Two Tribes_Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink

by Tony Evans

  Brown stood out and that made him nervous. ‘I’d been on the Oxford Road Show and got a Joe Strummer Mohican to go on TV,’ he said. ‘I was wearing a mohair jumper and combat trousers. I looked like a Clash wannabe.’

  It was a look that would not have gone down well with the sort of football fans Brown was more familiar with. ‘In Leeds, they were all National Front,’ he said. ‘The Service Crew sold Bulldog, the NF paper. They were all right wing. It was different in Liverpool. I was relieved about that.’

  Even so, once the Royal Iris cast off, Brown had a small moment of panic. ‘I remember thinking as the ship left shore, “I can’t leave!”’

  Some people nearly missed the boat. Literally. The review in the Liverpool Echo told the story. ‘The Farm’s trombone player, Tony Evans, missed the boat first time round … If the Granada people hadn’t requested a re-dock at 9 p.m. to get their film footage to News at Ten, the arrangements could have been all at sea.’ It was the last time I ever said, ‘They can’t very well start without me.’

  Once the show got under way, the real craziness began. Groundpig always guaranteed a good time. They were unlike any other band of the period.

  The area’s music scene was vibrant and inventive, and groups like Echo & the Bunnymen, Wah, The Farm and numerous others played to rowdy packed houses. The soundtrack to the period was not created by any of these original bands, though, but by Groundpig.

  They were unlikely local heroes. They could not have been more idiosyncratic. John O’Connell, the main singer, looked normal enough and had a voice that was so flexible it could lend itself to any style. He could have been a front man for many of the bands in the city. Graham Evans, the other main stage presence, was different. He looked as if he had wandered on stage from a Norman Wisdom sketch. Evans wore a flat cap, a moustache and was the most unlikely pop star of the Scally era. He was a former welder at Cammell Laird’s shipyard and, along with his bravura banjo and violin playing, brought a humour to the stage which enhanced the Groundpig experience.

  They played a set of other people’s songs. During their residency at the Bier Keller, they attracted crowds of nearly a thousand people.

  If you closed your eyes, Simon and Garfunkel could have been in the room singing ‘The Sound Of Silence’ in close, emotional harmony. Groundpig might follow that deeply moving performance with the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies. Next would be a rousing version of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’. It was unpredictable and the effect was inexplicable. Young girls clambered on to Bier Keller tables and danced Hillbilly jigs while O’Connell and Evans performed a frantically competitive version of ‘Duelling Banjos’ on the stage. The mad, frantic energy, the insane vivacity and the sheer exuberance of these gigs were a counterpoint to the bleakness of the economic situation in the region.

  Groundpig became the house band of the burgeoning Scally culture. They found their audience in young, match-going fans and transmitted through their music the same feverish excitement found on the terraces. Every gig turned into a massive singalong. People were dancing on the tables on the Royal Iris, a dangerous game while afloat, even on the calmest of seas.

  Jegsy Dodd, a robust poet, did a set for the appreciative crowd but the night exploded when Ted Chippington appeared on the low stage. Chippington’s surreal, deadpan style initially aggravated the crowd, as did his attempts to subvert traditional humour (sample joke: Knock, knock; who’s there? Reg Gomez; Reg Gomez who? Stan’s brother, you know Stan Gomez …).

  The reaction was hostile. ‘Ted Chippington looked as out of place as me,’ Brown said. ‘He was dressed like a rockabilly. All the crowd were heckling him, shouting, “Fuck off, Ted.”

  ‘He was giving as good as he got. He said, “Where do you want me to fuck off to? We’re on a boat.”’

  It didn’t calm the audience. They chanted, football-style: ‘Who the fucking hell are you?’ for almost five minutes, with Chippington supplying an answer every time they drew breath (‘I’ve told you four times now, Ted Chippington; is the mike not working?’). Brown thought it was great. ‘All these wild casuals three feet away from him throwing ale and abuse and he fronted them. And suddenly, the crowd got him and started laughing instead of abusing. He had them eating out of his hand.’

  The mood swung and the night became wilder in the best sense. The Italians were treated to voluminous amounts of beer and were dancing alongside their hosts.

  The Farm closed the night. The Echo described them as ‘bringing with them their current street credibility. That includes suede shoes, cords, fairly naff shirts and pullovers. A sort of Scally wardrobe by courtesy of the Burton’s catalogue … by now it wasn’t just stand on the tables time. They were bouncing up and down on the deck.’ At least the Echo had a slightly better grip on the way Scousers dressed than the Sunday Times after Heysel.

  ‘There was another look going on, too,’ Brown said, endorsing the Echo’s view of the band’s fashion sense. ‘Some of the lads were wearing tweed and corduroy jackets. Imagine a geography teacher meets Sherlock Holmes and goes to the match.’

  The Italians were seeing a different side of Scouse drunken behaviour and were enjoying it. ‘They couldn’t believe the scenes on the boat,’ Hooton said. ‘It was a brilliant night.

  ‘We had a song called “No Man’s Land” about the First World War. Basically, it was about how in different situations people on opposing sides would be friends. That’s what the trip was about.’

  There were no recriminations or finger-pointing on this visit. It ended with embraces and tearful goodbyes.

  ‘They were emotional,’ Hooton said. ‘They were physically moved by it all. They didn’t blame us. There were myriad reasons for the disaster.’

  Such attempts at reconciliation received barely any coverage outside Merseyside. There was an easier narrative. In that summer, almost every public event was framed against the background of Heysel.

  Little more than a fortnight before the fundraiser on the Royal Iris, there was another musical charity appeal – on a much larger scale – that took place at Wembley Stadium, ‘the home of football’. Live Aid was inspired by the dreadful television pictures of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984. Bob Geldof, the singer with the Boomtown Rats, organized a charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, for the festive season and followed it up with overlapping concerts in London and Philadelphia. Rock ’n’ roll’s great and good turned out for the cause and it became one of the most memorable events of the decade. The Times chose to interpret its significance not in terms of the effect in starving Africa or the urge of the British people to be compassionate even at the peak of ‘no society’ Thatcherism. The paper saw Live Aid through the prism of Brussels.

  ‘Although its ostensible purpose was to bring balm to a far-off people, at times the Wembley leg of Saturday’s extraordinary Live Aid concert felt like the healing of our own nation,’ Richard Williams wrote. ‘After the weeks of troubled self-examination that followed the tragedy in the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, here the British seemed to be proving that their young people could gather peacefully in great numbers, drawn as much by a “good cause” as by the chance to worship the gods of popular entertainment.’

  Few had any faith that football supporters could behave when brought together in significant numbers. Or Scousers.

  6

  The trouble with football

  The climate of fear surrounding football was established a long time before Heysel. Violent disorder had flared up around matches for as long as the sport had been played. The game had always been a working-class pursuit. When young men from this background were placed in confrontational situations – often with alcohol as a combustible catalyst – there was potential for trouble.

  Mass away travel began in the 1950s as Britain experienced a post-war boom. Harold Macmillan declared, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good.’ The perk of the prosperity hailed by the Conservative Prime Minister was that there was more disposa
ble income to spend on leisure pursuits like football.

  Everton and Liverpool were at the forefront of the new age and their away fans soon earned the nickname of ‘Mersey Maniacs’ for their behaviour. The newly invented ‘football excursion trains’ were often the focus for disorder, and train-wrecking became a regular feature of British life. The ‘football specials’ – often dilapidated rolling stock with minimal facilities – were frequently vandalized.

  As early as 1956, Everton fans made the pages of The Times after a Saturday match away to Manchester City. ‘Nearly every train coming into Liverpool after 8.15 [p.m.] had some damage. It will take several weeks to repair the coaches,’ an official was quoted as saying. The last train from Manchester arrived at 11.20 p.m., according to the article. The game kicked off at 3 p.m., would have been over around 4.40 p.m. and the journey between the two cities could hardly have taken longer than an hour, even in the 1950s. The suspicion is simple: the later the train, the more drink its passengers would have taken.

  There were also early indications that Scouse travelling supporters were less interested in violence than theft. ‘Shopkeepers lock up when Everton are in town,’ said a report in November 1964.

  Increased television coverage brought disorder inside grounds into the public consciousness. One of the most significant moments in the history of football hooliganism occurred in May 1967 and did not involve the Merseyside teams.

  Manchester United were chasing the title when they went to Upton Park to play West Ham United. Mancunians, who were rapidly developing a reputation for being disruptive at matches, arrived in massive numbers to see their team win the championship, and the police lost control. There was fighting all over the terraces. United had the upper hand on and off the pitch.

  Four months later, West Ham hosted the champions early in the new season. This time, the East Enders approached their meeting with the Mancunians with a less hospitable attitude. Hooliganism in its modern form was born within the sound of Bow Bells. Another brutal afternoon on the terraces at the Boleyn Ground heralded the age of segregation in British football stadiums.

  The 1970s were a period when Manchester United’s fans became the most notorious in the country. They arrived at away games in huge numbers and anarchy ensued. This was particularly true of the season the club spent in the second division. In 1974–75, United’s Red Army terrorized small-town England. Vivid television coverage of their antics and hysterical newspaper reporting turned football violence into a source of modern moral panic.

  Back at West Ham, something else was happening. In the wake of the 1967 incidents, the disparate East End gangs had developed a degree of cooperation against outsiders on match days. Their reputation for toughness increased during the skinhead era. As the 1970s ended, a new phenomenon began.

  Groups of supporters started going to away games on the normal scheduled trains rather than the ‘football specials’. They were able to afford it because of a marketing campaign by Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate. The company entered into a deal with British Rail to allow them to offer two-for-one prices on rail tickets as part of a promotion. Advertisements centred on Persil washing powder asked, ‘Did you know Persil are giving away millions of free train tickets to help you the next time you want to take a break or visit a friend?’ Customers could post three tokens taken from the packaging of a host of Unilever cleaning products to the company and receive a voucher in return. When a passenger purchased a train journey and presented the voucher, they were given two tickets for the price of one.

  Special trains, put on for football fans, were cheap but comprised the oldest and nastiest rolling stock. They were slower than scheduled services and closely policed.

  Travelling as a normal passenger was more expensive and unaffordable for many of the young, wilder supporters who were in thrall to hooliganism. Persil vouchers halved the price for a pair of troublemakers. Across the country, tough young delinquents began to take an interest in their mothers’ laundry habits.

  Taking the timetabled trains rather than the excursions put on for football had another advantage. It allowed potential mischief-makers to make an earlier start to away games and arrive at their destination before the police had a chance to seal off the station and arrange an escort to the ground. Hooligan gangs prided themselves on being able to operate under the radar of the authorities. They would turn up four or five hours before kick-off, slip out of the station into town and enjoy some pre-match ‘entertainment’.

  The idea of Manchester United fans being the ‘Red Army’ was a generic term, referring to the travelling fans as a whole. The West Ham boys who took the service trains – and similar groups across the country – saw themselves as distinct from the main body of their away support. They were the elite.

  The hysterical tabloid coverage of hooliganism brought a perverse glamour to fans who liked a ruck or two. The East Enders recognized that and played up to the image. They christened themselves the Inter City Firm (ICF) and printed calling cards to leave with their victims that read ‘Congratulations, you’ve just met the ICF’.

  The media lapped it up. The myth of ‘organized’ hooliganism was up and running.

  Unlike the Red Army, the ICF and their ilk did not wear club colours. The age of the scarf-wearing bovver boy was over. The new delinquents dressed smartly and initially could have been mistaken for clean-living, respectable young men. Their unexpected arrival times and unremarkable clothing gave them an initial element of surprise and added to their notoriety.

  Newspapers bought into the mythology. The Times claimed they ‘hold regular meetings to plan their campaigns’ and talked of ‘military-style precision’. The Sunday Express agreed, suggesting they ‘often meticulously plan the trouble and start it’. It was all nonsense. There was little planning, barely any organization beyond discussing what train they would get and the ‘meetings’ were generally a few pints in the pub. But the public lapped it up. The ICF embraced the publicity. The way they dressed even had a name: Casual. They would have liked to claim they invented it, but its genesis took place 200 miles north.

  Something big was happening in 1976. In London, punk was developing. Its style of contrived shabbiness and deliberately mismatched clothing would soon become world famous. There was always an art-school, middle-class vibe to the scene and if it had its roots in the capital’s lower classes, it soon left them behind. What was happening on the streets of north Liverpool took longer for the fashion magazines to recognize but has had a much more enduring effect on British fashion.

  Things were changing. As much as the punks down south were tired of the long-hair-and-flares look of the 1970s, the youth in the tenements around Scotland Road were groping for a different identity. They got it largely by accident.

  Adidas Samba training shoes were already the footwear of choice among Liverpool’s teenagers. They are superb all-purpose trainers and were versatile in a district where games of street football were common and running from the police not unusual.

  Like the East End of London, the area just north of Liverpool city centre was in flux. It was still dotted with bomb sites that had never been rebuilt after the Second World War. The slum clearances of the late 1960s and early 1970s left even more swathes of open land – the demolished houses had not been replaced. The building of the Kingsway Tunnel under the Mersey – it opened in 1971 – exacerbated this.

  Arden House, a huge, gothic Salvation Army hostel, stood close to Scotland Road and the vast expanse of wasteland adjacent to the building made it an attractive stopping-off point for long-distance lorry drivers who could park their vehicles there and sleep in an inexpensive bed. The informal car park became the birthplace of a youth fashion. Local residents referred to this lorry parking area as ‘the Loadies’. They were more interested in unloading the goods, however. Break-ins were an occupational hazard for the sleeping drivers.

  In the summer of 1976, one of the wagons was carrying adidas T-shirts. An enterprising thi
ef broke in and stole the consignment. Within days, they were circulating around the Tate & Lyle sugar factory – the district’s biggest employer – and were snapped up eagerly.

  Many of the young boys in the area were presented with the T-shirts, which had round necks, a trefoil on the chest and three stripes down the short sleeve. They were similar to the adidas jerseys Brugge had worn against Liverpool in the UEFA Cup final the previous spring. Everyone aged between ten and 16 in the Scotland Road area seemed to be wearing one of these shirts, even if the entire consignment appeared to come in a single colour: orange.

  Hairstyles were changing, too. A much shorter cut with a side parting and ears exposed was becoming fashionable. Some have pointed to the influence of David Bowie’s Low on the haircuts of the era but the album was not released until 1977 and the real reason for the trend may be more prosaic.

  In the summer of 1976, ITV’s counter-programming to the Montreal Olympics was the American mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. The haircuts of the main characters – especially the pugilist Tom Jordache played by Nick Nolte – sent the male adolescents of the Scotland Road area rushing to the barbers. In a district where being a hard man was most boys’ ambition, everyone wanted to look like this television tough guy. At the beginning, hairstyles were based more on the stylized TV interpretation of post-war America than Bowie’s Futurism, though the Thin White Duke’s influence would grow over the next couple of years.

  By the first months of 1977, the move from flared jeans to straight-legged trousers was under way. The new look was starting to develop at a more rapid pace. Lois and Lee Riders jeans were popular. Kickers were an alternative to Samba – my first pair were bought for £16 in the summer of 1976. Clarks Nature Trek shoes, known as ‘pasties’ due to a design that looked like a Cornish pasty, were popular and suede chukka boots began to be seen around. Sheepskin jackets and snorkel parkas were the outerwear of choice for the freezing football season.