I STARTED 2025 with a rousing, rallying poem called The Optimist, summing up all the challenges we face and offering my flamboyant and confident response. I can’t better that. So I’ll start 2026 with a simple, positive message from two larger-than-life friends, blasting out from their two very different, inspiring, recently published books. 

It goes like this. If you’re being bashed by big business, conspired against by capital, ripped off by the rich, don’t just moan — or even write endless screeds of angry words — get off your arse and do something about it.

Ordinary people, working together, can make history. Direct action works. There are many, many more of us than them, and if we use our advantage cleverly and without distractions we can move mountains.  

My social and cultural world is broad, my lack of interest in dull, sectarian, ideology-sodden political meetings, navel-gazing poetry events and finger-in-ear folky frottage spectacular.

I have always believed actions speak louder than words, and as long as those actions bring people together in struggle and are inspired by a heart firmly in the right place, there’s no need to pick holes about the finer points of ideology and agree about absolutely everything.  

Here we have two books by two friends, very similar in some ways, very different in others, both with a successful campaigning story to tell. 

In the red corner in every sense, I give you Joe Solo, the hardest gigging full-time washing machine engineer in the world, writer of what he himself describes as sledgehammer songs, fundraiser, organiser, and above all, the totemic figure behind the grass roots self-help movement We Shall Overcome.

Under this banner he and his comrades, centred around the equally inspirational Pauline Town’s Station pub in Ashton under Lyne, one of the hardest hit areas in the country, have organised well over a thousand gigs helping to raise an estimated £1 million for those in need. 

Once those washing machines have been repaired Joe is out there gigging all over the country as a passionate, lyrically masterful singer-songwriter and storyteller — and after about 20 albums his words have now been collected into a beautifully presented book, Songs & Verses — Selected Lyrics & Poetry.  

Chip Hamer from Poetry on the Picket Line has helped magnificently with the difficult task of getting the lyrics from the page to the stage and the whole thing is an absolute tour de force, with, as ever, all profits going to We Shall Overcome.

Working-class history, punk mythology and a definite romantic longing for a big ol’ road trip across the USA — better wait a while for that one, Joe. Well done, comrades! Get your copy from here.

In the blue corner (in a strictly football sense) I give you undertaker, wit, man about town, football fanzine editor, sports journalist and broadcaster, after-dinner raconteur, purveyor of occasionally cringeworthy humour and my comrade in the long battle to save our football club from an unspeakable fate at the hands of greedy moneymen, Brighton Independent Supporters’ Association co-founder and co-conspirator Ian “Harty” Hart.  
(Now there’s an introduction!) 

His new book Brighton & Hove Albion: From Every Angle is precisely what it says, a humorous, quirky, hard -hitting account of a life supporting and writing about our club through all four divisions, focusing on what we call the “war years” in the ’90s and early 2000s when a few of us organised what I can honestly describe as the most successful grassroots campaign I have ever been involved in, mobilising huge sections of our fanbase. 

In 1997 our Goldstone Ground was sold behind our backs and the club nearly got relegated from the Football League. We forced out the scumbags who were destroying the club, spent two years homeless, ground sharing at Gillingham, and another 12 at a shabby old athletics ground In Brighton campaigning for a proper stadium, which we finally got in 2011.

Now we’re in our ninth season in the Premier League. That’s the short version. Harty has a longer one, with some unnecessary fripperies like boxing also featured, but it’s fine stuff. Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword. 

If you’d like to order a copy email hartybooks@hotmail.com.

Happy New Year. Solidarity. And make sure you’re on the anti-fascist march on March 28. It’s important.