ON THE road again, writing on the train, got a million ideas buzzing round my brain...

I’m heading  to Bradford for a last minute Literature Festival gig at St George’s Hall with award-winning poet and podcaster George the Poet and very much looking forward to meeting another trailblazer from the burgeoning new generation  of spoken-word artists.

They’re everywhere these days and, in a huge triumph not just for Stormzy, but for the genre, one has just headlined the main stage at Glastonbury.

I’m totally inspired by how the scene has developed in the last 40  years. When I started jumping up on stage in 1980, shouting poems in between bands at gigs and generally taking poetry to places it didn’t usually go, I was one of a tiny band of punk performance poets called the Ranters.

We saw ourselves as complete mould-breakers and, back then, the idea of hauling poetry off the bookshelves and onto the streets was indeed brand new.

Most people who encountered ranting verse in those early days hadn’t seen anything like it before. Poets weren’t supposed to be on stage at rock gigs and performing on football terraces.  Our “place” was reading to hushed audiences in libraries.

But we Ranters were loud and in your face, took on fascists and hecklers — especially fascist hecklers — in the audience with gusto and if  people threw things  at us we threw them back, or at least I did.  

We did have antecedents of a kind, of course, though most were much softer in their approach —  beat poets like hippy hero Michael Horovitz, the Mersey Sound trio of Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri and the great radical Adrian Mitchell, whose quote: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people” I adopted as a manifesto and later as a T-shirt.

And then there were the reggae talk-over artists. I loved reggae, tried out on sound systems a couple of times in the late 1970s, and count the great originator U-Roy among my greatest influences. Along, of course, with punk-poetry pioneer John Cooper Clarke, who showed us all how it could be done.

Through the latter part of the '80s and early '90s the surge in alternative comedy took many of our best performers because comedians are better paid than poets and get far more airtime on stations like Radio Four.

But I never gave a hamster’s arse about the mainstream. I just forged my own path and, although it was a bit of a lonely one for a while, in the last 20  years or so the spoken-word scene has completely exploded all over the country.  

As I put it in my new poem 40 Years in Rhyme: “Ranting verse, reggae chat, hip hop, grime and all of that – we are simply spoken word, voices shouting to be heard.”  And, thanks to social media and the new DIY culture, more and more of us are being heard loud and clear.

Respect to one and all, and especially for Stormzy for taking radical words to as mainstream an audience as you can get.

After Bradford I’m doing a Labour fundraiser in Slough and tonight (Saturday) I’m at Leamington Poetry Festival for a gig in a church. But don’t worry, there’s a pub next door. I’ve negotiated and Jesus says you can take your drinks in. Then tomorrow (Sunday) it’s the lovely Prince Albert pub in Stroud.

Next weekend I’m back on the road with my “early music meets punk” band, Barnstormer 1649.  Next Friday, we’re at the Dublin Castle in Camden with the mighty Blyth Power and on Saturday head to the Midlands for the Wellingborough Diggers’ Festival, where my songs about the radical movements of the 1650s will, once again, come well and truly home.

Attila’s Stormzy tribute 40 Years In Rhyme is available at facebook.com/attilathestockbroker/videos/398252387716578/