by Alan Davies
At my eighteenth birthday party at Epping Forest Country Club, the assembled throng of teenage boys in plaid looked like off-duty lumberjacks, the uncalloused hands of suburbia poking pinkly from sleeves being the principal giveaway.
Also pink that night were my cheeks after my college mate Jamie invited me to try some blue pills he had in an envelope. I had five. ‘Five!’ said my older, wiser friend Gill when I told her. I didn’t fall asleep until six in the morning. I had never heard of amphetamines and assumed I was just too drunk. I’d been swigging from a half-bottle of vodka all night, which I’d received as a birthday present and proudly shown to my stepmum. ‘Oh dear,’ she’d understated. Four coffees and four pints of water later I was still wide awake. Justine, my girlfriend of five months by then, was sound asleep as I lay twitching in the dark. I had enjoyed myself, with everyone I wanted there; Mel and Lou, mates from school and college plus Justine and her friends. It’s one of those nights from the ’80s I remember well, mainly because I was up all night reliving it.
The urge to look like James Dean reached its nadir when I spent my time trying to smoke cigarettes like him. He was often photographed with a cigarette shoved into the corner of his mouth while keeping it pointing straight forward. It’s not possible to overstate how absurd I looked standing around house parties in Essex with a fag poking out of my mouth in this odd way. Then I came across a red jacket at last but that didn’t help as it was a slightly effeminate blouson affair with a wide plastic belt, incorporated in to the waistband with a series of loops. This was not the garment of a rebel, with cause or otherwise. Wearing it on campus in my first year at university, one of my friends shouted, ‘Belt!’ from some distance away. I went with empty hanging loops after that. Eventually, I forgot I wanted to look like James Dean and, having experienced performing in a few plays, also dropped my hopeless aspiration to act like him.
Charlie Nicholas
The new darling of Glasgow Celtic, scorer of fifty-two goals the previous season, including a stunning hit against Old Firm enemy Rangers after a mesmerizing stop–start dribble, wanted a transfer.
For some reason, possibly the loss of playmaker Liam Brady, to expand his bank balance and his horizons, with Juventus of Turin, and the further loss of striker Frank Stapleton, to expand his bank balance, and train in the rain each week, at Manchester United, Arsenal had decided they wanted Charlie.
This was out of character for the club, who were not usually in the market for skilful mavericks, partly because they’d been let down by the small impact made by another Scot, Peter ‘the new George Best’ Marinello, in the early ’70s. They had signed teen goal machine Clive Allen from QPR in 1980 but promptly swapped him with Crystal Palace, for left back Kenny Sansom, in a deal that smacked of a set-up, since Allen never played for Arsenal. Then in 1982 they signed England’s Tony Woodcock to play up front.
With Graham Rix in the side there was potential, and Charlie was to be the creative spark that would hopefully fire the team to great things, even though he was only twenty-one.
The 1982–83 season had been a disappointment as Arsenal had lost to Manchester United in the League Cup semi-final (with Stapleton scoring in the face of torrents of abuse from his former congregation). The two clubs were drawn to play again, in the FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park.
Aston Villa’s ground can be seen from the M6 principally because of its vast Holte End terracing, which was divided down the middle for semi-finals with rival fans on either side. I travelled to Villa Park on my own and walked up the huge terrace to the back. It was uncomfortable, with fans drunk and drinking. No matter, Arsenal went 1–0 up and we sang of going to Wem-ber-ley. During half-time the ground beneath my feet was wet and I looked round to identify the source. All along the top of the Holte End, men were lined shoulder to shoulder, facing the corrugated iron, relieving themselves of imperial gallons of urine, which cascaded down the terrace, possibly all the way to the pitch.
The game restarted and some tough tackling saw Arsenal’s best defender off injured when United equalized. The momentum was with them now and they won 2–1. Feelings of bitterness and injustice were conjured up by the chemicals in my brain, carving out a synapse of their own, which was to be well used over the next three decades and counting.
Manchester United also wanted Charlie and so, more to the point, did Liverpool. To a football fan, this was a nobrainer. Liverpool had won the league six times in eight years. They were three times winners of the European Cup in that time, and three times winners of the League Cup too. Kenny Dalglish, the finest player in Britain, now Brady had gone to Italy, and like Charlie a former Celtic hero, was in his playing autumn. Over the next couple of years Liverpool would be looking to groom a successor. Charlie had to go to Liverpool if he had any sense.
Manchester United, who had the FA Cup and the cash to pay big wages, would be most people’s second choice. If Charlie had any sense.
To the disbelief of the club’s fans, the best young player in Britain decided to sign for Arsenal. Various reasons were suggested. That he thought there would be less pressure at Highbury was one, which didn’t augur well, and the idea that he fancied London’s ‘bright lights’ was another. This is a strange concept to Londoners, implying the rest of the country lives in near darkness with excitement consequently hard to come by.
Whatever the reason, a big crowd expectantly attended his debut against Luton. I even took a camera and stood down the front of the North Bank to try and snap our new hero. He looked a bit short and dumpy, but he had good close control, and a mullet.
The next game was at Wolves and, when Arsenal scored, a goalflash, Wolves 0 Arsenal 1, appeared on BBC1’s Grandstand, which was normal, but it included the scorer’s name: Nicholas, which wasn’t. His first goal was of national interest. It was followed by a second in the same game. Now he’d started, would he stop?
Yes, he would. For three months.
Arsenal lost their next three games, including home defeats against Liverpool and Manchester United. Charlie was not living up to the hype by November when Arsenal went to Spurs for a League Cup tie. He scored though, and Arsenal won.
Then he went into hibernation again (though he was technically on the field for every game bar the last one that season) until Boxing Day when Arsenal returned to Spurs, whose fans were eager to delight in Charlie’s tribulations. He scored twice as Arsenal won 4–2.
Later in the season, he dribbled through the Spurs defence at Highbury to score his fourth goal in three games against them, as Arsenal won 3–2. This three wins out of three record against Spurs, together with his rejection of the northern giants, made Charlie the archetypal ‘darling of the North Bank’. He was cocky, flash, and underachieving, but adored.
Sometimes, for a skilful sportsman like Charlie, everything comes easily. Like a kid at school, placed one set below his ability, who doesn’t have to work too hard. Arsenal were a level below the top sides, which meant he could be a hero. Not that Liverpool and Manchester United were going to come back for him now. He lacked speed. Had he been as fast as Woodcock he could have been one of the best in Europe. For Arsenal fans, now unused to challenging for the title, what mattered was to beat Spurs and try to reach a cup final.
Charlie had a little bit of Jimmy White, the snooker player, in him. Nearly the same age, they shared a slight physical resemblance: both were dark-haired, with a half-smile a permanent feature, and neither was averse to browsing in a jeweller’s shop. Both were entertainers. Whether they liked it or not, even on a bad day, there was more interest in them than their immediate opponent or, for Charlie, than in his team-mates.
The unpredictability of their play in itself defines the appeal of spectator sport. It may be that winning is the sole motivation for those less gifted (certainly those that become the, often sociopathic, obsessives known as football managers). Certainly it is the less gifted players for whom a desire to win probably took them closer to the top than their talent would merit
, but it is the players who offer the element of surprise who bring in the crowds.
Every unique populist needs his nemesis though. It’s that contrast in styles that completes sport’s appeal.
It’s rare, but memorable, that two thrilling entertainers meet head to head, as Nadal and Federer did at Wimbledon in 2008. More often the maverick repeatedly encounters the same automaton. If he’s unlucky, he’ll meet two. As McEnroe met Borg and then Ivan Lendl so White met Steve Davis and then Stephen Hendry, in a career that would see him reach the World Championship Final six times and contrive to lose every time.
1984 was White’s first final. He had to play Davis, the champion and regarded as one of the best of all time. Davis was from Essex and, in normal circumstances, I would have supported him, but I couldn’t, as he was the most infuriatingly perfect bore in sport. He never missed, he never betrayed emotion, he never gave the opponent a point if he could help it, and he never let things go a little loose when he was clearing up the balls with the frame already won, suddenly firing a dramatic swerving shot off three or four cushions to break the tension, as a little bonus for the paying customers, who had respectfully watched him crush another man’s spirit.
Not for Jimmy the moody patrolling of the table with an eternity between each shot. He was rapid, he was the ‘Whirlwind’.
Me and my sister bonded over disliking Davis and wanting White to win. Previously untapped reservoirs of rage were revealed in her as she glared at the screen while Davis lined up another pot:
‘Miss, miss, miss… oh.’
‘One,’ said the referee as the white ball rolled in behind the black.
‘Miss, miss, miss, miss, misssss.’ It was an incantation now. I was impressed. Maybe there was hope for this family yet. We stayed the course as Jimmy fell just short and everyone agreed that he was so young his time would surely come.
Later that summer the Olympics were held in Los Angeles. Here was an event without underachievers. To qualify you had to be in the top two or three at your event in your country, and even then, Olympic qualifying standards may exclude you. No sitting happily in a lower set there. You were at the top, or absent.
Four years previously in Moscow, Steve Ovett had shown you could be a bit flash and still be the best in the world when he beat Sebastian Coe to win gold in the 800 metres.
Like Borg v McEnroe and Davis v White, Coe v Ovett was a national litmus test.
On holiday one year, I stood with my dad on a cliff top as we looked at waves crashing against rocks.
‘Would you rather be the sea or the rocks?’ I asked.
He breathed out, frowning: ‘The rocks,’ he said.
‘I’d rather be the sea.’ He didn’t respond.
‘It wears the rocks down in the end,’ I added in an ‘I win’ voice.
I was spiteful, but the appeal of the restless water, over the unchanging rock, was genuine.
Predictably, given the way the family went three to one in the Borg v McEnroe stakes, a split emerged over Steve Ovett.
My dad was enraged by him.
If he was winning on the home straight, Ovett would celebrate by waving to the crowd. Some saw this to be adding insult to his rivals’ injury, gloating, and – this is the cardinal sin – unsporting. Of course, the more he was disliked in our house the more I warmed to him; he was an oddball with natural talent and none of the advantages of Coe, with his freakishly perfect motion and his well-spoken ‘take me home to meet your mum’ manner.
Ovett looked like he was running away from a shop after nicking something (I may have been projecting that on to him).
Coe had been expected to win the 800 metres, but prevented Ovett from taking a double by winning gold in the 1500 metres instead, which was Ovett’s speciality. They left with a gold each and another medal each, which neither seemed interested in, for coming in behind the winner.
Along with Allan Wells in the 100 metres and Daley Thompson in the decathlon, they were the British heroes of the Moscow games, which had been spoiled by the USA team pulling out over Russia’s fruitless attempts to control their uncooperative neighbour, Afghanistan, by military force.
The Russians, along with some of their allies, refused to participate in the Los Angeles ’84 games in retaliation, clearing the way for an impressive US medal haul, with their drug-addled Eastern European rivals at home.
Coe won the 1500 metres brilliantly again in 1984 but this time my dad turned on him for his behaviour in victory, when he pointed furiously at doubters in the press box. To win without displaying emotion is the ultimate achievement to some English people. Or to feel none at all. No wonder Britain maintains Olympic standards in heart disease.
We were encouraged to feel that the Americans had boycotted out of principle and the Russians out of spite; that the American gymnasts who therefore cleaned up in ’84 were wholesome cheerleader types, who were not chained to the asymmetric bars during infancy on an intravenous growth hormone drip; that Carl Lewis, the four-time gold medallist, was the epitome of human perfection and that such a specimen could only flourish in the all-American dreamworld of the US Olympic team.
Lewis was later disgraced, having failed three drugs tests at the US Olympic trials in 1988. He went unpunished and escaped a ban, along with over a hundred other American athletes. The sheen of American glory was dramatically muddied.
That was all to come though. In August 1984 when Lewis turned up at a packed Crystal Palace to race in a special 300 metre event he was the most famous high achiever in sport. The man at the top of the top set.
I went to that meeting with Justine and my sister. Lewis didn’t win but we saw him and that was exciting enough.
For some reason, Arsenal players were there giving out the medals, to boos from the South London crowd. We squeezed through to try and collect autographs. On the way we had a photo taken with the enormously popular boxer Frank Bruno, who was the most solid individual I’ve ever brushed up against, a wall of muscle. Then Justine saw Charlie Nicholas.
She edged along the row and appeared in front of him, a tanned and pretty seventeen-year-old with curly hair and a beaming smile. Charlie signed her programme and asked her if she’d like him to write her phone number on it. She was a bit confused and flushing slightly but told him her number. He wrote it down and then tore it off the back of her programme with a cheeky grin. Justine moved away and the burly bloke next to Charlie indicated me and said: ‘Look out, it’s the boyfriend.’ Charlie’s smirk was supplanted by a more Glaswegian expression. There was a moment of tension as we made eye contact but I kept going right towards him. I expected his minder to stand up and intervene but I was by now staring at Nicholas, inches from his face in the scrum of the crowd. He met my gaze and then I spoke:
‘Can I have your autograph please, Charlie?’
We were slightly disappointed that he never called.
Billy Bragg
The NME’s special compilation cassettes came up trumps for me by including a Billy Bragg track on NME011, Department of Enjoyment.
‘Fear is a Man’s Best Friend’ didn’t appear on Billy’s short album, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy; nor did it turn up on Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, his first full LP and my most played record of 1984.
It was typical of Billy Bragg that, should he be asked to provide a track for a compilation cassette, he would give them something unreleased and then consider it gone. To release it again and put a price on it wouldn’t sit right with him. It would be exploiting young fans without much cash.
Life’s a Riot came with the instruction:
PAY NO MORE THAN £2.99 FOR
THIS 7 TRACK ALBUM
Brewing Up carried the tag:
£3.99 OR LESS
Each song was crafted and witty and many were clippings from the plants nurtured in Billy’s growbag of heart-rending emotional truth. If he didn’t want a dry eye in the house then he could have it that way. Usually he’d make you laugh just when you were having a wobb
le over songs like ‘St Swithin’s Day’ or ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’.
He was a one-man band and, with his guitar in hand and an amp and speakers on his back, he had busked all over the place, bawling out his own songs in an entirely untrained, unaffected and personal way about subjects dear to his heart: love, betrayal and trade unionism.
I thought of him as heroically honest, warm and funny. In a Radio One live concert which I, and probably several thousand others, recorded and played back hundreds of times, he told a story about how he and his ever-present mate Wiggy were playing Subbuteo:
‘Wiggy’s Mum moved something from behind the sideboard and a dartboard rolled out, went once round the pitch, and then went foom! [much laughter from the live crowd]. It was worse than the Munich air disaster, except it was Everton or someone… [then you can hear a voice offstage] oh, Crystal Palace, Wiggy says it was Crystal Palace.’
The reference to Munich may seem in poor taste on the page but it wasn’t, being thrown away, a bit off the mic like a good stand-up comic, which he was in many ways. It was just another example of the ordinariness and the unpretentious style of Billy Bragg that belied the powerful impact he made when bursting forth in full committed performance.
His music came along at a time when The Jam had split up and Paul Weller had disappeared into a gentlemen’s boutique while ‘The Cappuccino Kid’ wrote the amusingly upbeat sleeve notes for The Style Council’s poppy releases. The edginess of The Jam was gone and while I bought everything that Weller released for years it was Bragg who now sounded like the young Weller of All Mod Cons and Setting Sons.
There were some bands, like The Redskins, with a political agenda, but there was as much infighting amongst left-wing musicians as there was amongst left-wing politicians. As usual, most pop music avoided anything approaching thought, never mind expression. All bland and all vain, it was all unpalatable.