Post by QPR Report on Apr 24, 2009 12:34:04 GMT
Foour Four Two - How football became the new rock’n’roll
Rock'n'Goal Week
Celebrating music's relationship with the beautiful game
Wednesday 22 April 2009 08:20
In their grotesque autobiography The Dirt, LA metal band Motley Crue tore up every moral known to man.
Groupies were molested nightly; spiralling booze, heroin and cocaine addictions led to individual breakdowns, spells in rehab and frequent overdoses.
Meanwhile, Hollywood girlfriends were betrayed with such regularity that the band resorted to rubbing their unwashed "parts" with meat – the process apparently ideal for disguising “the smell of p*ssy.”
This was imperative: drummer Tommy Lee gleefully recalled sleeping with one girl who could spray her come 40 feet across a room.
Yet anyone detailing football’s sordid back story might just discover a greater catalogue of rock’n’roll misdemeanour.
In the past 50 years, the tabloids have reported dogging, drug busts, prostitution, trysts with the mafia, murder, kidnapping, counterfeiting and group sex on a scale not witnessed since Led Zeppelin’s Starship last scorched the JFK tarmac.
In half a century of headlines, footballers have taken on rock’n’roll’s most despicable at their own game (not to mention their very punk attitude towards public spitting). However, given the merging of football and music in the latter half of the 20th century, this behaviour comes as no great surprise.
Modern players, with their multi-million pound contracts, glamorous girlfriends and fancy cars, now carry the swagger of a marauding rock star, despite their clean-living athleticism.
Laughable attempts at pop stardom (Glenn Hoddle, Chris Waddle, Gazza, Andrew Cole) have dented the charts, Japanese girls have pursued David Beckham through Tokyo streets, while Roy Evans’ pretty-boy Liverpool team (plus Robbie Fowler) were even nicknamed The Spice Boys in the mid-’90s.
Fowler, McManaman and Redknapp sport 'those suits'
Meanwhile rock stars, in thrall to the off-the-cuff creativity and drama of the game, have made desperate attempts to associate themselves with football teams and players.
Elton John bought Watford FC in 1976 and later tried to sign Vinnie Jones; Harvey from So Solid Crew played for AFC Wimbledon, and Rod Stewart constructed an 11-a-side pitch at his California home.
“We’ve got the only team with our own showers and a bar,” he once said. “I wash the kit... well, kind of. I get my personal assistant to do it. It’s beautiful. I’m trying to get Vinnie Jones to play for us too.”
Rock’n’roll and The Beautiful Game: a marriage made in heaven. But which matchmaker hitched these two unlikely bedfellows?
“Just play the way the ball bounces / And bounce the way the ball plays / Cos you won’t have long in the limelight / No you won’t have many days / Georgie, Georgie they call you the Belfast Boy.”
Belfast Boy, Don Fardon, 1970
Football’s tryst with musical hedonism began in 1963. London to be precise, where the Swinging Sixties was in full sway. A generation hardened by war and financial hardship watched in horror as sexually-liberated teenage girls gobbled down The Pill.
National Service had been scrapped, life was affordable, and a desire for shiny technology and modernism reached a grand peak. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, the Beatles were recording their first number one album Please, Please Me, kicking a revolution to the head and shaping the decade’s remaining years.
It’s worth mentioning these historical facts because, within a spectacular cultural shift, the world began viewing celebrity and football with very different eyes.
Televisions – available in most homes – presented fame as a realistic opportunity for the ordinary Joe Bloggs. Now, everybody could live the life of the pop star. Even if you kicked a leather ball around a boggy park for a living.
“Whatever field they worked in,” claims former music mogul, Simon Napier-Bell, “everyone wanted to make it the way the Beatles had. Suddenly there were opportunities for anyone with energy and flair who could look at things in a new way. The Beatles had got everybody chasing success.”
Televised games and Jimmy Hill’s abolition of the maximum wage had transformed football, and George Best had energy and flair in abundance. A few hours up the M1 from Carnaby Street, sexuality, sideburns and a hedonistic streak had positioned Best alongside a score of British bands.
Like Please, Please Me’s arrival at Number One, Best’s Manchester United debut made an immediate impact. Almost overnight he was a football and cultural phenomenon.
Two years later, his clubbing and womanising was in full swing. By 1966, after a 5-1 thrashing of Benfica in the European Cup quarter-finals, Portuguese newspaper A Bola had dubbed him El Beatle and Best was iconic in the same way as John, Paul, George and Ringo.
The papers even nicknamed him The Fifth Beatle as girls, drinks and parties followed harder and faster than before.
“In six years, he has become a cult for youth, a new folk hero, a living James Dean who is a rebel with a cause,” wrote The Times.
A new era had began. Best’s actions – on and off the pitch – turned on a host of kids more in tune with the hit parade than the football results. Suddenly, footballers were cool.
“I was a Best worshipper,” says Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall, a United supporter. “He captured the imagination. He was the first footballing pop star. We looked up to him as kids, not just for his footballing skills but for his whole personality. He had pop star qualities as well as the hair, the fast cars, the women. He was a hero to us.”
Players, with one eye on the pop media, became aware of their own glamour potential. And from then on in, English footballers began embracing rock’n’roll iconography and hedonism, opening clothes boutiques on the Kings Road and sashaying around nightclub dance floors with glamorous blondes, rock star admirers and fashion models.
'Fifth Beatle' Best shows off his boutique
Chelsea’s Peter Osgood even scored with sex siren Raquel Welch, leaving club chairman Brian Mears to admit: “Osgood epitomised Swinging London as much as David Bailey or Paul McCartney.”
When Best left London nightclub Tramps one evening, he was followed from the door by the same Beatle and wife, Linda. “Just as they were leaving,” said Best, “Linda came up behind me and whispered, ‘You know we love you, don’t you?’ It was fantastic.”
Football and music had always been entwined. Old church standards had been adapted for the terraces for as long as the game had been a public event. Yet their lyrics had never referenced danger or controversy.
By the ’70s, the terraces roared with LSD-inspired Beatles songs. Elsewhere, the media mashed sport and sex together, introducing a public audience to live games and a role call of glamorous players eager for attention.
“Footballers and rock stars were similar because they became folk heroes,” says Greg Gilbert, singer with The Delays, a top 20 band in their own right.
Gilbert had his own football career shattered when, in a fit of pique, he threw a shirt at his youth team coach at Portsmouth. “Footballers can do things that are instinctive and exciting, things that most of us can’t and it’s the same with bands. Everybody watches them and talks about them in the pub or the playground. And the legend of different players gets passed down to generations just like albums.”
Both Best and the Beatles derailed in the ’70s, but a host of characters filled their vacuum, each one blessed with flair, skill and a reckless attitude to authority. As a swathe of rock bands (and later punk) leapt from the radio, football provided its own anti heroes: Charlie George, Peter Storey and Stan Bowles.
“Bowles was the greatest,” says one-time Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, a QPR fan. “He was a bit of a villain and I suppose he was a rock’n’roll character, but that’s why I admired him, because he had that streak in him that wanted to cause trouble.”
In playgrounds up and down the country, cigarette cards of Frank Worthington became as thrilling as a new single by The Clash or The Jam.
Girls were excited too – for every footballer cut with an anarchic streak to appease the boys, a pin-up was made available for bubblegum magazines. From Kevin Keegan to David Beckham, the game threw up its own pop stars: squeaky-clean poster fodder for teenage girls and cooing grannies.
Meanwhile, as the Government’s introduction of career advisers in schools took hold, teachers sought vocational aspiration within their students. Usually, they were bombarded with two answers:
a) “Sir, I want to be a rock star.”
b) “I want to play for England.”
Anyone looking for psychological clues to these two career choices need only search their own brain. Successful players and bands are often graced with financial security, glamorous lifestyles, pin-up girlfriends, admiring peers and, above all, hero worship on an obscene scale.
Which hormone-fuelled male hasn’t craved all of the above at one time or another?
Then of course there’s the actual “doing” of both. It doesn’t get much better than playing football with your mates, winning the local league or scoring an important goal at any level.
Likewise, sitting around listening to records, making an unholy, neighbour-baiting racket on a drum kit or crowd surfing at a festival is another world of joy. Imagine doing all of that and being paid for it too.
“The buzzes of football and music are very similar, because the very best bands and footballers are doing something creative that other people can’t,” says Greg Gilbert.
“It’s all about showmanship. The greatest players play with a smile on their face because there is a joy in what they’re doing. It’s not a considered motion. But the experience they both share is the feeling of walking a tightrope - whether you’re playing live at a gig or playing football in front of 40,000 people there’s that worry that you could fall off either side.
"But if you pull it off, do a great show or play well and come through the other side, there’s no greater feeling.
“Live, both share a spontaneity which can’t be described,” continues Gilbert. “Which is why it’s unfair to have a go at players for not being insightful during post match interviews. It’s like asking Noel Gallagher to talk the fans through an improvised guitar solo after a show.”
This adrenaline rush often causes the overambitious to stab at both vocations. Rod Stewart (Brentford), Badly Drawn Boy (Manchester United), Manic Street Preacher’s Nicky Wire (Wales U16s), Julio Iglesias (Real Madrid), Luciano Pavarotti (Lepanto) and Take That’s Mark Owen (Manchester United) all spent time under the tutelage of football clubs.
Sadly the closest Shakin’ Stevens and Mick Hucknall got was an appearance in Viz’s Billy The Fish cartoon strip.
Iglesias: Real Madrid career truncated by car crash
Meanwhile several pros have started their own rock bands, including Alexei Lalas (The Gypsies), Christian Dailly (South Playground) and one-time Nottingham Forest striker, Paul McGregor (Merc).
Of the two, most agree that football presents the greater pressures.
“When you’re doing a gig, you haven’t got thousands of people screaming at you,” says Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, Liverpool fan and writer of England’s 1998 World Cup single, Top Of The World.
“You don’t have people telling you you’re shite. Yelling at you at if hit a wrong note or f*ck up. Not normally anyway. I could never play footy in front of all those people.”
Rock'n'Goal Week
Celebrating music's relationship with the beautiful game
Four Four Two When footballers become pop stars...
Thursday 23 April 2009 09:00
United forever, whatever the weather
Less than 100%? Never!
The son of a miner, funkiest rhymer
Always in the news, my crew the headliner
£7.5 mill record breaker, I’m rapping on the mic, keeping it real
I’m keeping the raw.
Andy Cole, Outstanding, 1999
In the late ’90s, then-Manchester United striker Andy (not yet Andrew) Cole, flushed with Champions League success, released his debut pop single – a cover of The Gap Band’s Outstanding, featuring a painful diatribe rapped over the top.
It stiffed, but in the accompanying promotional junket Cole delivered a revealing interview to Time Out magazine, assessing a selection of other singing footballers.
When played Ian Wright’s Do The Wright Thing, Cole enquired, “I remember this well. Who wrote this? Stock, Aitken and Waterman?” (Pop fans note: it was actually Pet Shop Boy’s Chris Lowe).
On Martin Buchan’s Martin Buchan Blues he awarded a “10 out of 10. It’s cool when you consider what type of music was out in 1976.”
This Time..., the 1982 England World Cup song and Liverpool’s Anfield Rap both received the thumbs down, before Cole was played Diamond Lights, as performed by Spurs’ flamboyant midfielders Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle.
“Nah!” snorted Cole. “Forget this. That was shocking, man. No, really, fast-forward this.”
Anfield Rap: Thumbs down from Coley
Despite Outstanding’s lacklustre entry to the pop canon, Cole had inadvertently smacked the nail on its head.
Footballers, despite repeated attempts at musical stardom, cannot make records – in much the same way that Diana Ross can’t kick a football into a gaping net at the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup or Chris Martin wouldn’t pick up the ball on the halfway line, weave his way through a barrage of defenders and ping a drive into the top corner from 25 yards in the Champions League final.
Even to the casual observer it seems nigh-on impossible to hold down a career in both. Dedication, physical perfection and regimented diet hardly feature on the schedules of most touring bands. Drugs, groupies and sleepless nights are frowned upon at most professional clubs.
Not that a string of players have cared – they’ve had a riot peppering the charts with poorly-produced novelty singles.
Terry Venables and John Charles both released records in the 1960s before Kevin Keegan made the first laughable stab at pop stardom with his single Head Over Heels in 1979. It only reached number 31 in the charts but a trend was set.
By the mid-’80s, Spurs midfielders Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle had released two records – Diamond Lights and It’s Goodbye – to muted response, while a decade later Ian Wright and Andy Cole were laying down hip-hop cuts with a level of fan enthusiasm unnoticed within Spicemania.
For an indication at just how bad these singles were, it’s worth considering that Gazza topped the lot with his Number Two smash Fog On The Tyne in 1990.
Gazza and his guitar top the charts, almost
But rock stars have added to the whole sorry phenomenon too – lyrically at least.
Bands referencing the game in song include Morrissey (Roy’s Keen), Billy Bragg (Moving The Goalposts, God’s Footballer and Shirley – “How can you lie there and think of England when you don’t even know who’s in the team?”), Don Fardon (The Belfast Boy – a song praising George Best) and Half Man, Half Biscuit (I Was A Teenage Honved Fan).
Also guilty are The Wedding Present, The Fall, I, Ludicrous, and Super Furry Animals, whose single The Man Don’t Give A F*ck featured notorious Reading player Robin Friday on the cover.
“His daughter and wife were really upset about it,” says drummer Dafydd Ieuan. “They got in touch to say, actually, he did give a f*ck.”
Still, when it comes to creative inspiration, there’s nothing to match the FA Cup final muse which so often drives bands to pen songs for their favourite teams, most notably Chas’n’Dave who penned the Rockney masterpiece Ossie’s Dream for Spurs in 1981, complete with the couplet:
“Ossie’s going to Wembley
His knees have gone all trembly.”
Clive Allen reaches for the high note
This seasonal horror is only surpassed by the build-up to an international tournament as the whole process goes into meltdown and bands proffer their support for the national team.
Step forward New Order (World In Motion, 1986), Echo And The Bunnymen, The Spice Girls and Ocean Colour Scene (Top Of The World, 1998) and Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds (Three Lions, 1996 and 2002).
“I've never ever written a song about football apart from Three Lions,” says Liverpool fan Broudie.
“I remember when the FA got in touch and asked me to write a single for Euro 96 and I said no first of all because I was a little bit uncomfortable with the whole En-Ger-Land thing. I know New Order did that song but I didn't even like it that much.
"I remember they were doing games at Anfield for Euro 96 and before the end of the season a few pennants went up and that's when I thought, ‘Actually it's going to be here at Anfield’ and I got quite into it.”
Of course, it could be worse. Scotland’s 1998 World Cup campaign was infamously soundtracked by folk rockers Del Amitri’s prophetic Don’t Come Home Too Soon. Craig Brown’s team were duly knocked out in the group stages.
Still, what these singles really create is an arena in which John Barnes can rap, Gazza can sing and the entire squad – complete with kitman, physio and masseur – can sway awkwardly in a low-budget promotional video while clutching oversized headphones.
What songwriter could resist the association? Sadly, the results are often intolerable.
“England players can just about play football,” hisses Ian McCulloch, “let alone sing.” Nevertheless pop’s elite are as wide eyed in adulation of footballers as the next man.
Football is the great leveller. Most bands, despite their too-cool-for-school demeanour, will boast at least one long-suffering fan among their ranks.
“Johnny Rotten would always get pissed off when we started talking football,” recalls former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, a QPR fan.
“He couldn’t get his head round it. He would say things like, ‘What’s so special about 22 grown men kicking a football around a muddy field? It’s crap.’
"And then, with Euro ‘96 and football suddenly becoming a fairly credible sport again, all of a sudden he’s saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a massive Arsenal fan. I’ve always been a massive Arsenal fan.”
Rotten: "Goooooooners"
Not content with falling over at celebrity five-a-side tournaments, countless artists have played shows at a treasured stadium (Oasis at Maine Road) or bought the club (Elton John at Watford), while Leeds Britpop band Kaiser Chiefs stole (and misspelt) their name from the South African side once captained by Elland Road favourite, Lucas Radebe.
“Bands love football because it’s such a contrast from what they do in the studio,” says The Delays’ Greg Gilbert.
“When you’re recording an album it’s all about thought and analysis. You’re expressing yourself, but in a thoughtful way. When it comes to football there’s no bullshit. It’s a physical one on one where great players rise to the top. And you can’t help but notice great players.
"Everything is so quick and instinctive too, more instinctive than making a record. As a musician, I’m into the detail, whereas football is more about getting on the pitch and doing it.”
Footballers aren’t above a little hero worship either – and not just towards the likes of perennial favourites, Luther Vandross and Phil Collins. Rumour has it that former Scotland midfielder Pat Nevin was such a fan of indie band The Cocteau Twins that he was substituted during a Chelsea reserve game so he could catch their London show.
Mani recalls seeing a string of Manchester United players at Stone Roses gigs while punk fan Stuart Pearce went so far as to introduce The Sex Pistols at a Finsbury Park show in 1996 with the cry of “Who said there were no more heroes? Ladies and gentlemen... The Sex Pistols!”
Nevin: "Five more minutes gaffer, then I've really got to go"
Fortunately, these “superfans” seem aware of the unwritten rule: a little love is OK but unwavering obsession is a dangerous thing.
Any player unsure of the consequences of falling too deeply should look back at history and the likes of Gazza, George Best and Stan Bowles.
Mixing the rock’n’roll lifestyle with training ground discipline just doesn’t work. And nobody has ever taken the football aspirations of Harvey from So Solid Crew, Rod Stewart or Robbie Williams very seriously.
But you can’t blame people for trying, both are rewarding businesses after all.
“Football is like music,” says Mani, Manchester United fan, formerly bassist with Stone Roses, now Primal Scream.
“There are so many people who are really good at it and they’re worth every penny they get. And when it comes together, whether that’s on the pitch or on record it makes it all worth it. It’s f*cking beautiful.”
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