great. I hadn’t until the most recent one and, to be honest, I was half expecting the Bakuninite equivalent of two Trots and a dog – on a string of course.

But the place was heaving with hundreds and hundreds of people and the discussions and stalls were really interesting. Did a gig there with my old acoustic punk mate Patrik Fitzgerald and then we stuffed a ridiculous amount of gear into a hired Ford Galaxy and I set off for my latest tour of Germany and Holland with my band Barnstormer.

We started in Dortmund and as so often while on tour in Germany the subject got round to football and the vast difference in ticket prices over there.

One of the Borussia Rude Boys showed me his season ticket which cost 225 euros – about £180 – and that’s not just for a whole league season watching one of the top teams in Europe but for the home games in the first stages of the Champions League as well.

When I told him that my season ticket for my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion cost more than double that, and you’d pay double that again to watch the elite clubs in England, he and his mates gasped in disbelief.

The key factor of course is that in Germany and most other mainland European countries they still have standing areas and we don’t. Now that the Liverpool fans have been rightly exonerated and the whole police/Thatcher stitch-up at Hillsborough exposed, it’s time we reclaimed our game, got our terraces back and stopped pricing so many people out of watching the game we love.

From Dortmund we drove up for a show at Groningen in Holland where, Belgian beer fans, I had far too much Westmalle Tripel at a delicious 9.5 per cent ABV. Thence to a mad night in Amsterdam and a long drive to east Germany for shows in Halberstadt, Gorlitz and Chemnitz, or Karl-Marx-Stadt as it used to be called in the days of the GDR.

But history has only partly been rewritten because the huge statue of Marx’s head still dominates the Street of Nations by popular demand. Rather more surreally, when the local bank Sparkasse Chemnitz held an online vote so the public could choose between 10 different images for the bank’s new credit card, Marx’s statue won.

I don’t know what he’d make of that. Maybe mumble something about needing to make that kind of materialism a bit more dialectical?

Anyway, greetings from the beautiful Bavarian city of Regensburg. Nine gigs done, 2 to go. Tonight we’re playing for FC Augsburg and Borussia Dortmund fans at a pre-match party at the Tribut Kunstgalerie in Augsburg.

Punks and football fans having a party in an art gallery – now there’s a few stereotypes gone west.

For more info on Attila’s activities, visit www.attilathestockbroker.com.

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