by Paul Lake
By rights we should have told these meat-heads where to shove their poxy clubs but, if I’m honest, in those days we were more bothered about pursuing some after-hours drinking and dancing than storming off home as a matter of principle. But it always left a sour taste in my mouth. There were far too many venues in Cheshire and South Manchester that employed DJs to play wall-to-wall black music like soul and Motown yet – totally oblivious to the irony – hired door staff to treat non-white people like outcasts. Racism, I’m sorry to say, was alive and well in suburbia.
The quickest way to sober up on a Sunday morning, I discovered, was the realisation that I had to be at a Junior Blues’ meeting by 10 a.m. After a heavy night on the town, nothing instilled greater dread than the knowledge that, in an hour’s time I’d be dressed as a chicken and doing the ‘Birdie Song’ in front of 200 kids at City’s Social Club.
One of Maine Road’s oldest and most respected institutions, the Junior Blues was established in the early 1970s with the aim of nurturing thousands of young supporters. Babies born into true blue families would often be enrolled before they left the maternity ward – sometimes just minutes after Dad had cut the cord – and for the next 16 years little Johnny or Julie would qualify for discounted tickets, behind-the-scenes tours, regular glossy magazines and entry to the monthly Sunday-morning get-togethers. The organisation blazed a trail for junior supporters’ clubs and was rightly held in great esteem by chairman Peter Swales, so much so that he’d insist on five or six players attending each meeting. He rarely forsook his Sunday-morning brekkie in bed to come himself, though. Funny, that.
These player appearances were managed on a strict rota basis, with the big-name stars required to turn up to two or three meetings per season and the younger lads about four or five. Attendance was compulsory (any no-shows would receive a hefty fine) even for those players who routinely went home to Scotland or the Midlands after a game. If these fellas were ever earmarked for JB’s duty they’d have to get up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning, no doubt cursing those pesky kids as they hit the road at sunrise.
If truth be told, I found these Sunday-morning gatherings an ordeal in my younger, more self-conscious days, although I changed my attitude a little as I got older, one day even becoming the organisation’s president. Meeting and greeting a roomful of Junior Blues and their parents wasn’t the problem. It was more the fact that every single player was coerced into taking part in the on-stage entertainment, which could be anything from a song and dance number to a ‘comedy’ routine. I’d much rather have sat through a sermon at nearby St Crispin’s than make such a public tit of myself, but I really had no choice in the matter.
I was always a bag of nerves backstage, petrified at what lay in wait for me on the other side of the velvet curtain. I remember once having to perform the actions to that godawful ‘Music Man’ song, playing an imaginary pia-pia-piano while Andy May pretended to bang on a big bass drum and Mark Lillis did a half-hearted trombonist impression (just look at what you missed out on, Giggsy).
As the kids pelted us with Chewits and their parents laughed and pointed I died a thousand deaths inside, counting down the minutes until I could flee to the refuge of my Escort. And what made it worse was that the Social Club’s stage lights were more like sun lamps. Sub-tropical heat was the last thing you needed when you were hungover, and I’d stand there, sweaty and nauseous, frightened to death that I was going to vomit over the Dawson family in the front row.
At least I never had to pretend to be a ventriloquist’s dummy on stage, unlike poor Jim Tolmie, a City striker from the mid-1980s and one of the shyest blokes you could ever meet. I remember the wee Scot being forced to sit on some old fella’s knee, who then proceeded to shove his arm up his jumper and jerk him to-and-fro like a Ray Allan and Lord Charles tribute act. I seriously thought Jim was going to burst into tears at one point.
In direct contrast, though, you’d get some of the more extrovert players who would quite happily perform their party pieces under the spotlight, like Earl Barrett who wowed the kids with his body-popping and his Michael Jackson moonwalk as part of the annual Junior Blues’ pantomime. I managed to wriggle out of a solo performance that Christmas, convincing the director that my recital of Pam Ayres’s ‘Oh I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth’ probably wouldn’t bring the house down.
When it came to Manchester’s cluster of rave clubs, the Haçienda was beyond compare. Spearheaded by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson and bankrolled by the band New Order, the Haç had been a fixture since 1982 – Madonna performed her first ever British gig there – and had transformed the city’s clubbing scene by offering an alternative to grotty student dives and grab-a-granny nights. However, it wasn’t until the explosion of the so-called ‘Madchester’ music scene in the late 1980s that it truly came to the fore.
I was a regular there during the so-called ‘Second Summer of Love’, a period straddling 1988 and 1989 in which the city of Manchester became the place to be. You couldn’t turn on MTV or flick through The Face without seeing scowling Manc bands sporting baggy jeans, floppy hats and ‘curtains’ fringes. I remember watching that infamous November 1989 edition of Top of the Pops when both the Roses and the Mondays made their debuts, a wild-eyed Ian Brown swaggering around to ‘Fools Gold’ and a bog-eyed Shaun Ryder staggering about to ‘Hallelujah’. Both bands had been introduced by Jenny Powell and Jakki Brambles, two squeaky-clean hosts who, judging by their bewildered expressions, hadn’t had much previous contact with drug-ravaged Mancunians. You could see the relief on their faces when those nice boys from the Fine Young Cannibals took to the stage with their short haircuts and neatly pressed chinos.
People who’d once looked down on England’s second city were now looking north for inspiration. Our music revolution had blown apart all the stereotypes of a city defined by Coronation Street, spindly men with whippets, dark satanic mills and podgy northern comedians. It was Mancunians, not Londoners, who were now setting the pace, with our friends in the south having to contend with the focus shifting elsewhere for a change.
For me, being in the middle of all this was thrilling, and I had a real sense of being in the right place at the right time. Not only was I living and clubbing in the coolest city in the world, I was also privileged enough to be playing for one of its football teams. The fact that I was realising the dream of thousands of young Mancunians made me cherish my charmed existence all the more. To echo the local buzz-word of the day, I was well and truly sorted.
On a Saturday night, the queue outside the Haçienda snaked all the way down Whitworth Street, all sharing the common desire to get waved through by the notoriously discerning bouncers. Occasionally, though, one of the doormen would spot me in the queue and beckon me over.
‘What are you queuing for, Lakey man? Grab yer mates and I’ll walk you all straight in.’
This blatant queue hopping used to make me cringe, but my mates would lap it up.
‘This can’t be bad,’ they’d say as we waltzed to the front to a chorus of tuts. ‘The Red Stripes are on us, big fella …’
The Haçienda’s interior was awesome, modelled as it was on a huge industrial warehouse complete with steel girders and stark lighting. But the thing that really set it apart from the rest was the fact that you went there for the music. No lairy lads in shiny suits, no stiletto-shod girls dancing around handbags, just brilliant rave and retro tracks spun by brilliant DJs like Mike Pickering and Dave Haslam. Their sets would work up the throng of wide-eyed, Ecstasy-fuelled clubbers into a frenzy, and even though I didn’t do drugs, I always had a blast. I can still conjure up memories of me and my mates going wild whenever A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ came on. No other track better captured the mad-for-it mood at that time, and I still get goose-bumps whenever its intro booms out from my iPod.
Plenty of City fans hit the Haç on a Saturday, most of them giving me a quick nod and a ‘hiya, Lakey’ before letting me get on with my Bez-style frea
ky dancing. This was in direct contrast to the glitzier venues in town, where you’d spend the whole night being tailgated by supporters wanting to talk about that day’s game or debate some dodgy refereeing decision. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind bantering with fans at any other time of the week, but on a Saturday night I just wanted to chill out with my mates. At the Haç, there was no such circus. No one gave a toss that you were a footballer, and that’s just how I liked it.
What really fascinated me about the Madchester club culture was its gradual infiltration of the City terraces. Suddenly, for a whole faction of fashion-conscious young Blues, going to the match was no longer just about football; it was also about the clothes and the attitude. As I pulled up to Maine Road on a match day I’d pass groups of lads and lasses walking down Lloyd Street dressed in their unisex uniforms of flared jeans, fishing hats and Kickers. From what I could see, the distinction between club wear and match day clobber was becoming blurred; what was being worn to the Venue on a Friday night was also being worn to the game the following day.
The effects of this cultural crossover meant that football tops, especially City shirts, became high-fashion items in their own right. Pre-Madchester, replica kits had largely been the preserve of diehard fans or football-crazy kids and weren’t often seen away from the terraces. However, in the late 1980s they started cropping up in a variety of city-centre dance and indie clubs, as well as gracing the window displays of menswear style emporiums like Hurleys, near Piccadilly station.
Broadening the shirt’s appeal was the parading of Blue allegiances by influential members of the Manchester music scene. A decade earlier it seemed that only middle-aged actors and comedians came out as City fans, but now the likes of The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, The Stone Roses’ Reni and The Cult’s Billy Duffy were revealing their true colours.
Meanwhile, over in the Mancunian suburb of Burnage, two City-daft, music-mad brothers were lying in their bedrooms dreaming of fame and fortune. Within a couple of years their group, Oasis, would become the most successful rock ’n’ roll band on the planet, and Noel and Liam Gallagher would be renowned as City’s starriest fans. Their proud endorsement of the City shirt – donned in countless gigs and photoshoots around the world – would add massively to its kudos.
Umbro’s garish City away strips of the late 1980s – as opposed to the minimalist sky blue home shirts – became iconic clubbing tops in Manchester. Particularly coveted was the 1988 maroon-and-white striped design with the blue collar, as well as the plain maroon top that was produced two years later. Both had City sponsors Brother’s name emblazoned on the front and both looked – to coin a slogan of the time – ‘cool as f***’ teamed up with jeans and Adidas Gazelles.
I had a real soft spot for the 1990 kit, probably because I’m sporting it in one of my favourite action photos. This shot – one of the few to adorn my walls at home – was taken during a pre-season game in Norway when I was at the peak of my career and playing the best football of my life. I look in tip-top condition, the kit looks classy as hell and, most importantly, my Shaun Ryder-style fringe looks the dog’s bollocks.
In October 1989 City’s infamous canary-yellow third kit was introduced, arguably the gaudiest City strip of all time. We wore it only once, away to Arsenal – they thrashed us 4–0 – and ran onto the pitch looking like Fyffes Bananas FC, to chants of ‘are you Norwich in disguise?’ and ‘who the f***in’ hell are you?’ filling the stadium. Yet, while this custard-hued shirt looked hideous on the pitch, it would have made perfect clubbing wear for the smiley-face brigade at the Haçienda or in Ibiza. However, for some reason Umbro decided not to mass-produce it for the fans and by doing so, I reckon, missed a trick and lost out on a potential fortune. The 13 yellow City shirts worn at Highbury were the only ones ever to be manufactured, I gather, and have since become collector’s items which go for a song on eBay. I didn’t have the foresight to keep my top, unfortunately, so if someone’s got the yellow one with the number 11, can I have it back please, mate?
There were other indications that the loved-up Madchester vibes were transmitting to Maine Road. I’m not saying that everyone in the Kippax was blowing whistles and popping Ecstasy, but there was a real sense of uninhibited fun among our supporters towards the end of the 1980s, in spite of the monotony of Second Division football. Nothing embodied this better than the infamous inflatable craze which, according to Manchester historian and author Gary James, caught on when a bloke called Frank Newton took the first inflatable banana to Oldham v City at the beginning of the 1987–88 season. No one really knows why; it was just one of those bizarre things that City fans did.
As the season progressed more bananas appeared, but it wasn’t until the 1988–89 campaign that thousands of people began coming to matches armed with inflatables of all shapes and sizes, from hammers to beach balls, from giraffes to dinosaurs. During one match – I think it was away to West Brom – I remember spotting two huge Frankenstein’s monsters having a fight in the City end. The crowd seemed more entertained by this inflatable boxing bout than by the game itself, singing ‘Frankie, Frankie, give us a wave’ and totally ignoring my team-mate Brian Gayle as he cleared his defensive lines.
The biggest love-in of all was, without doubt, the 1988 Boxing Day fixture at Stoke City. A group of City fans, heavily influenced by a City fanzine of the time, Blue Print, had decided to celebrate the festive season by going to the Victoria Ground in fancy dress, and the idea spread like wildfire. Costume hire shops were plundered, wives’ wardrobes were ransacked, and City’s diehards would yet again brighten up with their unique brand of lunacy the footballing world.
As our team coach drove up to the stadium that day it wasn’t the usual sea of blue-shirted fans that parted for us; instead it was a swaying mob of Draculas, Nazis, Mr Blobbies, Mother Superiors, Tommy Coopers, pantomime horses, Bernie Clifton ostriches and lots of hairy cross-dressers. Total mayhem. The decision to stage a mass fancy-dress party in the Potteries was quite a brave one; Stoke could be a menacing town on a match day and, in the 1980s, was notorious for its special brand of ‘hospitality’ to visiting supporters.
In keeping with the party atmosphere, the club made us run out onto the pitch carrying our own inflatables to launch into the away end. We weren’t exactly thrilled by the idea – I remember Neil McNab spewing out a stream of Scottish expletives when he was handed a huge blow-up banana – but we did as we were told.
If our woeful performance was anything to go by, it should have been us City players who turned up in fancy-dress costumes that day. Eleven clowns’ outfits would have sufficed for the farce that culminated in a 3–1 defeat, a result which no doubt put a dampener on all the revelling on the terraces. There was a feeling of deep embarrassment on the team coach as we headed back up the M6, all of us lamenting our lacklustre display. Twelve thousand fabulous fans had gone to all that trouble to create a carnival atmosphere, yet our response had been to truly rain on their parade.
By the end of February 1989 we were topping the league, thanks to a purple patch of six consecutive wins with Wayne Biggins and Nigel Gleghorn scoring a lot of goals. Our comfy 11-point cushion made automatic promotion a distinct possibility but despite our lofty position we weren’t donning the blinkers. We were very conscious that there were some tough games ahead and some decent sides waiting to knock us off our perch; fellow First Division wannabes such as Chelsea, West Brom and Crystal Palace all had the promised land in their sights and were ominously hitting form at the right time.
My comeback game after the tongue-swallowing trauma saw second-place Chelsea visiting Maine Road. A crowd of 40,000 – our biggest gate of the season – witnessed our team being totally out-thought by a side brimming with confidence and experience. Bobby Campbell’s men fully deserved their eventual 3–2 victory and duly leapfrogged us to the top spot. Despite this setback, we managed to garner enough points during March and April to enable us to remain in automatic promotion contention. However, a dismal
home defeat by underdogs Barnsley on 22 April caught us unawares, and in an instant the atmosphere in the dressing room changed from upbeat to downcast. It seemed that we were losing our nerve in the crucial final stages of the season, and questions started to be asked about our resolve. Any more points dropped like this and we were going to be in serious danger of missing out on a top-two place and – horror of horrors! – condemning ourselves to another season in the second tier.
A concerned gaffer and his assistant, John ‘Dixie’ Deehan, sought to allay any doubts and convened a post-training pow-wow, hammering it home to us that we really did have the willpower and firepower to haul ourselves up a division and that yes, we really were good enough to rub shoulders with Liverpool and Arsenal. With their battle cries ringing in our ears, the following Saturday we went down to the Manor Ground and demolished Oxford United, playing out a 4–2 victory to a backdrop of ‘we’re going up’ chants from the away end. On the coach back home, Mel and Dixie did the maths and relayed the good news that all we needed to secure promotion was one win from three games. This was the psychological boost that we needed. It would take a collapse of monumental proportions to screw this one up, surely.
On the first day of May we came up against arch-rivals Crystal Palace who, now that Chelsea’s champions’ status had been sealed, were our sole challengers. Only two days earlier the gaffer had gently broken the news that he was giving me, as Brian Gayle’s replacement in central defence, the responsibility of marking the great Ian Wright. (It was by no means the first time that my role had been shuffled around. I played in every outfield position during that 1988–89 campaign, and ended up wearing eight different shirt numbers in one season.)