by Jamie Jones
I rushed home from school on the day of the gig and dressed in my predetermined uniform of a Neds ‘Godfodder’ t-shirt, Carter USM shorts and my black DM’s. As always, when we needed to go somewhere over the other side of town, I persuaded Dad to give us a lift. Six of us piled into his Vauxhall Cavalier and we sat on each other’s laps for the 4 mile journey.
We got to the venue and it was as we watched the flood of people going through the doors that it dawned on me that as a nine stone weakling, wearing glasses, I was about to enter a darkened room surrounded by 800 people throwing their arms, legs and hair in all directions. I had read about Roman Gladiators in my school history books and now I knew exactly how they felt before going in with the lions.
Three weeks previously my beloved Peterborough United had played and somehow managed to beat, the then mighty Liverpool in the League Cup at our London Road ground. As the winning goal went in, the crowd around me went absolutely bonkers and, before I knew it, my legs were flailing desperately in the air above my head and I was tumbling down the concrete terracing. The euphoria of the goal kicked in and for a full 30 seconds I was a deliriously happy young man hugging total strangers. Then, as I picked myself up, I could feel the cut on my lip, a tooth that suddenly felt loose and spotted an odd jagged shape in my line of vision. I had broken my glasses.
As the rest of the city partied into the night to celebrate this famous victory, I had to go home and break the news about my specs to my mum. As I’d been wearing glasses since I was 3, Mum was well used to having to drag me along to Boots to get them replaced via an emergency appointment, but that never stopped her being absolutely fuming each time it happened.
That night, Mum gave me the “If you can’t behave at football I will stop you from going” speech with added “If I find out that you are behaving like those hooligans we see on the TV, I will tell your dad.” Two points to make here:
1. I actively ran away from any trouble that I saw at football matches. I’d never seen a football hooligan that wore glasses. Even if I’d wanted to be a hooligan, I would have been useless. One clip ‘round the ear from an opposition fan and I would be scrambling around on the floor shouting, “STOP! Do you know how much these glasses cost???”.
2. “I will tell your dad” was the ultimate threat in our house. It would occasionally be used by Mum to stop me and my sister playing up but the few times Dad did get “told” about my misdemeanours, upon his return from work, I would run to my room and barricade the door, not caring that I would miss my tea.
Back to the Neds gig and, as the band took to the stage, I looked around the pitch black hall and saw hordes of men in their late teens or early 20’s, many with multiple face piercings and suspicious body odour, and wondered if we should go and stand near the back. Just as I was about to suggest this to my mates, the band kicked into their first song and the crowd surge that rolled from the back of the room like a tidal wave picked me up like a ragdoll and flung me around whilst I watched my glasses fly off into the distance. I was falling, desperately grasping at thin air trying to save them from a certain crushing but to no avail. Soon enough, gravity took hold of my skinny 15 year old frame and I found myself dumped face down on the floor. I quickly realised that blood was flowing from my nose and just below my eye, thanks to the fact that one of the plastic nose-clips from my specs had managed to imbed itself into my skin, which was particularly painful.
As at the Posh v Liverpool match, here I was, in the middle of a delirious crowd scrambling around on the floor trying to find my specs. I shook my head clear of its mild concussion just in time to see a white bloke with long, dirty dreadlocks gleefully pick them up and hurl them into the darkness. As I saw them arch high over the crowd, I knew that another terrific night out had been ruined by my specs, and specifically my inability to keep them on my face. I did my best to enjoy the rest of the gig but I knew that the broken glasses argument wasn’t far away.
When Dad picked us up, he decided to not mention the fact that for the first time in 12 years I wasn’t wearing my glasses or that my nose was covered in blood, which was good of him. My Mum, on the other hand, went up the wall when I got home. Another week spent grounded was the penalty handed down by the High Court of Mum, with the judge refutting my mitigating circumstances and turning down my appeal.
1992
Goodbye to Faith No More
AS much as I was an avid fan of both Ned’s and Carter USM, the band from that scene that I really took to heart was Mega City Four. They were an indie band with loud but jangly guitars, led by a singer called Wiz who wore his heart on his sleeve. Every one of their songs told a tale from the eternal disaster that seemed to be Wiz’s love life.
Their album “Sebastopol Road” was the last LP that Jo and I listened to together for hours on end. The guitars were just about loud enough to satisfy her love of American rock music and the lyrics were something we could both relate to. For the first few months of 1992 it was rare to find us in one of our bedrooms not listening to it. In real life we were growing up and apart so being able to scream along to Wiz’s tales of pain, deceit and breaking up seemed to us like a mirror being held up to our increasingly grim relationship. Jo had decided that she had been the passive partner in our relationship for too long and was determined to rival me in the pain in the arse stakes. She was now the one not bothering to phone or choosing to ignore me if the mood took her. Our teenage love affair was a mess.
In March, one of our older friends, Lee, moved into his own house and, for better or worse, it changed the course of our adolescence. By now we had evolved into a group of about a dozen lads and girls, all roughly the same age, hanging around together. Relationships could start and end in a single night amongst the group and it all seemed perfectly normal. Before Lee got his house, much of our hanging around took place between the hours of 6pm-9.30pm (10.30pm at the weekend) either inside the tiny kid’s playhouse at the local rec with 2 cans of cider each, or in the clearing in the local woods. At Lee’s we had a stereo, a fridge for the alcohol and a whole group of wannabe young adults wanting to have fun. Well, I say a whole group but, to be honest, I didn’t find it fun being at Lee’s. Ideally, I would have been put in charge of the stereo, selecting the tunes for my friends to listen to as they coupled off, but of course that was too much to ask for. At least half of the group, powered by cheap booze, wanted control of the stereo. In between the indie songs I selected we would have to listen to the Levellers or, worse still, Back to the Planet. I absolutely despised The Levellers and the “crusty” scene they had created, but most of the girls in our group loved them. In fact Jo was the only girl I knew that didn’t fall for The Levellers’ fiddle and fleas rubbish. I loved her for that. The problem for Jo’s indie obsessed boyfriend was that she was falling ever deeper in love with the US rock scene. This also meant that she was spending more time with her new friends who were generally all older than us and could easily get her into pubs and Peterborough’s only ‘rock club’. She did try to include me and introduce me to her new gang but I wasn’t interested. They liked music that I hated with a passion, and more importantly I already had my mates, I didn’t need any new ones. She soon gave up.
I wanted to be this pained introspective indie type with long, lank hair. She wanted to dress and act like she was in a rock band. Where she used to write things like ‘I love Jay’ on her school bag, she now had a huge Faith No More sticker.
We split up and got back together more times than Oasis, often following bitter rows played out at Lee’s house in front of our friends on a Saturday night. After such rows/splits, I would usually manage to wrestle control of the stereo and put Mega City Four on whilst looking forlornly into the middle distance and sipping from a can of Carlsberg. Unlike during my Billy Bragg period, I hadn’t purposefully sabotaged our relationship to make the song lyrics seem more meaningful, but on those nights it would feel like Wiz was singing those songs just for me. I was listening to tracks with titles like “Wast
ing My Breath” and “What’s Up?”, while Jo (quite understandably) sought comfort in the arms of others, often in the same room that I was in.
I was beginning to realise that teenagers had a unique ability to disregard the social norms that most adults follow. During the first 3 months of the year, with us splitting up and getting back together, Jo ended up snogging over 50% of my mates. I’m not judging her or being mean, it was just how things happened in our group back then. As a dalliance between two members of our group ended, another emerged to take its place. Most of the group could deal with these mini love affairs by simply pulling up their jeans and carrying on with the night. I would use these situations to what I thought was my advantage and quickly perfected my heartbroken scowl. With my Mega’s long-sleeved t-shirt pulled over my hands, I would sit and wallow.
Eventually, realising that as Jo was in an upstairs room with one of my mates, we probably weren’t going to get back together that night, I would leave Lee’s to go home and listen to my Walkman until sleep took over. On Sunday mornings I would wake up, crack open a fresh 6 pack of TDK C90 cassettes and spend the day making compilation tapes. Most of those tapes were made for me, heartfelt songs to make me feel better or, more often, worse. The lyrics of the Mega’s songs that filled the tapes weren’t exactly subtle or poetic but they comforted my 15 year old hormones, as I liked to imagine they did for thousands of similar morose folk around the country. Some of the compilations were made exclusively for Jo. I wasn’t emotionally capable of showing my caring, loving side in words or actions, but in the 14 or 15 tracks that you could fit on one side of C90 tape, I would use songs to express what I couldn’t. I bet most of the time she threw them into the bin without even listening to them or looking at the carefully handwritten track listing and lovingly selected lyrics sheets that accompanied them.
By March, both Jo and I were sick of splitting up and getting back together on a fortnightly basis but couldn’t quite give up on what we had. We didn’t have a dramatic final break-up, it was more of a mutual agreement. It happened one night, as we sat in her bedroom listening to music:
Jo: ‘Jay, are you happy?’
Me: (smiling) ‘Not listening to Faith No More I’m bloody not, no.’
Jo: ‘You know what I mean.’
Me: ‘You mean, am I happy with our relationship coz you’re not and want us to split up for good this time?’
Jo: ‘Well?’
Me: ‘Well, was I right about what you meant?’
Jo: ‘Maybe.’
Me: ‘I think it’s really a yes or no answer don’t you?’
Jo: (laughing) ‘Yes you were right. Look can we agree to just split up for good and be friends?’
Me: (pulling on my coat) ‘I would agree to anything to get out of this room and not have to listen to that rubbish. Ok, let’s call it quits, see you tomorrow at school yeah?’
It was as simple and pain-free as that to end our 18 month exploration of our constantly evolving hormones.
With my relationship no longer taking up valuable time, I got to fully devote myself to indie music, my mates and The Posh.
Posh didn’t stop winning from January 1992 until the end of that season in May; well at least it felt like that. Slowly but surely I could sense the space in my chest that Jo used to occupy being replaced by a ginger haired centre forward called Tony Adcock. He was a graceful striker with a sharp eye for goal and a touch that was pure class. As the season progressed, Posh had a genuine chance of promotion into a league that we had never competed in before. We were looking at potentially the greatest team that the club had ever produced. After a 2-2 draw at London Road in the play-off semi-final v Huddersfield Town, we travelled to their Leeds Road ground more in hope than expectation for the 2nd leg. Against all the odds, we managed to win 2-1, thanks to a fantastic diving header from Stevie Cooper. That win meant that for the first time in our history The Posh were off to Wembley, for the play-off final v Stockport County.
Our school wasn’t normally a hot bed of Peterborough United fever, with just a few of us wearing our Posh scarves and shirts in amongst the hordes of Liverpool and Manchester United fans, but it was in the week leading up to Wembley.
My mates had all made their travel plans for the game by studying the train timetable and tube map. Unfortunately my mums fixation with “hooligans” took over my plans and, despite repeated pleas, tantrums, tears and threats to purposefully fail my GCSE’s she refused to let me travel by train. I was getting desperate and decided to change tack and asked my dad to drive me to Wembley. He laughed heartily at that request, his reserves of enthusiasm for football still dry after that England v West Germany semi-final in 1990.
Running out of options, I had only one left, the official supporters club coach. I was gutted to have to join the “window lickers” as they were known. Even though a couple of lads I knew from school were on the same one as me, I still had a face like a slapped arse on the morning of the game. I got to the coach park at 10am to find my schoolmates drinking illicit cans of warm Special Brew. Always a partial sucker for peer pressure, I took a cursory swig of the thick treacle like brew and got on board.
My schoolmates quickly realised that as the coach steward had a “no alcohol, on pain of death” rule, between the 3 of them they had to drink 6 cans of Special Brew before they could get on board. At £1 a can they weren’t going to throw them away.
I settled down in my seat and, thanks to my copy of “Catcher in the Rye” and a football themed compilation tape on my Walkman, the journey whistled by. Then, onto the horizon came the almost mythical sight of the twin towers of Wembley. As promised, my mates were waiting for me upon arrival and we excitedly bowled into the ground and took our seats. I could describe the match blow by blow but I won’t. The summarised version is that we were winning 1-0 with 5 minutes to go, with everyone in our ranks stood on their seat, hollering for the ref to blow for full-time. Then our ‘keeper made a mistake and in the blink of an eye Stockport had made it 1-1. I sank back down into my seat, head in hands, close to tears and whimpering about how unfair life was. I was consumed by a familiar sense of doom, that the day and the season were all falling apart in front of my eyes. We had got this far, all the way to Wembley, only to throw it away. I was already dreading the coach home, with some people no doubt saying bloody stupid things like “It’s only a game”. I was especially dreading getting home to my dad, a man who would take the mickey out of any situation that I found myself in, no matter how grim it was.
Thankfully it didn’t quite pan out like that. Jacko pulled me to my feet and back to standing on my seat just as we came close to conceding another goal. As we stood there, waiting for the inevitable defeat, the Wembley clock ticked down to show only 2 minutes remaining. At that moment, the ball fell to our cultured midfielder, Marcus Ebdon, who looked up and played possibly the greatest pass of all time to our star striker, Kenny Charlery. Kenny got his legs moving for one last effort, controlled the ball and powered towards the Stockport goal. The next moment is locked in time as we all stood, open-mouthed in anticipation, as he shaped to shoot.
I can say without fear of over-exaggeration that Kenny’s sublime shot hitting the back of the Stockport net was the best moment of my young life. The seething mass of 25,000 Posh fans stood behind the goal, exploded. In yet another tumble of arms and legs (I later counted that I fell down six rows of concrete steps), we were all as one – in a scene that looked as if all of us had been wired to the mains electricity for 30 seconds.
The aftermath of the goal saw grown men hugging complete strangers and openly crying with joy. A blackmailer could have made a fortune with a camera that day, as many of those fellas wouldn’t have wanted anyone outside the stadium to see them in such an emotional state. I could have died there and then a deliriously happy young man, screaming and crying with joy into the faces of my best mates. It was a moment that none of us would ever forget.
As a group of teenage lads we were never shy of a hu
g. We were the antithesis of our fathers who were far too tough and working class to ever spontaneously embrace another man. But as the final whistle blew it was hugs, kisses and sheer unbridled joy as far as the eye could see. We stood in the most wonderful Peterborough United themed glow and vowed to always remember that day, to always support The Posh. Standing on my seat, tears of joy rolling down my cheeks, watching our captain, the inspirational Mick Halsall, pick up the play-off winner’s trophy, I looked around the ground at the thousands of Posh fans and drank in every last moment.
Ten minutes later we danced our way out of Wembley and embarked on a wacky-races style chase to get back to Peterborough’s Cathedral Square, in order for the party to start. As we came back up the A1, with about 20 miles still to go, at every bridge crossing the motorway were people waving blue and white Posh scarves, cheering and clapping the buses and cars home. It was a surreal and humbling sight, like we were victorious warriors being welcomed back to our home village.
Skipping merrily along the city centre streets (I was actually skipping), I looked across the road and there, in front of Woolworths, stood Jo. Being in a buoyant mood for once, I felt compelled I had to go over and speak to her even though she was with her dad who, understandably, had never been my biggest fan. We had shared so many of the high and lows of the last few Posh seasons; I knew we had to share this one. It was only as I skipped the 50 yards across the street that it dawned on me that she might not be pleased to see me. Luckily she greeted me with a smile, a yelp of delight (I assumed that was because of Posh winning, rather than seeing me) and a hug. We stood and talked for 10 minutes about the game before moving on to the inevitable “So how are you doing anyway?” conversation. Thankfully her dad had moved up the street by this point. Enthused by a combination of the joy of Posh’s win, our affection towards each other and let’s be honest here, habit, we talked about getting back together. We spoke of changing things, of doing more fun stuff but deep down we both knew that it was over and should stay that way. We stood there and said our farewells as a city went absolutely bonkers all around us. A quick hug and she was gone, into the mass of people staging the biggest impromptu party Peterborough had ever seen.