Attila the Stockbroker has an autobiography out that has been very well received – and he’s very happy to tell you all about it. Write Out Loud’s Laura Taylor can testify as to what a good read it is – and so can I, as it happens. But as I listened to him being interviewed by the Poetry Trust’s arts administrator, Amy Wragg, at the Aldeburgh poetry festival on Saturday morning – “11.15? This is the earliest I’ve ever done a gig” – I thought there could be another Attila book for all his card-carrying fans  – The Thoughts of Attila the Stockbroker, perhaps.

Here are a few, for starters. “I’m a self-publisher, and I’m better at it than anyone else … a lot of people want the validation of publication, you know, Dead Dog Publishers, of Harrogate … obviously I don’t have a self-doubt gene … in the early 80s I was seriously targeted by the far right, having chairs and darts thrown at me by Nazis.”

If you think this all sounds like a guy just a bit too full of himself, you’d be wrong. The punk poet and musician is larger than life - and I don’t mean that in a sizeist way - but everything he says makes perfect sense. To me, at any rate.

How did he choose his stage name? “I was working in a stockbrokers at the time, and someone said I had the manners of Attila the Hun. The name got me my first 50 gigs.” The debt he owes to John Peel: “He was incredibly powerful and influential. A million people used to listen to his radio show. After my first Peel session I went from 20 people at my gigs to over 100. I’d have managed some day, somehow, but he certainly made it a hell of a lot easier.”

He toured East Germany four times before there Wall came down. “I learned German because I was absolutely determined to find out what that country was really like, as opposed to what we were being told in the West.”

He is very happy that Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party. “I’m a Corbynista, totally, and I never dreamed it would be possible. One of my happiest moments was a few weeks ago when Jeremy Corbyn was elected, Brighton and Hove Albion were top of the Championship, I’d just become a stepgrandad, and my autobiography had come out.” He tries to organise his gigs around Brighton’s fixture list: “They’re playing MK Dons today, who I’ve always boycotted, so it’s very fortunate that I’m here.”  

Page and stage? “I think a lot of page poets could improve their performances, and some of the excellent performers need to improve their words.”

Attila treated us to a few poems at the end of his interview, some of which he performed again in the evening at the Britten Studio, including the moving ‘Never Too Late’, about his stepfather, and another to honour his father’s experiences in the first world war. He also declaimed ‘A Hellish Encounter’, on the afterlife of Margaret Thatcher, and ‘UK Gin Dependence Party’, the title of his latest collection – “It would have been so much easier / To have teamed up with Rhodesia” - , as he clutched a bottle of Adnams Southwold bitter, before picking his mandola to thrash out a version of Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love, commemorating the bizarre night he was asked to stand in for the 1970s teenybopper idol.   

One of his maxims is: “When a fascist hits a poet, the poet’s doing something right.” I don’t think you can argue with that. It was inspiring and stirring listening to him at Aldeburgh on Saturday night. He said of his autobiography, Arguments Yard, which recounts his eventful 35 years as a political satirist and rabble rouser: “There’s a lot in there that you couldn’t make up - and I haven’t made any of it up.”  

Greg Freeman