IT’s still amazing and wonderful to me that I have managed to earn my living for over 40 years doing something I enjoy so much that I’d have done it as my main lifetime hobby all that time if I hadn’t earned a penny. And no, I’m not “a celebrity” — especially in the modern, vapid sense of the word — and most certainly don’t need anyone to “get me out of here.” I’m content where I am, thank you very much. I’m faster than most and I live on the coast. 

And even more amazing for me, after four-and-half decades and 4,000 shows in 26 countries as Attila the Stockbroker, is that the most utterly batshit of all the many completely nuts experiences I have had in my travels across Britain, Europe and the wider world has unravelled in the last 18 months, as I traverse my 67th and 68th years. And I didn’t actually go anywhere.

Next Friday I am releasing two new tracks. Over the years I’ve wandered through punk poetry, spoken word, acoustic punk, melodic punk, early music punk, thrash punk, ska, dub poetry and industrial language (a Laibach-influenced genre I created for myself.) 

But I never thought I’d have a go at K-pop. Or, to be more precise, NK-pop. Medieval NK-pop, to be even more exact, banned and praised simultaneously by the Organising Committee of the April Spring Friendship Art Festival in North Korea. 

“Wow. How? Why? What the hell?” I hear you asking.  

Are you sitting comfortably? Now I’ll begin. 

Towards the end of 2023 I got an email from Glyn Ford, former leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party and deputy chair of the European Parliament Socialist Group, now founder of Track2Asia, a “soft diplomatic” channel aiming to ease tensions on the Korean peninsular. But I didn’t know that. I just knew him as a long-time supporter of my work with whom I’d exchanged a few messages in the past. So his email came as a bit of a shock.

“Fancy spring in Pyongyang?”

I was gobsmacked. He explained that representatives of the aforementioned April Spring Friendship Art Festival, which takes place every other year in Pyongyang and features a disproportionate number of Russian borderguard choirs and Bulgarian weightlifter string quartets, were attempting to broaden the programme for 2024 and had asked him to recommend someone from Britain. He had recommended me, and they wanted to hear some material. I sent them some of the woodwind and fiddle-driven tracks from my early music punk band Barnstormer 1649, and they loved them. 

The next thing I knew I’d received an official invitation to the festival for me and the band for April 2024, with a request for a 30-minute set, including two Korean traditional songs. That was easy: I chose the ancient song Arirang, the best-known song in both Koreas, a “soul of the nation” piece which exactly fitted my band’s style, and the incredibly bouncy Mount Paektu, a song about the mountain which also symbolises Korean identity, especially in the context of the long battle against Japanese colonial rule. 

I translated it into English, removing the NK propaganda element and making it into a nice song about walking up a sacred mountain, and it sailed past the censors. We were just preparing ourselves for the ultimate trip into the unknown when the news confirmed that the Covid outbreak which was slowly ebbing away there hadn’t ebbed away in time and the whole thing was going online to be shown on North Korean state TV.

We had to send a 30-minute video. “And you must dress smart!” said my embassy contact Kim,  a craft beer and garlic-loving Man City fan with two kids at the local school in west London. 

Our local Brighton cable channel Latest TV did us proud with the video and off it went — but it was never shown. Because of the way we were dressed. I was wearing a SHIRT (as opposed to a T shirt) on stage and the others looked the picture of respectability. By our standards. But we were wearing JEANS. And I had a CHAIN.

But they did put a piece on the website praising our arrangements of the Korean songs and gave me a certificate of merit. 

Arirang and Mount Paektu are released by Cherry Red Records on all streaming platforms next Friday, May 23, along with videos released that day on my YouTube channel. I’m singing in Korean.

And no, I didn’t make a single world of this up. 

Banned in North Korea? It’s in my jeans. 

For further info please visit facebook  and/or bandcamp.