by Paul Rees
It was Atkinson’s intention to put the club on the map, since by doing so he would also make his own name. As such, he welcomed the attentions of the media and threw doors open to reporters. Regis was comfortable in this carefree environment, whereas Cunningham retreated into his shell.
‘If it was an away game, I’d be at the ground at 9 a.m. to get on the bus with the players,’ recalls Bob Downing of the Express & Star. ‘They had a card school running on the coach going to matches, but Laurie was never part of it. He was always very quiet, never went looking for publicity. It was very difficult to get him to open up. He might well have done to Cyrille, but he certainly didn’t to the press guys and I don’t believe he did to the other members of the team either. I don’t suppose the rest of them ever really got to know him at all.’
‘There was no such thing as agents in those days and you’d have to ring the players at home to get a story,’ says Dave Harrison of the Evening Mail. ‘If you didn’t have their phone numbers, then you weren’t doing your job. I’d often call Cyrille up. He lived round the corner from me and we’d meet up in the pub at the end of our street, the Star & Garter.
‘He was totally different to Laurie. He’d had a tough upbringing and I think he was more appreciative of what the game offered him. He was great company too. He had charm, good looks, personality, but without being in your face or over the top. He did also like the ladies and a night out. If you were ever struggling for a piece for the paper, you could go down to a club called Holy City Zoo in Birmingham on a Saturday night. Cyrille and some of the other Albion players would be in there more often than not.’
More so than either of his immediate predecessors, Atkinson encouraged a sense of togetherness within the team, and if that meant them going out for a skin-full, then so be it. It wasn’t that Johnny Giles hadn’t allowed the players a drink. It was just that, when he did, he would tell them to enjoy their first beer because it would also be their last. Even this relaxing of the reins was anathema to the temperate Ronnie Allen, who frowned upon the slightest suggestion of excess.
Under Atkinson, the West Brom team played as hard off the pitch as on it. Wednesday was the big night out for them in the week. However, some of them would bend club rules that forbade drinking forty-eight hours before a game and sneak out on a Thursday too. The other great social occasions were after the match on a Saturday, when they were most able to cut loose.
In the week, the players would gather first for a couple of pints in one of the spit-and-sawdust pubs near the Hawthorns. Older heads such as John Wile and Tony Brown soon called it a night and went home to their wives and families. Brendon Batson, temporarily withdrawn from the team by Atkinson after his first two appearances, invariably followed. The others would go on to a nightclub in Birmingham. The next morning at training, the worst afflicted of them wore bin liners under their football shirts to better sweat out the alcohol.
‘Yes, we did like to party,’ says Regis fondly. ‘After a game, win, lose or draw you’d also have a drink with the opposition in the players’ lounge. It’s Corinthian, isn’t it? Nowadays, none of that sort of thing goes on. The players are straight on the coach and off home. They don’t even talk to each other. To me, that wasn’t what football was about. It was a social entity and having a night out was a big part of the whole thing.
‘Of course, Ron would also join us from time to time. We used to run into him in a club in Birmingham called Maximillian’s.’
‘Ten of us would all be out together, and it was so wrong and yet so right,’ says Ally Robertson. ‘The laughs we used to have, I can’t even begin to tell you some of the stuff that went on. Big Ron was forever receiving complaints about all the players being in nightclubs and getting up to this, that and whatever. He used to show us the letters that were being sent in to the club. He’d tell us, “So long as you’re not getting beaten, I’m not bothered. Start losing and I’ll do something about it.”
‘At times, people would pick on the black lads if we were in a club, but all of us stuck together. No one ever got in trouble or into a fight, because there’d always be someone from the team there to pull you away. It showed on a Saturday as well. We all looked out for each other during a game.’
Just as he would when the mood took him on the football pitch, Laurie Cunningham would delight on such nights in being among his team-mates and a crowd that was his for the taking. He might have shunned small talk and other social niceties, but he was never able to resist a chance to perform.
Says Tony Godden: ‘My fondest memories of Laurie are from those nights. Give him a bit of music, any music, and he’d be there. That’s when he’d come out.
‘The club would be packed and he’d go off and dance on his own to the middle of the room. Within thirty seconds, everyone else would have stopped dancing and be standing around the edges of the dance floor watching him. I’m telling you, he was the black man’s John Travolta.’
While out with the rest of the team, it was unusual for Cunningham and Regis to attract more unwanted attention. There might be the odd comment made, or someone who didn’t like the way his girlfriend was looking at one or the other of them. But it was nothing too serious. It could be a different matter if they went out on their own and were unrecognised.
One night, Cunningham was with Nicky Brown at a club in Birmingham and waiting in line for a drink. A white guy jumped the queue, shouting out that he wasn’t able to stand behind Cunningham on account of the smell. The watching bar staff served him, ignoring Cunningham and Brown’s protestations. In these earlier days at West Brom, both Cunningham and Regis also got used to being refused entry to clubs in the city centre.
‘At that time, you couldn’t get into a nightclub in Birmingham if you were black,’ Regis says. ‘It was a nightmare for me. Later, I never knew if I was only being let into a place because of who I was. If you’re good at football, it crosses those barriers and you get a bye. “Cyrille Regis? Oh, come in!”’
‘Whenever Laurie was injured, I’d go out with Cyrille,’ says Brown. ‘And I’d step up and get him in. It got to the stage where I could get both of them in anywhere. Very young, I learned to have a set way about me and it was an act. I’d always get in the face of whoever was responsible and fight it. But then, in his own quiet way, Laurie was also belligerent about it and so was Cyrille.’
There were also the occasions when Cunningham was given no choice but to confront such prejudice head on. Another evening, the Saturday after a game, he and Brown had decided to make a quiet night of it and were walking to their favourite Indian takeaway in Birmingham. Four white lads were coming the other way. One of them sneered at Brown as they crossed paths and spat out, ‘Nigger lover.’
Cunningham drew up. Brown begged him to keep walking, but he told her he had no option. The four lads had stopped too and were coming back to confront them. The leader of the group again directed his insult to Brown, stretching it out as though it sounded better to him second time round. Cunningham walked right up to the guy and told him to apologise to Brown. He responded by drawing his head back and moving to butt Cunningham. Being so fast on his feet, Cunningham ducked to one side like a boxer and knocked his would-be assailant to the ground in the next movement.
One of the others rushed him next and he cuffed him to the floor as well. By this time, Brown had run into the restaurant to fetch help. When she came back out, dragging several waiters with her, a third man was on his knees and Cunningham had the fourth in a headlock.
‘Laurie was going to him, “See what you made me do? How ridiculous do you look now?”’ says Brown. ‘One of his mates had just then recognised Laurie. He was getting up, his face bloodied and he was shouting about how Laurie Cunningham had broken his nose and that he loved him. It turned out that all of them were Albion supporters.
‘After that, the four of them couldn’t apologise enough. They offered to pay for our taxi home and for Laurie to have his new silk shirt cleaned. Laurie ended up inv
iting them to a game and speaking to them about their attitude.’
It was better and safer for all of them to go to the reggae clubs in Handsworth. Not to the Hole in the Wall, since it was known to be wild and sometimes dangerous. But to places like the Rialto, the Georgian or the Santa Rosa, which each operated a dress code and where the music was good and the mood mellow. No one ever bothered them at such places.
‘I used to go with them to Handsworth,’ recalls Godden. ‘The clubs would be full of Jamaicans and the boys would go into their own little lingo. I used to pull them up. I’d say, “Laurie, Cyrille, hold on, you’ve got a white man here.”
‘Because I was the only white face in the place, I’d get stared at. But I made a lot of black friends through being with the guys, good mates who’d look after you. I was just taken as a pal of Laurie and Cyrille’s. In my experience, colour never came into it with the black man. I loved the music too: I was brought up on ska and reggae when I was kid. It still makes me feel happy.’
The music of the Caribbean had then begun to percolate out of its natural inner-city strongholds and through to a generation of white kids who were growing up in Birmingham and the West Midlands. It would be this and not football that struck the first great blow towards advancing a sense of multiculturalism in the region.
The previous year, Bob Marley had become an international star through the unprecedented success of his Exodus album, and this had also progressed reggae onto a global stage for the first time. During that spring, there was no escaping the loose-limbed sound of Marley’s follow-up record, Kaya, in the clubs and joints of Handsworth and Balsall Heath. In both of these districts, sound systems also boomed out from the house parties, or ‘shebeens’, that came to vibrant life at the weekend. These would spring up in backyards or derelict houses. The local communities came out for them to drink, smoke and dance through to dawn, and often as not on into the next night as well.
There were very few British reggae bands at this point, but two of the most notable sprung up out of Birmingham. The first of these was Steel Pulse, who’d formed in 1975 and cut their teeth in Handsworth clubs such as the Santa Rosa. Later that year their first single, ‘Ku Klux Klan’, was released through Island Records, the label that had brought Marley to a bigger audience.
Steel Pulse had been moved to write the song after reading newspaper reports about a planned visit to the area by David Duke, the Klan’s Grand Wizard. Duke, a 27-year-old from Jefferson, Louisiana, was due to address a meeting in nearby Wolverhampton on 6 March 1978. However, he was banned from entering the town by the local council and at the urging of its newly formed Anti-Racist Committee.
‘The other part of that story was that Duke had also come to Britain to meet with John Tyndall, who was then running the National Front,’ says Steel Pulse frontman, David Hinds. ‘I wrote the song imagining these two guys coming together and creating havoc around us.
‘Oddly enough, there was a faction of people who thought that the band was supporting the Klan. One of the guys who helped to put reggae on the map in the Midlands was a black DJ named Barry Curtis, and he refused to play it on his Sunday night radio show. I remember going down to the station and literally waiting outside to confront him.’
UB40 even better highlighted the extent to which music was crossing into and merging communities in Birmingham. A collective made up of eight friends drawn from various schools in Balsall Heath, the group took its name from the signing-on document issued at the dole office and it’s members were variously black, white and an Arab. They came together in, of all places, a city centre folk club run by the father of the band’s two brothers, singer Ali and guitarist Robin Campbell. Campbell Sr. began putting on a weekly reggae night at his club, booking among others Steel Pulse as a headline act, and he corralled the UB40 boys to tend the bar and sweep up.
‘That period was an awful time in the Midlands,’ relates Ali Campbell. ‘We were a disenfranchised youth. We’d started off trying to get jobs and then realised there weren’t any. Each of us in the band was on the dole, surviving on £8 a week. We pur-loined and stole instruments and then spent six months rehearsing in a cellar that we’d cleared out. On my seventeenth birthday, I got glassed in the face in a bar. I received some compensation money for criminal injury and we used it to buy our first proper gear.
‘The scene around the south of Birmingham was very multicultural and our audience was as mixed as we were. We’d play at all these garden parties, where they’d have a reggae band like us on and then a folk act or a heavy metal group. My wife-to-be lived in Fulham and she used to come up to Birmingham and be constantly amazed at how relaxed the atmosphere was in the city. She said things were much heavier in London at the time.’
Other groups began popping up out of this fertile ground. Some of these mirrored the make-up of UB40 and each owed a huge debt of influence to black music. From Birmingham and taking their cues from American soul music came Dexy’s Midnight Runners and also the Beat, who looked back beyond reggae to the ska sound that had preceded it in Jamaica. Fifteen miles down the road in Coventry, another group of lads picked up on ska and also approximated its ‘rude boy’ look of sharp-fitting suits and porkpie hats. Known at first as the Automatics, they soon changed their name to the Specials.
‘We started to see white people using our music,’ says Derrick Campbell. ‘It was technically well designed, but it didn’t have soul. You could clearly hear that it was a white boy trying to sing black man’s music. Yet it was also important to changing social attitudes. In that respect, music was definitely a meeting point and it brought people together.
‘A lot of poor white kids were living on the same run-down council estates that I grew up on, and they had similar life experiences with regard to social stigma. Like we did, they lived in damp homes and had to go to the second-hand shops to buy their clothes and shoes. Lots of these kids started to listen to reggae and smoke weed and that was how we became mates.
‘However, there were still some cultural differences. When they went home for tea, they had faggots, chips and peas. Black kids like me went home to rice, beans and chicken. That was a divide that was never bridged.’
On 11 March, West Brom played Nottingham Forest at the Hawthorns in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup. Promoted the previous season, Brian Clough’s Forest side were the surprise run-away leaders of the First Division. Up to that point they had lost just three games, their last defeat coming at Leeds in November. They would remain unbeaten in the League through to the end of the season, when they would be crowned champions.
Clough had first won the First Division title six years earlier, with another unfashionable club from the East Midlands, Derby County. At Forest, he had followed the same blueprint as then in assembling what looked like a ragbag collection of misfits, well-travelled old pros and young hopefuls and fashioning them into an outstanding team. Like Atkinson, he was also a strident personality and a devotee of attacking football. Clough too had a simple mantra. He told his players that if the game were meant to be played in the air then there would be grass growing up there.
Yet Clough stood out from the game in another sense. He took a public stance against racism. In 1977, he endorsed the founding of the Anti-Nazi League and the organisation was thereafter given free advertising space in the Forest match-day programme. He had also nurtured a young black player through the ranks at the club. A Nottingham-born lad, full-back Viv Anderson had joined Forest from school, and as a teenager in 1975 became a first-team regular under Clough.
‘I vividly remember one of my first games for Mr Clough,’ Anderson says. ‘We were playing up at Carlisle and I was substitute. At one point, he told me to go and warm up. As soon as I got out of the dug-out, the crowd began throwing fruit at me. After five minutes of this, I went and sat back down on the bench. Mr Clough glared at me and said, “I thought I told you to warm up.” When I told him what had happened he just said, “Get back out there. And bring me back a couple of p
ears and a banana.”
‘Afterwards, he called me into his office and told me I couldn’t let people like that dictate to me. Because I wouldn’t be any good to him if I did and he’d be forced to put someone else in the team. I wanted to play football for a living. And you couldn’t let racist abuse affect you if you wanted to get on in those days. So I shut it all out and it became water off a duck’s back.
‘It was a bit different for Laurie and Cyrille. I was a defender and to an extent got under the radar. They were both flair players and caught the eye. People look at the stereotype, which was to be flash, and that was Laurie.’
Anderson was injured for the cup-tie and didn’t play. Regis led the West Brom forward line, but Cunningham was still being used as a substitute. Having turned out for Cambridge in the competition earlier in the season, Batson was ineligible for cup matches. The game began at a furious pace and on a bright, crisp afternoon. Forest, the favourites, looked ominous from the start and pegged Albion back into their own half. In the home team’s goal, Tony Godden was soon being forced into a string of fine saves.
However, in the fifteenth minute and against the tide of the match, the Baggies took the lead. Their Irish midfielder, Mick Martin, latched onto a looping ball on the edge of the box and lifted it over the onrushing England goalkeeper, Peter Shilton. Forest continued to press forward, but now West Brom matched them and the game veered from one end of the pitch to the other, both sides attacking with speed and verve.
There was something gladiatorial about the movement of the contest, each team taking guard and then lunging for the throat of the opponent. Regis landed the killer blow three minutes into the second half. He chased a long punt down field from Godden, shoulder to shoulder with Forest’s imposing centre-half Kenny Burns. Muscling past Burns, Regis took the ball on its first bounce and struck it from the edge of the penalty area and beyond Shilton’s grasp. It was a strike that was as bold as it was thrilling.