THE HOUSEMARTINS – “Caravan Of Love”
Just as Europe’s as close as we’re getting to hair metal, The Housemartins are our nearest brush with 80s indiepop. This isn’t their strident and strummy side, of course: instead it’s a showcase for their deep-rooted brand of socialist Christianity. “Caravan” is to say the least a radical take on Isley-Jasper-Isley’s squelchy 1985 original, turning it into slimmed down Northern gospel and by doing so giving it a sense of place and purpose.
To do this, the band make one small but important change to the song – instead of “the world in which we were born” they sing “the place in which we were born, so neglected and torn apart”. And that, of course, means England, and in the context of 1986 it turns the line into an attack not on sin but on Thatcherism. And that in turn puts a different spin on “Caravan”‘s calls for unity and fraternity. But they don’t stress the point: instead they concentrate on finding the still centre of the song. “They” really means Paul Heaton, with the others used as Flying Pickets style backers – his rough-edged white soul voice has got the right amount of character for this record, stops it becoming too bland.
I would have sneered at its religiosity at the time, but really I disliked it for no more sophisticated reason than boredom. I’m no more God-fearing now but I think it’s aged quite well. I like the record’s serenity and stolidity better than I would a more evangelical or passionate reading. This is a brass band away from the Salvation Army, and I can get behind that culturally even if I can’t spiritually.
5
34: Yes he did it was about Sheffield United’s BBC (Blades’s Business Crew). Always thought he seemed a total prick trying to come on the prole but then reading a biography of the Beautiful South (from the library but I must have been scraping the barrel that day!)where it shows how he spent his childhood in various parts of the country as his family moved around due to his dad’s high-flying executive type job.
Nothing wrong with that but pretty wanky when you read stuff in there where he’s trying to make out he’s some salt of the earth jack the lad from the backstreets.
As I remember it the idea of football as “Cool” exploded at the 1990 world cup although the game had been quietly gaining fans since its nadir around 1984-86.
In pop circles this sudden “trendiness” culminated in embarrassing examples of bands in the early-mid 90s desparately trying to pretend they were into football and within a couple of sentences giving the game away that they didn’t have a clue – I believe Supergrass were prime exemplars of this and were so clueless they claimed to be Man Utd supporters – at the best Gloryhunters but more likely probably the only club they’d heard of…
As a football fan from about 6 years old and therefore all through my early teens first-starting-to-pop-take-seriously-phase it used to mildly surprise me that rock and pop musicians seemed to be so little interested in the game. But then I remember most of the people who were into forming bands who I knew of as i grew up were generally the last people used expect to see at the football so I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised.
In fact as I remember it football’s intersection with pop up until my early 20s was so small that I think I can remember most of the times it did intersect pre-1990 even now ie
Elton John – almost as famous in England as Watford’s chairman as a pop star at one point(Watford),
Rod Stewart and his Scotland following (and I believe Arsenal supporting too)
the Cockney Rejects and Iron Maiden (both West Ham supporting)
Robert Plant (Wolves fan and sometimes seen at Kidderminster Harriers)
Pink Floyd (had their own football team and at least 2 proper ie match-going Arsenal fans)
Ronnie Hilton (50s/early 60s singer – used to be on the Leeds Utd board)
Bill Wyman – Crystal Palace fan
Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople – Shrewsbury Town fan
and that’s about it
except for 2 surreal sort of retrospective ones (ie pre late-80s popstars but who I’ve found out subsequently were/are football fans)
Marvin Gaye – when he was briefly living in North London he was seen at Arsenal at least once
David Soul – an Arsenal fan for quite a few years now
can anyone think of any I’ve missed?
27: yeah I know Mark Knopfler was born in Glasgow but he moved to Newcastle when he was very young, gre up there, has a Geordie accent and in the early Dire Straits stuff references Newcastle locations quite a bit (along with Leeds – where he worked and went to college) and obviously London where he then moved.Hence the song “Southbound Again” which follows his perginations from Newcastle southwards).
I was a football-mad left wing indie kid from a religious background, so the Housemartins were almost perfect for my 16 year old self. Still have a lot of time for them. They came, were an invigorating, amusing presence for 18 months and split up before they got boring. Shame more groups don’t follow their example.
Always found COL a bit dull though. I much preferred the yuppie-bashing follow up Five Get Overexcited.
Marvin Gaye’s Arsenal fan credentials are about credible as Osama Bin Laden’s!
The two big pop stars who were unabashed football fans in the 1980s were Ian McCulloch and Robert Smith, but this didn’t infect their music and demeanor, neither being laddish and casual figures on record or stage.
In The Beatles’ photo on the cover of my first copy of Revolution In The Head, Paul’s wearing a Liverpool rosette – but I later found out that typically he supports both Liverpool and Everton. I don’t really think any of them were fans, to be honest. Maybe of St Pauli.
Chas & Dave recorded many a Spurs cup final tune, I believe, and I reckon there must’ve been some pop crossover around QPR too (though that’s possibly just down to the era when they were good, plus reputation for slacking – I have similar feelings about Man City and Fulham, and any number of NASL teams – the New York Cosmos were actually owned by Atlantic Records, pretty much).
And Mani was famously spotted in the crowd during one live match gobbing on Gordon Strachan, though that may have been post-1990.
Acid House and Rave culture had a bit to do with the changing image of football too. There was a documentary about Italia ’90 called ‘On The March With Bobby’s Army’ about England fans in Sardinia and at one point some are shown mellowing out in a van with some weed and Pink Floyd on the stereo. I think that’s what led to the wonderful trend of people bringing inflatable bananas to games instead of, you know, Stanley knives.
Pat Nevin(Chelsea midfielder) used to do gig reviews in the NME.
#53 I was going to mention Robert Smith as an out and proud football fan before it became ‘acceptable’. There was certainly a dearth of pop support for the sport throughout the mid 80s. I remember going to see Duran Duran at Villa Park (in 1983) and they were pictured in the programme wearing Villa scarves. It was an odd juxtaposition as you never associated glamorous pop stars with football (even ones from Birmingham). As a Duran and Birmingham City fan I was a bit conflicted.
It’s easy to assume that football didn’t matter to anyone before 1990 (and that was the point it all changed, not the Premiership; the Premiership was made possible by Italia 90), but that ignores the fact that there were 57,000 at Old Trafford, 50,000 at Highbury, 44,000 at Anfield and so on every week. That something did not exist in the NME consciousness does not mean it was not a hugely socially important force. My guess would be that plenty of pop musicians were football fans, just as plenty of the rest of the population were, it’s just they didn’t always go on about it in interviews. As anyyone who actually went to football before 1990 can tell you, it wasn’t the sole preserve of hoolies; nor was football verboten to the middle classes before Fever Pitch.
What 1990 did was expand football’s audience, putting it into the consciousness of those who had previously never given a fuck, and that was done through the creation of a national hero, and it’s only the closing minutes of the semi-final that dictated it was Gascoigne. A slightly different sequence of events and it might have been David Platt.
There’s actually a case for arguing that “Cool Britannia”, with its media celebration of the things that had been disdained in the 80s – the flag, working class culture, casual fashion, hypermaleness; in short, the values of the terraces – would have been impossible without England’s progress in Italia 90.
Yes, Bobby Robson created Britpop. I’m not being facetious.
(An addition to the football/NME crossover – a 1989 interview with Brian McClair by Stuart Maconie. McClair revealed himself as an NME reader, and said his favourite album of that year was … wait for it … Win’s Freaky Trigger.)
I do remember a Beatles interview CD where they were asked about Football, and John said that none of them were interested.
So, there you go.
# 51 – I’m pretty sure that Rod Stewart portrayed himself as a supporter of Celtic and United, as confirmed in “You’re In My Heart” but I might be mistaken.
Marvin Gaye might or might not have been spotted at Highbury but what is beyond dispute is that Muhammad Ali was at the ’66 World Cup Final. This was exactly one week before he knocked out Brian London at Earls Court.
There are, I suspect, many examples of artists/bands suddenly emerging as terraced footy fans in order to ingratiate themselves with the proles but I have personal knowledge of a case of the reverse. In the seventies I was at school with a black lad who regularly went to White Hart Lane. He was a bit of a punchy kid and got into the odd scrap at games. He made up for this by having an engaging character and a creative mind. So creative, in fact, that many years later he became a recorded reggae artist, a close associate of one Smiley Culture, who charted with the hilarious “Police Officer”, an aprocryphal story of Smiley being stopped by Plod in his car, who promptly discover his stash. During the exchange, Smiley launches into a cockney accent for the copper and a rasta accent for himself. Like my friend, Smiley was London born and bred. The real surprise for me was when I came across an article in which my friend (who I’m not going to name) stated that he had only recently been taken to his first game (at Spurs, naturally) and outlined what an alien experience it had been “for I”. Clearly he had no intention in admitting to a past which may have compromised his image to his core supporters in his eyes.
Re 58: Other clubs’ gates were plummeting though – iirc Wolves couldn’t get 3,000 for some games at semi-rebuilt Molineux around 86/87. I know they were 3rd/4th division at this point, but still. And their warm welcome for Scarborough’s league debut in ’87 sums up why people had stopped going. I think this was covered on The Crowd thread. Grim times, and the start of non-league being seen as a more pleasurable alternative.
Speaking of which, to add to the late 80s indie/football crossover list, Frank Sidebottom was/is an Altrincham fan.
Izzy #44 – I’d hesitate to say the quality was particularly dreadful in the mid-80s. Sure there were developments that weren’t exactly for the purists – I still love the Guardian’s preview of Wimbledon v Portsmouth, “This could be the game of the century – the 9th century”. But even in an era when teams mainly consisted of British Isles players rather than the multinational feast of talent Sky’s money has paid for since 1992, the Football League’s product was the most successful – 7 European Cups in nine years – even if it maybe wasn’t the prettiest.
Some of the best football I’ve ever seen was from the United team which won its first ten games in 1985-86 – the period when football was off the screens for half the season – and screwed it up, as Spurs kindly reminded us the following April (“Ten points clear and you won f— all”). The Liverpool Double team wasn’t exactly lacking in quality either. But you’re right about the attendances – ’85-86 was also the season that saw League attendances at their lowest ever.
AndyPandy #51 – well that confirms it, anybody who buys into that particular branch of football “literature” is a bit of a tosser in my book.
Mike Ticher, the co-founder of “When Saturday Comes” and a massive Undertones fan, wrote a piece in the first issue of the magazine about the links between music and football, which I’ll have to dig out and quote on here…
Worth considering, though, that the Hand of God happened during this time – if football had disappeared entirely from the national discourse, it wouldn’t have been such big news.
Also, players like Ian Rush, Hoddle, Waddle, John Barnes, Saint Gary and the absurdly overrated Bryan Robson all had their peak years during the Dark Ages, and managed to become passably famous.
Ah, John Barnes! If only he hadn’t scored that goal against Brazil, who knows how many caps he wouldn’t have won? I don’t think that Bryan Robson was absurdly overrated really. He was just a permanent crock. Magificent imbiber, though!
Re 63: Football’s ‘low profile’ was relative – but saying you were a football supporter in the late 80s did frequently get you looks that suggested you were a thug. Not much public appetite for standing up to Colin Moynihan’s ID cards as I recall.
Biggest loser of this fallow period was Frank McAvennie whose golden season wasn’t captured for posterity by tv. Nothing but foggy memories. Poor chap.
Sorry, no musical refs at all on this comment… err… Norman Cook hailed from Reigate, and Reigate Priory were one of the 15 teams to enter the first ever FA Cup in 1871. Phew.
And of course Norman Cook’s, or rather Fatboy Slim’s, Skint Records label were Brighton and Hove Albion’s shirt sponsors in the late 90s.
Wichita #65 – there was plenty of appetite for standing up to Moynihan among the more radicalised football-supporting community by 1988. The Football Supporters Association, founded in the wake of Heysel, were by then influential enough to garner widespread opposition, from MPs to press to a 400,000-name petition, and got a lot of publicity for the campaign. It’s hard to claim that it would have stopped the Football Spectators Bill without the massive spanner in the works that was Hillsborough, but we weren’t taking it lying down.
But yes, there were some surprising attitudes at the time – in my first few weeks at SNCF in London I mentioned footy to a white van driver delivering at our office and he said “Football should be shut down – bloody lunatics”. You wouldn’t have got that in Manchester.
Oh, I meant outside the football supporting community! Don’t recall the famous socialist Alex Ferguson saying what a disgrace the ID card scheme was, either
Excellent stuff. I’m convinced now that it was fanzine culture that sparked football’s resurrection, which is quite an indie ideal and therefore this is the right thread for it. Also appropriately, first one I ever remember coming into contact with was Motherwell’s ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forward’, named after the Billy Bragg song and therefore probably dating from around 1989/90 (and still going!)
Can I take it back that last stage and ask what sparked fanzine culture in the first place? Going by the date alone it might have been home computers, but from what I remember of them they mostly seemed to make do with potato-printing technology instead. Could it have been the miners’ strike and putting its infrastructure to new use i.e. mass organisation, assembling and handing out flyers?
(there’s a useful book by teal triggs called “below critical radar”, which is a history of (us and UK) fanzine culture)
Izzy – well, without wishing to repeat a lot of what was said in The Crowd “You’ll Never Walk Alone” thread, Mike Ticher started “When Saturday Comes” as an offshoot of a music fanzine called “Snipe”, and inspired by the 70s footie publication “Foul”. As for what inspired the club-based zines that predated WSC – Bradford’s “City Gent”, West Brom’s “Fingerpost”, York’s “Terrace Talk” – I’m not sure.
When I joined the FSA in January ’87, the first bloke I spoke to was later to be the editor of Crystal Palace’s “Eagle Eye” fanzine, and indeed he’d been politicised by the miners’ strike – although the FSA’s founders were a sociologist and a copper from Liverpool, so there was more of Derek Hatton than Scargill in their DNA! But there was very little evidence of home computers in the early football fanzines, indeed some would say the advent of desktop publishing signalled the end of the golden age!
I think as we saw it, the trough of ’85-86 saw the level of support down to a hardcore, at one end of which were the hoolies who were driving others away and ruining our reputation, at the other end those who were prepared to get radical and “reclaim the game” (the FSA motto) from the hoolies, the politicians, the dodgy directors etc. But the effect of the Sky era has largely been to “resurrect” football for a different audience from those who stayed loyal to it in the dark days. Would you agree with that Wichita?
#67 wl- to be fair to the whingeing wanker it was a civil liberties issue rather than a socialist one. And at the time he was preoccupied with keeping his job and trying to win games with the likes of Colin Gibson and Ralph Milne in the side !
Re 68: Organized underground, football and pop, post miners strike – that sounds about right. Most music fanzines were in leftist red/black/white.
It was pretty rare to go to a gig in London in 1986 and not have the choice of 2 or 3 fanzines on sale. I’d just moved to London and Sportspages had all the football fanzines, too – exciting times.
1986 was the year of my first attempt at a fanzine, but I’m struggling to remember what sparked it beyond wanting to do a cross between Viz and Hungry Beat. It included a piece on Accrington Stanley after I’d put on my duffel coat and trekked to their old ground at Peel Park (original brick changing rooms still intact). And a piece on The Pastels. C86 self-parody, really.
Re 71: I know, I just couldn’t resist.
I don’t think the fanzines changed much, to be honest: rememeber, club-specific fanzines were bought only by those who were insanely dedicated and tracked them down in Sportspages, or by those attending home games. WSC and The Absolute Game, in conjunction with the FSA, provided an alternative focus for those who wanted an alternative portrayal of football to the “wantaway strikers” of the back pages and the “evil thugs” of the front. But they made no bloody difference at all to the wider population, who didn’t even know the things existed. They changed football media, over a long period, but not football.
It’s also far too simplistic to say that by the mid-80s football was followed only by hoolies and radicals. The vast majority of fans at all clubs were neither. In fact, the nadir of attendance at the top flight in the 80s was in 83/84, when the average attendance per game was 18,834. Accepting that this is a hardcore, that’s still a pretty bloody big hardcore.
53: I wasn’t saying Marvin Gaye was an Arsenal fan just that a read in IIRC “Divided Soul” (a very well respected biography of the man)that he visited an Arsenal game once which I thought and still think is really quite surreal.
As was David Soul’s actual eventual genuine supporting of the Gooners -unbelievable here was “Hutch” from that massive phenomenon of my childhood “Starsky and Hutch” and of who I still had residual memories linked to my 10 year old self to whom he was a cop from California and associate of Huggy Bear (and also whose singles I actually think are all pretty amazing) actually supporting my team!
73: I think you’re right about football fanzines even amongst the average hardcore fan they were basically ignored or ridiculed – I used to read them but would have been far too embarrassed to get one out on an away trip or at a game.
I don’t know what to make of the post-1990 boom, some of the influx of money, spectators, publicity was obviously good but all these sudden references to football by indie pop stars and music magazines could be seen as just the trendier youth wing of the prawn sandwich brigade who appeared at the same time.
Oh and to add to my list Rick Wakeman was involved with a non-league club can’t think who though.
and scraping the barrel a bit here but if we go into the realms of djs we all know about John Peel but Kid Jensen used to support QPR and used to mention them a lot on his show as I listening to to it doing my homework in about 1979/80.
And “Sounds” usually via Garry Bushell (Charlton Athletic fan)and the Cockney Rejects and Iron Maiden used to mention footballl quite a bit at the start of the 80s.
63: Agree that the “hand of God” showed how football was still on the radar but was largely a working-class (and to a lesser extent lower middle class phenomenon). Not wanting to repeat myself from an earlier thread but shaving-foam scores on the Saturday afternoon at weekenders were still a reality in the mid-80s and I remember visiting my friend at Liverpool polytechnic in early 1985 and thinking we were being quite unconventional having “Match Of The Day” on when we got back from the pub and people started to arrive at this sort of get together he had at his shared house. Do any of the people on here who were students around that time agree that football wasn’t exactly de rigeur at polytechnic/university around then as this was about the only time I went to anything connected to higher education until 1997 (when I finally went to univesity myself)and so I don’t really know. I know by ’97 though it was extremely popular with the other students including (and this was definitely pretty rare in the mid-80s)females.
It would be possible to exactly date this weekend as Everton were hosting Spurs on the Sunday of the weekend and the fact that the pubs where we were in County Road, Walton had the typical matchday feeling showed how even at the games lowpoint it was still significant for a certain sector of the population (harder to get a place on the coach back to London etc) – I managed it on the all-night-stop-near-Milton Keynes-at-about-4-AM-just-as-the-hangover-of-my-all-weekend-bender-was-kicking-in one).
That weekend had a very bittersweet resonance for me years later as I visited County Road for the first time since, when I was in Liverpool a couple of years ago for the the Saturday of the Beatles weekend and was overwhelmed by a torrent of feelings of the type of “why hadn’t I gone to university when I was in teens and mixed with other people more like me in so many ways? instead of working in a string of menial jobs in factories and on building sites with a load of people who were often decent enough people but who I had little in common with besides booze and a few other superficial interests”.I know it would have probably been a whole lot better for the next ten plus years.
Re 74: All I can say, as I’m sure I did on the previous thread where we discussed this, is that certainly by the time I got to university (1989, therefore a year before the notional rebirth of the English game), football was a thoroughly accepted topic of polite – if occasionally heated – conversation. For instance, I remember a girl from Coventry who was still basking in the afterglow of the ’87 Cup Final. Lots of people drank tea from fairly ancient team mugs. And plenty of students used to go down to Elland Road.