Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  ‘We were very alike. For Rushy, there was Kevin Ratcliffe. For Souness, there was Peter Reid. Culturally, they were very similar people and performers. Howard Kendall understood the importance of team spirit and instilling a drinking culture that would inspire success.’

  Manchester United were full of drinkers as well.

  ‘United had better players or individuals than us,’ Johnston maintains. ‘It would be a wrongful statement to say we were individually superior. But we had the better team spirit, which was founded in the pubs and bars of Liverpool as well as the training ground. What set us apart from United and the rest was the running off the ball. Football is all about movement. In the game today, there is more focus on the player in possession, but they miss the players that make the space. Kenny was and still is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time – rightly so. But at any one time he had three players running off him, making the defenders move into places where they didn’t want to be. We were ahead of our time. The dummies and the dopes were as important as the artists. We had a better balance of people and players in the squad, and that’s why we won a lot more than them.’

  Ian Rush initially struggled to become a part of this ‘spirit’, but after two seasons at the club he became one of the dressing-room leaders along with Souness, Hansen and Dalglish.

  ‘At first, Rushy was dressed like Tom Jones, and some of the boys used to call him “ET” because he was phoning home all the time and he looked like he was from Mars. But he got into the swing of it pretty quickly and became one of the major piss-takers. In Liverpool, if you can score goals like him you can walk on water. People would laugh with him even if he wasn’t funny.’

  Johnston’s room-mate was Grobbelaar.

  ‘We were seen as two exotics. They used to say we were stupid, thick and crazy – especially Ronnie Moran, who seemed to have a fear of anything different. Anybody who came from Australia or Zimbabwe must be a fruitcake, so Ronnie thought that anything me or Bruce said made little if any sense at all. At one away game, somebody brought a game of Trivial Pursuit. For once, because it wasn’t cards or piss-take jokes and rather something about general knowledge and how the world works, we managed to win it hands down.’

  Michael Robinson was also different.

  ‘He was not your typical footballer at all. He was on another planet – like me and Bruce. It was considered that anything he might have to say that embraced a cultural subject was fluffy, fairy and for poofters only, so to speak.’

  A player wasn’t encouraged to break from the often-burdensome results-orientated climate that emanated from the Bootroom.

  ‘Tom Saunders was the only person who saw the world like me. Being an ex-headmaster, he’d already worked with kids from all kinds of different backgrounds. Bob and Ronnie were more basic but equally effective in their methods. Ronnie particularly set the tone for everything that went on in training. He would call Dalglish and Souness “Effing bigheads”. He was the sergeant-major type who’d say, “You think you’re clever; I’ll show you who’s clever.” When we won the league, his attitude was, “I’ll show you clever – put your kit on and let’s train for two hours and see who drops first.” Ronnie and the management just wanted to win, and win with style, class and charisma – it was so comprehensive that it was beyond reproach.

  ‘This attitude originally came from Shankly and was carried through time by the people he brought to the club to pass on that message. They all had football intelligence beyond the years of any other management team in Europe. They were all canny and streetwise in the bucketload. Shankly understood that a successful team must have Jocks, because they too were canny. Bob Paisley was clever enough to carry that on with Hansen, Souness, Kenny and Nicol. They were all professionals who were prepared to go all the way to win. In life generally, the guy in a fight who is prepared to die is the one that wins, and our team was full of those guys.’

  Johnston insists that he shared those qualities, but because he thought deeply about other issues in life away from football he was sometimes viewed as ‘a bit soft’.

  ‘Maybe I came across as someone who wasn’t as committed. There were a lot of other things that entered my head after a game, which made me stand out as a bit fluffy or woolly. On the field, you couldn’t find a more committed player, and I think that’s why the supporters took to me. It was like winding up a toy and letting me run around for 90 minutes. Bruce and Hansen have both said since that I was the fittest player in British football. I was like that during matches, but once it was over and we’d won, I was interested in the arts and interested in photography. I think that came across badly. If I had my time again, maybe I’d keep it to myself, because to the old guard, maybe they thought I was a bit of a flake and that caused friction. Really, though, I was more committed than them because I did it when it mattered.’

  Unlike the more instinctive players, Johnston also suffered from nerves.

  ‘We played Everton once in the derby and I was really shitting myself. When you play for Liverpool, it’s the best club in the world to be at when everything is going well and you are performing. But you get nervous because if you make a mistake or, like me, you’re not this wonderful footballer that other people are – if you’re this guy that comes from northern New South Wales that misses an open goal – your confidence can go. That’s why you become so scared – because you fear letting yourself down, your teammates down, the fans down and the manager down, especially in the derby. So I started to look around at my teammates and I began to think, “Really – how bad can it be?” I had Souness standing next to me. I had Dalglish and Rush in front of me. All I had to do was half pass a ball and they’d get there. Then I looked at Lawrenson and Hansen. I realised that if I was nervous, how much must they be shitting themselves next door? I started laughing and all of a sudden I relaxed and started to believe in myself.’

  By 1986, Johnston was playing some of his best football. With Dalglish now in charge, he was a regular on the right-hand side of Liverpool’s midfield, making sixty-one appearances in total that season, scoring ten times. A week after securing the title against Chelsea, the Reds travelled to London again for the FA Cup final against Everton at Wembley.

  ‘Everton were a brilliant football outfit – they were tough and they were hard. Anything we could do, they could do too. Neville Southall was unbelievable. He could save everything. I was fast, but Pat Van Den Hauwe was just as quick. I was thinking about how to get out of his way for 90 minutes, because he’d justifiably earned the nickname “Psycho”. It all meant I was very, very nervous. It affected my performance, and both teams didn’t play as well as they probably should because it was so intense.’

  Johnston recalls his goal with a grin.

  ‘Everywhere I went, Van Den Hauwe was with me. Box to box. Then one time, I remember going back to our box and he followed me. I saw a space down the wing and I started to sprint into it. The ball was on our left wing, but Van Den Hauwe followed me all the way for 70 or so yards. By then, Jan Mølby had the ball. I knew he’d try to find Kenny first, but something prompted me to make that last ten-yard dash. Instinctively I went, and it was only because I had a bigger heart that I connected with the cross. Psycho Pat didn’t have any legs left in him, and it was the easiest goal I’ve ever scored.’

  Ian Rush and Ronnie Whelan still make fun of Johnston for what he did next.

  ‘I shouted, “I did it … I did it.” Ronnie and Rushy were the first over and whenever they see me now they scream like girls, “I did it … I did it.” I didn’t mean that I’d just scored. I was actually talking about the journey to get there: the polio, the television, the Jack Charlton stuff, the car park every day and the tough times at Liverpool. It sounds corny, but it was my dream to play in an FA Cup final and to score a decisive goal was unbelievable. If somebody would have shot me then, I’d have died a happy man.’

  Another goal from Rush secured a 3–1 victory.

  ‘I scored the most i
mportant one in the match, but the turning point was the skirmish between Bruce and Jim Beglin after a misunderstanding at the back. Everybody reacted to it. The celebrations afterwards were special. We all jumped in the bath inside the changing-room at Wembley with the cup. The baths were huge, and you could fit a whole squad in there. Suddenly, these two Liverpool supporters burst through the door and jumped in with us. Somehow, they’d passed through security with their bobble hats and scarves on. The beer flowed.’

  Two years later, Liverpool were in the cup final again with Wimbledon the opposition. Johnston decided to contribute something even more special than the promise of a goal ahead of the match. This time, he created a song. Twelve months earlier, before the League Cup final defeat to Arsenal, Johnston had written, produced and released ‘The Pride of Merseyside’, a tune that reached 41 in the charts. The ‘Anfield Rap’ was different.

  ‘I liked “Pride of Merseyside” more than the “Anfield Rap”,’ he says, like a musician who resents his most famous work. ‘But the “Rap” was an achievement because people remember it today. It was my idea, I paid for it, I wrote it, and I did the video. But I did need a bit of professional help and I got it from Derek Bee, who was Britain’s first rapper. I had the idea for the rap, but I needed a musical hook with something to do with The Beatles and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. So he came up with using “Twist and Shout”. The whole concept of the song was to reflect accents. There were only two Scousers in the team – Aldo and Steve McMahon – so they opened it.’

  Johnston breaks into the song. Then he pauses. ‘Every time I hear it, I cringe. I even exaggerated my Australian accent for effect, and it sounded crap. I think when I initially said it in recording, everybody laughed. I regret it now.’

  What people didn’t know at the time was that while Liverpool were doing so well on the pitch and Johnston was producing music off it, he was also going through a personal trauma. His younger sister, Faye, had an accident earlier that year while on holiday in Morocco, leaving her in a coma. Johnston was at the annual Christmas party with his Liverpool teammates when he was told of the news.

  ‘I was dressed as Dame Edna Everage and a call came through. I realised that I had to drop everything and hired a private plane – something that wasn’t easy to do. I flew to Morocco straight away and had to get her out the same night. The place she was being kept in was such a hellhole. It was like the Midnight Express if you dreamed about a hospital or a prison. It was horrible. She was all blue and I didn’t recognise her. When we arrived in London, I had to get my parents across from Australia. Because I was in the team at Liverpool, I was up and down the motorway every other day. Only Kenny knew about it, but maybe he didn’t understand how dire her situation was. Faye’s husband had just died in mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan and they’d just had a daughter. It was a terrible situation.’

  Johnston, believing his sister would emerge from the coma, placed all of his energies into her recovery. At the same time, he played 20 times in Liverpool’s first team as the club eased towards the 1987–88 title, playing some of the most exhilarating football ever witnessed at Anfield. The pressure took its toll.

  ‘I was a substitute against Southampton with a couple of games to go, and for the first time my mind wasn’t on the game [it finished 1–1]. I was thinking about my sister and a million miles away from football. Kenny brought me on and I should have scored in front of the Kop. I should have used my right foot and I used my left foot instead. But I didn’t care about it and it felt strange. Afterwards, I didn’t go into the players’ lounge and headed straight home. I was living on Wirral by then and we were driving through the Birkenhead Tunnel. I just said to the wife, “Do you want to go home?”

  ‘“We are going home – I’m driving …”

  ‘“No, home – Australia. It’s time. I need to look after Faye.”’ [Faye had subsequently been moved back to Australia.]

  Johnston decided to retire from football, informing Dalglish the week before the cup final against Wimbledon.

  ‘Kenny wasn’t happy with the timing,’ Johnston recalls. ‘I felt I’d achieved everything and more of what I’d set out to do. When your sister is there sitting in a coma, it makes you look differently at life. For so many years, I lived my life around a football result at a weekend, but now something else had taken the focus away from that. Liverpool thought that because I hadn’t been in the team as much as I would have liked, I was trying to engineer a move away. To Kenny, everything happened quite suddenly, so I can understand why maybe he felt that way.’

  Liverpool placed a freeze on Johnston’s wages.

  ‘They seized my assets and took control of my bank accounts. They’d [previously] bought Ray Houghton in my position, but I was prepared to fight him for a place in the team before this all happened. It was quite a sad way to end everything.’

  When Johnston did not return for pre-season training, Liverpool finally realised that he had gone for good.

  ‘I was unlike other footballers because I loved pre-season. It was my time of year when I could achieve more than others. I was the benchmark that every other player went by, because nobody could touch me in terms of fitness. When I didn’t show up, maybe then the penny dropped with Liverpool.’

  Twelve months after retiring, news made its way to Australia of a stadium football disaster involving Liverpool supporters in Sheffield.

  ‘I was surfing on a Malibu board decorated in Liverpool’s colours when someone called me back to shore and told me something awful had gone on at Hillsborough. I was working for Channel 9 and I dropped everything to get the first flight back to the UK. I was there for about three weeks, doing what I could by talking to people. I could relate to the families because most of the injuries were suffocation and therefore brain damage – exactly what had happened to my sister.’

  Before he returned to Australia, Johnston was asked to visit Dalglish’s office at Anfield.

  ‘He told me that they really appreciated me coming back. He said that I’d had my tragedy – admitting that they couldn’t quite understand it at the time. Maybe I wasn’t as forthcoming with information as I should have been. “We’ve had our tragedy now.” Kenny added that if I ever wanted to come back, there was a contract waiting for me on the table. “Thanks, boss.” As I was walking out, he added that there was one other thing. “You forgot this when you left.” Out of the drawer he pulled out a league championship winners’ medal from the season before. “Have that – you deserve it.”’

  The meeting with Dalglish settled Johnston’s differences. But even after a contract offer to return to Anfield from Graeme Souness in 1991 after he took over from Dalglish, Johnston remained in Australia. His sister, Faye, remains there, still in a vegetative state.

  By the early ’90s, and without the kind of money a footballer would retire on today, Johnston was pioneering a television show in Australia called The Main Event. ‘When I walked away from Liverpool, I had to use my mind to earn a living.’ Soon, he would make more money from clever inventions. The one most people haven’t heard of is The Butler. ‘Moving around so much, I’ve spent a lot of time in hotels. Minibars are one of the biggest drains on hotel revenue. So I surrounded each item in the bar with sensors so that if you took a bottle of beer out it sent a signal to the room’s telephone and it would appear on your bill. Simple really.’

  His most successful invention has been the Predator boot. He may have designed it with a children’s market in mind, but as soon as it was licensed by adidas it became the must-have footwear of choice for football’s nobility – David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and, latterly, Steven Gerrard.

  ‘I went to Reebok and Nike, but they weren’t bothered about it. Then I went to adidas in Munich. Beforehand, I spoke to players that adidas would respect – Beckenbauer, Rummenigge, Breitner – and videoed them trying out my prototypes. They said a whole load of stuff in German I couldn’t understand. When I showed adidas the film, they went, “Oh my gosh,
don’t leave the room.”’

  Johnston sold his idea to adidas, not fully appreciating the boot’s potential.

  ‘I took the money. Since then, they’ve sold millions of boots, at over a hundred quid a pair. And I was on 2 per cent of the action, so you can do the mathematics. It left me much shorter than I should have been.’

  A person of energy and creativity, Johnston continued to dream big. He used his adidas pay-off to develop other inventions, including a football-coaching system for children called SoccerSkills. Despite gaining official FIFA approval, the English Football Association was uninterested by the idea and the system failed to take off. He found himself penniless and, eventually, divorced.

  He told FourFourTwo magazine: ‘Because of the FA’s delaying tactics, incompetence and gamesmanship, I went bankrupt. It cost me £1.5 million and my marriage. At one stage, after countless pointless meetings with them, I lost it. I nearly punched one of them out. Instead, I ran around the car park with a pair of women’s knickers on my head shouting, “You’re a bunch of twats!”’

  ‘SoccerSkills is so far ahead of its time in certain ways, the governing bodies will eventually take it up,’ he tells me. ‘I also think that the Predator hasn’t reached its potential as product yet. One day, I’ll go back to that and do a much better version.’

  Johnston became depressed. Then he pursued photography. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2010, he described what happened next: ‘I broke up with my wife, the kids had gone back to Australia; I had no house, no car, nothing. It would have been easy to hit the bottle. But I had my old camera. I went for a walk, it was pouring with rain, and for me photography is like meditation. I suddenly saw this mannequin, beautifully dressed in beautiful light in a window. Just then this nasty tramp was coming along the road, swearing at me. And I saw him in the window, and I thought how interesting – the haves and have-nots in the same picture. I got his reflection in the window, with this lovely model; it was a great moment. It really lifted my spirits. It took me to a different place.’