Bouncers and Bodyguards

by Robin Barratt

  BIOGRAPHY OF MICKEY FRANCIS

  Mickey Francis, AKA ‘The Guvnor’, is the All Nations Heavyweight Wrestling Champion of the World and one of the UK’s premier wrestlers. His book Guvnors: Story of a Soccer Hooligan Gang by the Man Who Led It was published ten years ago and is still a best-seller in its genre. Mickey continues to run Loc19 and supports various children’s charities.

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  DAVE COURTNEY TALKING . . .

  BY DAVE COURTNEY

  You will never be able to replace the quality of fighting doormen that you had back then with what you have on the doors now, purely because it was an era when fighting was popular, you know. ‘Are you looking at my pint?’ and it would all go off. And the emphasis on the door and number-one rule from the owner was ‘WIN!’ If you lost a fight on the door, the manager would basically sack you and employ a better fighter. It actually made doormen famous throughout the land for being good fighters, e.g. Lenny McLean and Roy Shaw. Every town up and down the UK had their minor celebrities. And it made tasty bastards – it just made fucking tasty bastards. Back then, we would have 3,000 people in a nightclub, at The Hippodrome say. You would have two doormen outside, one doorman inside and one doorman upstairs. That was 750 people each. No fucking walkie-talkies or CCTV or that shit. When it kicked off, we just fucking shouted, ‘HELP ME!’

  Fighting is like any other contact sport – including sex – in that you cannot get good at it unless you do it. You cannot stop playing football for six months and come back being as good as you were. Back then, the doormen were fighting four or five times a night, five nights a week for fucking years. And if you decided to kick off, you were in fucking trouble, because doormen were fucking good fighters. But now your doorman has his name and photograph and all his fucking details on a badge. If he hits a punter back once – if he hits him back! – he is brought to the police station by the owner, and he will never work again. So please can some cunt tell me how you are supposed to get good at something that you aren’t allowed to do. Right? If you hit someone now, you are sacked and never allowed to work as a doorman again. How the fuck is someone supposed to get good at something that they aren’t allowed to do? This is fucking diabolical. You will never replace the Lenny McLeans. And the way it’s covered now is to have loads of doormen. You can’t just send one doorman in to sort things out; now you have to send four fucking doormen in to get a fella out! And now you have 28 fucking doormen in the same place that I used to work in on my fucking own – 28 fucking doormen, all with walkie-talkies and CCTV.

  Society outside the nightclub might be more violent, but inside it is no more violent. There is no way in the world there are more fights in the nightclubs now than in my time. There fucking aren’t. With all those cameras! Twenty years ago, we fought every week – we had to. How the fucking hell do dickheads standing ten-handed on the door think they are a proper door team. If any one of them is banged once, they are dead. They’re just dickheads on the buzz, suited up, but if they hit anyone, they will never do the job again. How can they justify their fucking bravado? You cannot be what we were back then – doormen became famous worldwide. You will never have doormen taking on a pub full of Arsenal supporters like you did back then. Some of these people were – rightly so – legends. Whereas before there was one doorman onto twenty, now it’s twenty doormen onto one.

  And bodybuilding wasn’t as popular back then as it is now. There were big ol’ lads, but they weren’t really bodybuilders. Listen, if you are fucking frightened of spiders and then you go away for two years, wear leotards, stick things in your bum, look at yourself all the time in the mirror and come back, you are still fucking scared of spiders! You just don’t look like you are. It’s not like you’ve gone away for two years and learned karate, unarmed combat, ju-jitsu – these bodybuilders have actually worn leotards, looked in the mirror, popped a few pills and . . . I am not saying that this is all bodybuilders, but fucking most.

  Take Lenny McLean, for instance: he was a fucking tasty cunt at 16 stone, and that is well known. When he decided to do all that bodybuilding and went up to 20 stone, he was a fucking tasty cunt, because he was already a tasty cunt at 16 stone! If you are not already a good fighter and go away and become 20 stone of meat, it won’t actually make you any better when you tell some cunt to leave and he tells you to fuck off. (And you are not allowed to hit anyone now, anyway.)

  You can see naughtiness in a man; you can smell if someone is capable of it. Say you are gay and you go into a nightclub, you can spot another gay. If you are a heroin addict, you can pick out someone else who uses straight away. And if you are a naughty man, you can pick that out, too. You can pick up the mannerisms.

  They say the eyes are a window to the soul. I know if someone is fucking handy from their eyes. I know if they can hurt me or if I can beat them from their eyes – nine times out of ten. Some of the naughtiest men I know look as though they couldn’t harm a fly, but they have it in their eyes, and some of the scariest looking fucking creatures you have ever seen in your life are like fucking kids. When you go to work on the building site, you wear overalls or a mask if you are a welder. As a doorman, you are supposed to look scary.

  Believe it or not, what is actually happening now is that doormen are just policemen! You are not a proper doorman if you are not allowed to hit anyone back. As a doorman now you are someone who is going to arrest someone, take them down to the police station, stand in court and point your finger at them, and all that. And if you don’t point your finger and put them in prison like the governor wants, you are sacked. And because they have never experienced the old ways of the doormen, the new doormen of today actually believe that this is the way it should be, that this is really it, even though they are not allowed to hit anyone, not once – ever. They have never experienced the old ways.

  In the old days, doormen saved each other’s lives three times last week. When there was a big fight and everyone used ashtrays and glasses and fuck knows what, and you thought you had cashed your chips in, you came out of that saving each other’s necks – fuck me, you were fucking buzzing. How can that be the same now? You cannot find that in any other walk of life, bar maybe in the forces. The forces are so good at building on the strength of companionship. (Although I am not too keen on their aftercare when you leave. You grow as a unit and then one day you are out with fucking nothing.) You will never find that anywhere else. You used to be able to find that working the doors.

  Having a good partner on the doors was essential, because if you didn’t, you would get your fucking head kicked in. He saved your life. It is a lot fucking easier to be a doorman now when the governor has got 28 of you and you search everyone 20 fucking times even before the punters get in the club, and the club is all camerad up. And if after all that the fucking bollocks does go off, you are not allowed to do anything anyway.

  The doorman today is only a doorman in name. Real doormen are no more. They are all like special policemen now. It is not like you can sort things out there and then in your own club any more. If you catch someone with drugs, you can’t clip them round the ear and throw them out. If it goes off now, you hold them and call the fucking police. It doesn’t make fucking sense.

  The business was not just about what you knew but who you knew. There was no industry in the world like it. But not today. Back in the old days, if you ran a firm, your firm was run military style.

  Nowadays, teachers are not allowed to tell you off. If your mum gives you a smack, you can take her to court. What sort of a world are we living in? Back in my time, if you did something wrong at school, you got the cane, your mum told you off and your dad gave you a beating. Now, if you do something wrong at school, you get detention, and if you tell them to fuck off and don’t get detention, then what? We should tell the fucking do-gooders to shut the fuck up! Same in the clubs: if you tell someone to leave and they tell you to fuck off knowing that it is all camerad up, what the fuck do you do? Doormen are fucked, yet they still
try to drag a little fame and glory out of the job when it is just a title. Again, a doorman is now just a police officer.

  The government is turning the whole country into a country of informants. This is the God’s honest truth. When this country came out of the war era, the word on the street was ‘loose lips sink ships’. And the whole fucking nation grew up with that instilled in them – that was the number-one rule. The policemen at the time knew their job was very hard, as everyone said, ‘I ain’t saying nothing.’ And that came about purely because of the war years, but in the last 40 years it’s all changed. The government has, on purpose, made everyone informants. I paid policemen – I know what I am talking about. Please believe me, I know I am right. They made a conscious decision to make informing right. If you said to me 20 fucking years ago that there would be a programme on TV just for fucking grasses, I would have bet my life, or my kids’ lives, that you were lying. But cleverly, on prime-time television on every single station there are now trailers advertising entertainment programmes for grassing people up. There is a grass line if you are claiming the dole, a grass line if you have a gun. They have made it so matter-of-fact. There is a thing that if you know someone who has drunk too much and the cops catch them, you get £500 for grassing them up. There are people who go into a pub, buy their mates a few drinks and then grass them up. There is even a grass line for other doormen to grass on their mates, the people they work with. People grassing up their friends, their mothers, their dads is fucking Hitler Youth stuff. The government has turned it all around. There are no more Sherlock Holmes policemen; coppers now just rely on fucking grasses.

  They can take photos of you from the fucking moon, and new cars have to have a tracker installed so that they know where you are. Mark my words, one day every single car in the country will be bugged – a fucking police bug so they know where you are. There is no freedom of speech. The journalists have freedom of speech, but the editor doesn’t. The journalist writes a good story, but the editor says that it’s not allowed.

  I get booked to do talks around the country, but the police usually come and say if you have Dave Courtney talking, cancel it or lose your licence. Then I get a call with some excuse – the landlord’s nan’s died or something – but they don’t realise how many calls I get. They think they have a good excuse to get out of it, but I hear it every week. All the time Dave Courtney is alive, living in the UK and not in prison, I am rubbing their faces in it, and the police hate it.

  Because of the situation nowadays, the smart nightclub owner does this: he greases the authorities by having a certain amount of doormen working legitimately and trying not to beat anybody up on the premises; meanwhile, he employs another four people at the bar, not in doormen attire. If someone does need a fucking good kicking or the doormen are finding it hard to eject him, then they pass the job off. If anyone says anything, the unofficial doormen just leave. When the police and ambulance turn up, it wasn’t the doormen.

  Back in my day, the industry was a job centre for ‘doormen for hire’. It wasn’t just about the job doormen did for five hours a night. If you wanted anything doing, a doorman would do it – hired muscle, rent a thug. If you wanted your neighbours smacked in the mouth or your girlfriend’s ex to be told to fuck off, everyone knew someone who could do it, and doormen were the people to go to. To go and get muscle and things just grew for me that way. My personality is that I am easily approachable, and the door industry was a massive job centre for me. People contacted me from all over the world. Dave, can you get this? Dave, can you do that? I would get calls from people with £10-million debts. It was a job centre for naughty men. They were doormen for five or six hours a night, but for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they were muscle for hire. If they beat people up in the clubs six nights a week, then they would do it to your neighbour for a grand. Now, this is all completely crushed. I am afraid the poor old English person is brainwashed.

  I have actually read an article in the newspaper that Dave Courtney might be an informant, alongside my photograph! When I saw it, I said, ‘What?’ When I went to court, I was found not guilty and the coppers guilty. But they didn’t put that in the paper! The power the government has over British subjects is fucking frightening.

  I really miss the old days. I actually bang one off thinking about them. When my cock won’t get rock hard or something, I don’t think of a bird, I think about the old days.

  BIOGRAPHY OF DAVE COURTNEY

  According to his website, ex-London gangster Dave Courtney has been shot and stabbed, had his nose bitten off and has had to kill to stay alive. He has had long-standing friendships with many notorious hard men including ‘Pretty Boy’ Roy Shaw, the late Lenny McLean and the Krays. Amongst many other things, Dave has managed nightclubs and run security and debt-collecting companies – and he has been called ‘King of the Underworld’ and the ‘most feared man in Britain’. In 1995, Dave arranged security for the funeral of Ronnie Kray.

  Dave lives at Camelot Castle, south-east London, and has had number-one best-sellers with The Ride’s Back On, F**k the Ride, Stop the Ride I Want to Get Off, Raving Lunacy, Heroes and Villains and Dodgy Dave’s Little Black Book. Dave has also appeared in a few films, including The Krays, Clubbing to Death, Six Bend Trap and Hell to Pay.

  Dave now does a lot of charity work for the Prince’s Trust and is a patron of the children’s ADHD charity Misunderstood.

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  TOO BIG TO BE A GLASS COLLECTOR

  BY SCOTT TAYLOR

  ‘You’re a bit big to be a fucking glass collector, aren’t you?’ Those were the words that led me into my 15 year love–hate affair with the door. They came from a man called Ramsey, a huge highlander who worked as the bouncer in the bar I had just got a job in. I was a 17-year-old, acne-riddled boy working in a shit hole of a bar collecting glasses at weekends, the first job that I’d managed to get since moving to Aberdeen from a small town called Thurso in the far north of Scotland.

  ‘What in the fuck are you doing collecting glasses, Scott?’ Ramsey said, flashing me his trademark huge grin whilst knocking back his usual pre-shift treble vodka and coke. ‘You should be on the fucking door with me!’

  I couldn’t figure out what to say to him. How could I explain that I was as timid as a field mouse and that the very thought of standing at a pub doorway telling people that they couldn’t get in scared the shit out of me? How could I explain that I had no self-confidence thanks to a neglected upbringing by an alcoholic mother and that I was terrified of confrontation thanks to repeated beatings throughout my school years by older kids? I’d been working as a glass collector for a month, and it was hard enough to deal with people accusing you of stealing their drinks, even though their glasses were empty when you picked them up, or the assholes who wouldn’t move out of your way when you were trying to manoeuvre through a packed crowd with armfuls of pint and shot glasses.

  Before I could tell Ramsey that there was no way I could be a bouncer, he had stormed off toward the bar, where he’d spotted the manageress. After a few minutes of arguing with her, he walked back towards me with a big grin on his face, threw me a bow tie and said, ‘You’re on the door with me tonight, lad. We’re going to have fun!’

  So that was it – I was a doorman. The only good I could see in all of this was the big jump in wages, but then I didn’t think that it compensated for the fear that was pumping its way through me the first night working on the door. My voice was squeaky, making me sound like Mickey Mouse whenever a customer asked me a question. I must have run to the toilet for a terror-induced shit about five times in that first hour, and I was sweating more than Michael Jackson having a browse through Mothercare.

  Ramsey, however, loved the whole situation; finally, he had a fellow highlander with him on the door – he had a deep distrust of the city ‘lowlanders’. We also discovered that our parents used to live a few doors apart in the same street, so most of our chat was all about the home country that we’d l
eft to find work in the big city. Having Ramsey there made it easier for me to relax, and over time he helped me (unwittingly, it appeared) to develop my self-confidence and put my fears aside. No longer was I frozen stiff when speaking to people I didn’t know; no longer was I terrified of confrontation. Hell, being on the door was probably the very best therapy I could have had, and it was thanks to that big, usually drunk highlander who threw me a bow tie.

  After a while, I discovered that I loved my job. I loved meeting new people and working in new venues. I loved watching the ebb and flow of a crowd as the night grew long, watching and scanning for any possible ‘hot spots’. And as much as I abhorred violence of any kind, I loved the ‘I survived that shit!’ feeling you would get as you wound down from the adrenalin surge you’d just had after you’d been in the middle of a massive ‘Battle Royale’. That’s if you managed to make it out unscathed, of course.

  In my 15 years working the doors, I’ve seen too many good men and women getting seriously hurt because of the stupidity of the half-pint heroes – people who can’t go on a night out with friends and drink sensibly. I’ve seen friends go to hospital after having their face sliced open by broken bottles, being left with partial vision after being smashed in the face with a stool or chair, or having their skulls fractured by a well-placed kick when they’re down on the ground. These are people whose lives have been irrevocably changed thanks to the actions of some pissed-up bastard who thinks that it’s his God-given right to get drunk and fight, and that a night out isn’t a good one unless they come home covered in someone else’s blood or wake up in a cell covered in their own piss, vomit and shit after ‘sleeping it off’ for the night. To these vermin this is the sign of a good night out, a night out that they can boast about to their workmates the next day over the water cooler. To me it’s the sign of a deep-rooted problem with their upbringing and their psychological make-up.