Читать книгу Booted and Suited - Chris Brown - Страница 6

It looks like the bookshops of Britain had a bit of a problem with the classification of Bovver – should it sit alongside the plethora of ‘hoolie lit’ that has adorned the shelves over the last few years, next to the impressive eponymous Cass; the classic, granddaddy of them all, Steaming In, by Colin Ward; the scary Scally by Andy Nicholls; or the frankly embarrassing Inside the Forest by Gary ‘Boatsy’ Clarke? Or maybe it should be classed as an autobiography, right next to Beckham’s, as I have seen in Waterstones? Then again, I’ve also seen it under ‘Real Crimes’, nestling cosily between Happy Like Murderers: The True Story of Fred and Rose West by Gordon Burns and Real Hard Cases: True Crime from the Streets by Les Brown. David Beckham and Fred West – not quite exalted company, but interesting dinner-party guests nonetheless. Well, one of them at least.

Of course, many Bristol City fans have said that it should be found under ‘Fiction’ – they’re entitled to their opinion. Mind you, so is the bloke I see wandering around the city centre in his underpants holding a flagon of White Lightning who claims the world is flat.

An anonymous Sunderland fan wrote: ‘If you love the wannabe hoolie fantasy life then don’t buy it. If you want a bit of reality then have a read,’ while John King of Football Factory fame called it ‘Social history with steel toe-caps…’, which, to me, not only encapsulated what my book was all about but also conveniently classified it better than I – or Britain’s bookshops, for that matter – ever could. It will be interesting to see where Waterstones place Booted and Suited. I can promise one thing though – it won’t be under ‘Fairy Stories’.

When I wrote the original book some ten years ago, the ‘hoolie lit’ genre was in its infancy. I never envisaged that, in later years, Britain’s academia would not only be studying books such as mine but actually making a career out of it (and being paid to do so in part with Government grants), all supposedly to determine just what makes football hooligans tick. Steve Redhead, Professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the University of Brighton, who also dubbed the books ‘hit and tell’ stories, offers up the following in his article ‘Terrace Terrors? Post-Subcultural Criminology and the Rise and Fall of Football Hooligan Subcultures’, which may not explain why hoolies act as they do but certainly explains why the academics are fascinated by the subject: ‘The methodological work which is being undertaken is a study of the simulacrum of hooliganism, which includes the strange “pulp faction” of football hooligan literature. The study of football hooligan literature, it is argued, might eventually lead us to better, more informed ethnographies of football hooligan subcultures.’

Confused? Me too. Didn’t understand a bloody word of it. Which brings me back to the fairy stories. Professor Redhead even delves into the world of homo-eroticism that is allegedly apparent in the genre: ‘The football hooligan memoir authors’ interest in the male violence and male bonding of what were once labelled in pulp fiction “terrace terrors” is wrapped up in an almost “camp” fascination with hardness in male youth culture… the link between gay and skinhead subcultures is certainly worth reconsidering.’

Really? Not with the skinheads I know it isn’t, but then again I’m not a scholar – and I don’t live in Brighton. I’m just wondering who’s getting the hard-on over these books – the lads who read and write them or the academics who study them. For less of the psychobabble and a more concise reason as to why British males indulge in hooligan activities, I’ll offer some of my own thoughts later in the book.

In the Introduction to the original book, I mentioned something about regret. Like the late, great Frank, I had one or two – regrets about actions from my formative years, that sort of thing, but it’s often been said that you should only have regrets about what you haven’t done, not about what you have done. So, yes, there are a few regrets, like not delving deeper into the Bristol music scene and not giving Northern Soul the recognition it deserves, which I’ve endeavoured to put right in this new edition, but the biggest regret I’ve got is that I wasn’t born just a couple of years earlier – ‘I was 14 in January 1970, a perfect age for a perfect era…’ Well, not quite, maybe 16 would have done it; 18, and it would have been a totally different story.

I had touched upon the late Sixties in the first edition, but because Bovver was autobiographical I only wanted to write about my first-hand experiences, my memories, my recollections, my thoughts on the world around me in 1970s Britain. ‘Welcome to the real 1970s – it ain’t no boogie wonderland…’ proclaimed the cover. To write about this earlier period, I would need to draw upon the experiences of my elders, my betters, those more knowledgeable than me – after all, I was still into Chopper bikes, climbing trees and Jubblies in 1968 – and so this new edition now also includes a prequel which attempts to throw more light on Britain just before the 1970s, an intense few years that witnessed man walking on the moon, student riots, Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the metamorphosis of the quintessential and very acceptable British youth cult of the mod (clean living under difficult circumstances) to the birth of the most misunderstood and vilified – the skinheads (no one likes us and we don’t care).

As well as exploring this earlier period, I’ve also expanded on other areas which I think I sadly neglected in the original – the contribution of black DJs to the Bristol funk scene and how the shift from funk to punk was not such a quantum leap as it at first seems. It was a shift which was to have far-reaching consequences in future years, something which I guess at the time I was completely oblivious to, so there’s as much Seymour and the Pop Group as The Specials and Paul Weller – a good trade-up, I think.

In the summer of 2004, I was approached by Radio 2 to take part in a documentary called Way Out West: The Bristol Underground, to be produced by Simon Poole and presented by David Quantick, the freelance journalist with a penchant for acidic wit, one-liners and a rather annoying habit of pronouncing ‘Avon’ as if he’s flogging overpriced women’s cosmetics on the doorstep. As well as myself and other corpulent, middle-aged members of the Avon (rhymes with ‘raven’, Mr Quantick) Soul Army, the documentary featured such luminaries from the Bristol music scene as Mark Stewart, Nellee Hooper and Grant Marshall from the Wild Bunch, and an enthusiastic and educated Brislington (Briz) kiddie by the name of Tim Williams. Tim shone through with his vast knowledge of not just the provincial Bristol music scene, but the national scene as well. Back in the late Seventies/early Eighties, he produced Bristol’s equivalent of the infamous Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, Loaded; his other claim to fame was that his brother Leigh was mentioned in Briz’s very own born-and-bred harpie Julie Burchill’s autobiography I Knew I Was Right, so that’s two famous people to come out of the south Bristol suburb. I knew of Tim; he was a mate of Neil Emery who I knew back in the Seventies and who helped me write the first edition of this book. Listening to the finished Way Out West which went out in the July of 2004, it became evident that Tim was a ‘top kiddie’ – I needed to speak to him.

I caught up with Tim in the Wellington pub on Gloucester Road in north Bristol, a regular watering-hole for Rovers’ fans and which, as is very much the style these days, features stripped floorboards as well as stuffed olives and bruschetta on the menu, not to mention, bizarrely, morris dancers performing in the garden. It was all a bit surreal. We were debating whether ‘Change’ by Donald Byrd or ‘Commando’ by The Ramones best represented Seventies music, while, in the background, all we could hear was a fucking accordion and Noddy bells. Tim regaled me with tales of visits to the Wigan Casino where he learned precisely when to clap during ‘Cochise’ by Paul Humphrey like the locals, and how walking in front of the speakers was an alternative, and painful, way to get your ears syringed.

If that’s not enough, his recollections of the early punk scene and how, of all places, Newport in South Wales had a fair shout in rivalling the King’s Road as a main player in the world of spit and bondage are revealing to say the least. But there’s much more to Tim than an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Seventies music scene and a predilection for Vivienne Westwood shirts (yes, an original still adorns his wardrobe), so I’ve handed a couple of chapters over to Tim for his recollections in his own words. You’ll really think you were there – you can almost smell the Hai Karate in your nostrils and taste the Billy buzzing in the back of your throat.

I’m not trying to rewrite history. There is no specific aim or agenda about this book, but I am trying to correct a few misconceptions of not only the late Sixties and the Seventies but also the present day. If nothing else, I hope after reading Booted and Suited some people may have a less prejudiced view of certain things.

One of the biggest misconceptions of those days revolves around the much maligned aforementioned skinhead. Their propensity for violence can’t be denied, but their perceived racist views and supposed links to extreme political groups certainly can be. To a certain extent, this may have been true for many of the second generation of skinheads from the late Seventies and early Eighties who found themselves hijacked by various right-wing movements, but the original summer of ’69 boot boys cannot be tarred with that same brush. Their beginnings were apolitical, humble and basic – a basic need to belong and a basic need to look smart and tough. Perhaps many of them didn’t realise it at the time but they had more links with the Fifties and Sixties immigrants to Britain than they did with their own peers and parents.

The second misconception is linked but much more contemporary – if the original bad boys of Britain were having a hard time with the media, it was nothing compared with today’s chavved-up hoodies. Again, it would be foolish to deny their misdeeds – those Daily Mail headlines can’t all be wrong, can they? No, they can’t, there are some real bad lads out there who wear their ASBOs as a badge of honour, but to suggest that they are ‘feral’ and to think that many of today’s youth are members of knife-toting gangs is not only delusional but also insulting.

Having said that, this fear in adults of youngsters – this ‘pedophobia’ – is very real and a sad reflection of today’s troubled times but, if I’ve learned anything through my research, it’s that many of today’s youth are no better, or no worse, than their predecessors of 40 years back. Indeed, the incidents, both recorded and anecdotal, of youths carrying (or wearing) offensive weapons were as high then as they are now and, in some cities, I would suggest it was even higher back then. As Barbara Ellen wrote in the Observer in response to the UNICEF report on our troubled youth, ‘However frightening as it sometimes gets, maybe we should accept British adolescence for what it is, has always been – a whirling out-of-control carousel. You can only watch and hope that your particular (stroppy, nihilistic, establishment-hating, maddening, indispensable) Brit teenager manages to cling on for the ride.’

The third and final wrong that I want to put right is perhaps the most far-fetched and the most controversial, but in part it’s my raison d’être behind the book – I know it may sound like sacrilege now but not everyone back then thought music started and finished with Abba. Hopefully, this book will prove an antidote to I Love the Seventies, the TV series where the decade has been sanitised, repackaged and rewritten to fit in with cosy Saturday-evening viewing.

There’s been a whole industry built around the Abba myth; of course they were big, they sold shedloads of records, but so has Jive Bunny over the years – did anyone who was really into their music in the Seventies buy their records? No. Did your mum and your little sister buy their records? Yes. In the words of Public Enemy, ‘Don’t believe the hype.’

‘Mamma Mia… my my… how can I resist you?’ Well, in my case and for many thousands of others back then, quite easily, as it happens.