LAST Saturday, after witnessing a stirring 4-1 win for the Seagulls in a six-pointer against Swansea, I got the train to London and cycled to Hoxton Hall on my fold-up bike — Hoxton is one of those strange, Tubeless places where you need to be a Londoner to work out how to get there on public transport — and travelled back in time.

Not that far back, really, in the scheme of things — just to the beginning of the 1980s, when I had recently emerged from the underground punk scene as an angry young ranting poet and been invited by pioneering cultural activists Roland and Claire Muldoon from the CAST theatre group (it stood for Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre) to join their newly created London cabaret circuit New Variety.

For the next few years poets, jugglers, mime artists, the first wave of alternative comedians and other performers who simply defied classification entertained audiences across London in a truly diverse bill of entertainment reminiscent in its scope (though not its content – radical politics were well to the fore) of the old-time music hall shows.