The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘I fell out with Peter Barnes after one game,’ says Tony Godden. ‘He had all the skill in the world, but he was a lazy sod and not in Laurie’s class. Ron will always say, “Well, I sold the reserve England winger and bought the man keeping him out of the side.” But there was no comparison between the two of them. Barnesy said something to me in the dressing room after the game and I had a go back. Ron stepped in and the tea went everywhere. I ended up having a row with Ron. I told him he always defended the likes of Barnes and never his grafters.

  ‘After a home match, the team and the press guys used to go for a drink in the Europa. Ron was sat at the end of the bar when I walked in that evening and the room went quiet. Everybody knew we’d had a bust-up. He shouted over to me, “TG, what do you want to drink?” I said, “A bottle of champagne, please.” And that was it, finished. One thing about Ron, he never held a grudge.’

  When Regis returned to the side results improved for a spell, but then went into free-fall again. Derek Statham wrecked his cartilage in the same game as Regis made his comeback and barely played again that season. David Mills vanished on the field and then from the team. A crestfallen Atkinson took to referring to him as his ‘albatross’. Even the normally metronomic Batson struggled for consistency. Yet having each come into the team feeling like outsiders and as if they had everything to prove, he and Regis both now took a leading role in binding it together as it threatened to break apart.

  ‘Both of them are terrific characters,’ says Barnes. ‘Brendon was a great talker in the dressing room. He was very serious about his game when he went out on the pitch, but a joker off it. He was always taking the mickey out of people and smiling and laughing. Cyrille was more of the silent type. Yet he was one of the lads who liked to go out on the town and have a few beers. He dressed in snappy suits. He was a nice guy, very charming and mild-mannered. But put him on the field and if someone upset him, he’d be like a man-mountain.’

  ‘A lot of problems were sorted out in a social environment,’ says Owen. ‘That was more so with Cyrille than Brendon, because Brendon was a family man. You were able to say things over a beer or two in more relaxed surroundings that couldn’t be said in the workplace.

  ‘Cyrille was a joy to play with. He was so strong that you could knock the ball into him and know that he’d protect it and hold it up. Brendon was a great team player. He had pace and was a fine athlete. I can’t remember a winger ever getting the better of him. He didn’t get the international recognition he was due, because he was as good as any right-back in the country during that era. But next to the bigger clubs, West Brom was seen as being unfashionable. Phil Neal played for Liverpool and so he was the England full-back at that time. I remember the Evening Mail organising a petition to get Ron Greenwood to notice Bryan Robson’s performances, but he had to leave the club in the end to make that breakthrough.’

  The West Midlands birthed a blazing movement in youth culture that right then exploded out across the UK and marked the beginnings of a profound shift in the social make-up of the country. This was 2 Tone, and it was founded on a conglomeration of bands that rose up on the local club scene, and had its musical roots in the ska and rocksteady sounds originating from Jamaica in the fifties and sixties. At the forefront of this were the Specials, from Coventry, and principally their keyboardist, musical mastermind and all-round driving force, Jerry Dammers.

  The son of a prominent clergyman, Dammers was born in India in 1955 and attended the well-heeled King Henry VIII School in Coventry. As a teenager he passed through phases as a mod and a hippy, before fixating on Jamaican music. He met bassist Horace Panter while studying art at the city polytechnic. Panter had also been seduced by ska’s clipped beat, and the pair of them formed the Specials in 1977.

  From the outset, Dammers determined that both the band and their audience should be multi-racial. The Specials’ line up solidified over the next two years. Beanpole singer Terry Hall was a local lad who’d left school at fifteen to sing in a punk band called Squad, and he had the demeanour of a hangman. Guitarist Roddy Radiation (nee Byers) was plucked from the regional rockabilly scene and drummer John Bradbury had a background in soul and reggae. Each of them was white. Singer Neville Staple and guitarist Lynval Golding were both native Jamaicans whose families had brought them to the English heartlands on the cusp of the sixties. Staple’s ‘toasting’ style, chanting over the band’s effervescent rhythmic attack, gave the Specials their distinctive flavour.

  In 1979, Dammers founded a record label to release the Specials’ first single, ‘Gangsters’, a reworking of Jamaican ska man Prince Buster’s 1967 hit, ‘Al Capone’. Articulating Dammers’s multicultural intentions, the label was christened 2 Tone Records and was characterised by the striking black and white colour scheme it used for its artwork and graphics. 2 Tone’s soon-to-be iconic logo was based on a photograph of the Wailers’ guitarist Peter Tosh: an attention-grabbing print of a man in a black suit, tie, loafers and pork-pie hat, with white shirt and socks.

  ‘Gangsters’ hit the UK Top 10 in the summer of 1979. It was swiftly followed by a string of landmark singles on 2 Tone. Birmingham band the Beat had a hit with their ska-themed take on Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ soul standard ‘Tears of a Clown’. The Selecter also burst out of Coventry on the back of two rallying tracks, ‘On My Radio’ and ‘Three Minute Hero’. They were fronted by the bewitching Pauline Black, who best of all symbolised 2 Tone’s rich melting pot and the divides it set out to breach. Born to a Nigerian father and English mother, Black was adopted into a white family and brought up being unaware of her heritage. A seven-piece band from London, Madness, also joined the 2 Tone gold rush via their own tribute to Prince Buster, ‘The Prince’.

  2 Tone reached its climactic point in the autumn of ’79. In October of that year, the Specials’ self-titled debut album crashed into the UK charts. Produced by Elvis Costello, The Specials merged the ebullient sound of ska with the urgency and lyrical fire of punk. Bottled up in its songs were the frustrations and dissatisfactions of a British underclass growing up out of sight and mind on bleak and soulless inner-city council estates – the ‘concrete jungle’ of one of the album’s defining tracks. Such an environment was home to the teenage girl in another of the record’s standout songs, ‘Too Much Too Young’, and of whom Hall sang: ‘You’re married with a kid when you should be having fun with me.’

  The next month, the Specials, the Selecter and Madness all performed on a single edition of the BBC’s Top of the Pops. This sealed 2 Tone’s crossover into the mainstream. The visual message being transmitted by a band such as the Specials was as potent as the one sent out by Cunningham, Regis and Batson at West Brom. Hordes of white school kids around the UK rushed to take up their look, wearing the uniform of Jamaican rude boys like a badge of honour.

  ‘It was a special time, a sort of golden age of tolerance and togetherness,’ says Ali Campbell, then recording UB40’s debut album, Signing Off, which would make stars of him and his band the next summer. ‘Yes, we had our problems with the National Front and the British Movement, but that was just the obvious politics of depression and the kids rebelled against it.

  ‘What I saw developing then was a multiracial and multicultural society that looked as if it would go on to be even better. We were anticipating a rainbow nation, but that’s all gone now. In the thirty years or so since then, very sadly I think we’ve taken on an American style of politics and got a generation now that is self-segregated. You’ve got white gangs, black gangs and Slavic gangs. In Balsall Heath, the Indian kids will chase you down the street with baseball bats or hockey sticks if you’re white.’

  However, and as Campbell freely admits, it wasn’t the case that all of 2 Tone’s audience embraced its utopian vision. ‘UB40 actually shirt-tailed the movement,’ he says. ‘We were a reggae band, but we kept our heads down and got on ska-themed bills at places like the Electric Ballroom in Camden. The skinheads in the crowd used to ‘Sieg Heil’
us and generally we’d come off stage covered in spit. But the thing that they hated us for was playing too slow. It was because of the make-up of the band that we had constant death threats.’

  A further seismic event emanating from the Midlands during this same period got even more widespread attention. The trial of the four alleged killers of schoolboy Carl Bridgewater unfolded at Stafford Crown Court and in the full glare of the media. It took place in an alternate reality to the one in which Jeremy Thorpe had been judged earlier in the year. Patrick Molloy, James Robinson, Vincent Hickey and seventeen-year-old Michael Hickey had fallen through the cracks of British society and out to the margins. They were unemployed, petty criminals and odd-job men living from hand to mouth. On 9 November, the Stafford jury convicted Robinson and the Hickeys of murder and Molloy of manslaughter. Robinson and the two cousins were handed down life sentences and Molloy got twelve years. They left to serve them as the most vilified men in the country.

  Yet the case against them was unravelled through the slow and painful passage of time. It was made clear how scant the evidence had been linking the four men to the scene of the crime. It was proven that the investigating police coerced Molloy into making his confession and implicating the others. The Hickeys’ stated alibi gained credence as more witnesses were found to come forward. Two moves to appeal were rejected and one dismissed before Robinson and the Hickeys were at last set free on 21 February 1997. Molloy had died in prison sixteen years earlier.

  The identity of Carl Bridgewater’s killer or killers is still unknown, and the case remains unopened. During the long and wretched course of it, nothing was proven but for the fact that British justice of the time could be just as prejudicial against class as race.

  West Bromwich Albion tumbled into the new decade in a mess. Twice beaten in the League, 4-0 at Ipswich on New Year’s Day and 3-1 at Nottingham Forest, and turfed out of the FA Cup by Second Division West Ham. The Forest defeat left them hovering precariously above the relegation zone and facing a difficult-looking trip to Crystal Palace.

  Atkinson wasn’t one for chopping and changing his team. He had kept faith with his players to this point, trusting them to dig themselves out of the rut they were in. But he sensed the Palace game was a pivotal point of their season and took action, handing young Remi Moses his first-team debut. His reasoning was that the combative Moses would ‘snap and snarl and keep everyone on their toes. The Palace game was a big one for us. If we lost it, I thought we might keep on falling.’

  Going into the last fifteen minutes at Selhurst Park, West Brom trailed Palace 2-0. The home side had been bright and dynamic, full of zip and intent. For all Moses’s additional energy, the visitors appeared bereft of confidence and were flailing like drowning men. They looked directionless and their cause hopeless, but somehow they found redemption. As the clock wound down, out of nothing, Ally Robertson got up for a corner and grabbed a goal back, his first in almost two years. Then Regis snatched an equaliser, wildly celebrated. These two quick strikes turned around not just this one game, but their whole season.

  They suffered just two more defeats in their next seventeen games and had climbed to tenth in the League by the end of the campaign. Nevertheless, it still felt as though the flame that had burned so bright through the previous season had been dimmed. Liverpool had romped to the title again, and this West Brom team made no impression as timeless as that of the previous one had when led to victories at Old Trafford and against Valencia by a swaggering Cunningham. Remi Moses had at least emerged as a player for the here and now. He was a regular in the side after the Palace game and brought to it propulsion and a look of solidity.

  The fact that Moses was black led people to stretch for comparisons between him and Cunningham, but there were none to be made on the pitch. Where Cunningham was smooth and fluid, Moses buzzed and darted, one legato and the other staccato. Cunningham struck like a cobra; Moses had the persistence of a ferret. One was a mercurial attacker and the other a grafting midfielder. It just so happened that both were guarded and introverted off the pitch and neither was destined to fulfil his great potential.

  ‘When I first joined the club and was playing in the reserves, Big Ron asked me if there was anyone coming through that he should keep an eye on,’ says Batson. ‘I told him to put his money on Remi. He was extraordinary. His debut against Palace was the best I’ve seen from a lad that age. He wasn’t the greatest socially and never said boo to a goose. But he was a tremendous footballer and like a quiet assassin on the pitch.’

  Regis was also restored. He was again an immovable slab of muscle and menace, and with Cunningham gone he was now the centrifugal force of the team. There was a snapshot of him at his most imposing towards the end of the season: 8 March, versus Coventry City at Highfield Road. West Brom launched an attack along Coventry’s right flank. The ball was sent spearing down the touchline and Regis gave chase at full throttle. Rushing across to meet him was Coventry’s full-back Brian Roberts, looking like a Viking with his helmet of blonde hair and luxuriant moustache. Roberts came in low, side on and also at pace. At the point of impact, it seemed inevitable that he was going take both the ball and Regis into touch. But he didn’t. Rather, he hit Regis and bounced off him, sprawling to the turf as if he’d just run headlong into a rock-solid barrier. Regis powered on, passed to Barnes and Albion scored.

  ‘Brian told me he recalled making a clean contact with the ball and that was the last thing he remembered,’ says Martin Swain, reporting on the game for the Coventry Evening Telegraph. ‘He said he’d never felt anything like that in his life.’

  There was also now a trickle of young black footballers coming into the game and making inroads at the top level. That season, Garth Crooks at Stoke City scored fourteen goals in a relegation battle and broke into the England U21 team. Vince Hilaire, a deft midfielder at Crystal Palace, was another to win U21 recognition. A South Londoner, Hilaire joined his local team from school and made his first-team debut for them in March 1977. Under manager Terry Venables, Palace had assembled a young, attractive side that won promotion to the First Division two years later and was hailed ‘the team of the eighties’. Venables’s abrupt departure to QPR the next season put paid to that fanciful notion, but Palace’s best moments often as not came with Hilaire at the centre of things, and he was the supporters’ ‘Player of the Year’ in 1980.

  Born in Falmouth, Jamaica, in 1958, Luther Blissett was the third up-and-coming black player to ascend to the England U21 ranks in the 1979–80 season. A robust striker, Blissett was plying his trade at Graham Taylor’s Watford in the Second Division. His goals had shot the Hornets to two successive promotions and he was top scorer again when Watford reached the top flight for the first time in 1982. By then, Blissett was a full England international and in 1983 he followed Laurie Cunningham out to the continent, joining AC Milan in Italy for £1 million. However, Blissett’s direct style wasn’t cut out for the Italian game and he returned to Watford after just one season.

  Other, even younger players had made their debuts in the First Division. A cultured midfielder, nineteen-year-old Paul Davis had come through the ranks at Arsenal and took his first team bow in a North London derby against Spurs on 7 April 1980. Davis progressed to making 447 appearances for the Gunners up to 1995. Later on, he was joined at the club by two more skilful black footballers, David Rocastle and Michael Thomas. The three of them helped Arsenal to the title in 1989. Down the road at White Hart Lane, Chris Hughton, a Londoner of mixed race origin, began a long and successful career at full-back for Spurs. At Coventry, teenage defender Danny Thomas was introduced to the first team and became a regular in the side the next season. He went on to link up with Hughton at Spurs, from where he also won two full England caps.

  Nonetheless, such breakthroughs were still few enough in number to seem out of the ordinary, and there remained a dearth of black faces at some of the biggest clubs in the country. Tony Whelan, a local lad from Salford, had been on Manches
ter United’s books in the late sixties but didn’t appear for the first team in a competitive game. Two more seasons would pass before a black footballer broke that bar at Old Trafford – when United signed Remi Moses from West Brom. At Liverpool, a Toxteth lad, Howard Gayle, flitted into the team in October 1980, but it wasn’t until John Barnes arrived at the club in 1987 that significant progress was made in that regard. It took even longer for that to be the case at Everton. Two black players, Mike Trebilcock and Cliff Marshall, each made a handful of appearances for the club in the sixties and seventies respectively. But it took the signing of the Nigerian international Daniel Amokachi in 1994 for an unspoken apartheid at Goodison Park to be smashed.

  In stark contrast, the experiences black players had of being subjected to racist abuse through the game weren’t isolated. This remained rife in football. At Wolves, George Berry enjoyed an otherwise fulfilling season. His performances for his club caught the attention of his adopted country, Wales, and he was selected for a European Championship qualifier against West Germany. He might even have begun to feel part of the furniture at Wolves, having been a fixture in their team for two years. He was to stand corrected. In February, Wolves were dumped out of the FA Cup by Watford at Molineux. Towards the end of the game, Berry was targeted for retribution by one of his own supposed supporters.

  ‘Some bloke started shouting abuse at me and I just lost it,’ he told writer Simon Lowe. ‘I jumped into the crowd and started to beat him up. We went to the police station and I got a bollocking from the Chief Inspector, but it all got hushed up.’

  West Ham had been relegated to the Second Division at the end of the 1977–78 season. This spared Cunningham, Regis and Batson a visit to the Upton Park bear-pit in the League, but the Baggies had to go there for an FA Cup Third Round replay in January 1980. As the teams trooped out onto the pitch, Regis and Batson were again showered with bananas by the East End crowd. Batson recalls ‘looking at the contorted faces in the stands’ at Upton Park that night, on which ‘you could see all the rage and hate’.