Articles of Faith Page 4

  DB: Yeah, exactly, and it begins with you know ‘everyone seems to know the score, we’ve heard it all before, England’s going to throw it away, going to blow it away’, all that stuff is about, oh well, no one thinks we’re going to win but maybe we will anyway. But unfortunately the lines of triumph over adversity, ‘football’s coming home’, which is the epiphany following that thought, they can only be sung when England are doing well.

  RB: In a way David, yeah people wilfully took those lines out of context out of clear cockeyed optimism.

  DB: I should’ve stood up at Wembley every time they sung it and said, ‘No, you don’t understand, it’s a sweet, melancholy ballad about loss.’

  RB: (Laughter)

  DB: You’ve made it into a strident national anthem.

  RB: It was a Jeff Buckley-style lament on the futility of football.

  DB: Yeah. But anyway, what else do you want to know about football?

  RB: Wait a sec…well, I’ve got a very lovely linking device because West Ham’s song Bubbles is perhaps the only other song that captures the sort of sentimentality and pathos of being a football fan, as most songs do tend to be triumphant, and perhaps the team you follow, Chelsea, are a fine example of the kind of stripped-down refined success, lacking in magic but you know, under recent ownership, how do you define the romance of being a Chelsea fan for you at this time?

  DB: Well…to start…the song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, is that a West Ham song, or is it just an old song that West Ham sing?

  RB: I think it was, yeah I think it was co-opted.

  DB: So what is it about when it’s not about West Ham? I never know quite what it is…is it about someone who is blowing bubbles?

  RB: (Laughter) It is quite difficult to find a literal connection, other than fortunes always hiding.

  DB: Yeah, it is. But we sing it. We sing it as an anti-West Ham anthem which is about beating up, I believe, West Ham fans. How does it go? ‘Tottenham always running, Arsenal running too’, yeah, that’s essentially the hooligan’s anthem of course, so we’ve absorbed your song.

  RB: I’ve heard the hooligan version David, and I’ll go for a similar emotion that you’ve experienced when Germans sing Football’s Coming Home. I think this is abuse of the lyrics from the intentions of the song.

  DB: Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful anthem, but to answer your question, I don’t completely agree obviously with the Chelsea thing because having been a Chelsea fan since 1970, the only thing about being a Chelsea fan if you were a Chelsea fan then is that you were actually reared on a very stylish but rather pale form of play, so something very romantic which was Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson and Charlie Cooke, and all those kind of players being brilliant and stylish and clever but not actually winning very much, they won the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup but that was it. And then I went to Chelsea, I wasn’t old enough to go when I started supporting them, when I was eleven and they were shit. They had Micky Droy in their team and they were utter shit and I went for twenty years watching them be complete shit and thus I actually get quite annoyed, not as enraged as you do about your mum, and questions over her sexual endeavours but…

  RB: Even you mentioning it now is making me a bit cross.

  DB: Also I’m worried that the initial conversation won’t be in the book and so people will think well why on earth has he said that, that’s awful.

  RB: No, we’ll pick that out…

  DB: But what I get annoyed about is the suggestion that this sort of wealth has somehow just landed on Chelsea fans unfairly whereas in fact when it first happened, I thought well this is actually Chelsea going back to its roots, because I think Abramovich, in his heart he wants Chelsea to be a bit like the Harlem Globetrotters, he wants them to be an incredibly skilful, exciting, flair-based club which he hasn’t really chosen the managers to do.

  RB: No.

  DB: He’s got that slightly wrong, but I think that’s what he wants. And for Chelsea fans of my age there is a sense that we should be that club, you know, we should be this very flair, colourful club with lots of fancy dans like Peter Osgood playing for us, so I’m all for it. And I’m slightly fucked off that now that there are Arabs at Manchester City who’ve got much more money than us.

  RB: That must be irritating.

  DB: That is irritating. I don’t want to complain about it…well, perhaps slightly.

  RB: Oh, go on.

  DB: I’ve heard Chelsea fans…

  RB: Go on, you were going to complain did you say? I’m listening…

  DB: I’ve heard Chelsea fans complain, and they could be accused of hypocrisy here, that the Arabs at Manchester City are going to ruin football with all their money.

  RB: (Laughter) Difficult to feel sympathy for the fans of Chelsea.

  DB: Yeah it is, although it’s a strange thing, you know, I’ve earned a fair amount of money in my time and you must be earning quite a lot now.

  RB: Yeah.

  DB: But these are people who can offer £138 million pounds for Ronaldo, just ‘cos they sort of fancy it. How does that happen? How can people have that much money? It doesn’t really reflect so much on football as the general state of the capitalist global economy.

  RB: Yes that’s what I feel. I feel that in general when people talk about the commercialisation of football, just say well this is cultural, that it’s not something that is specific to football, it’s just that demonstrably the world is becoming more corporate and more commercialised so of course sport is going to also, it’s just a reflection of that.

  DB: Yeah, that is true and football is a microcosm of the extreme nature of the free market because as football gets more and more successful, which it has done over the last fifteen years, more money is attracted to it. There aren’t really any proper laws. The FA tried their best, but there aren’t any proper laws like there might be in a country, so as a result there is a free-market activity leading to £138 million pounds which could probably save the whole of Africa being spent instead on Ronaldo and his stupid over-white teeth.

  RB: I think you’re quite right – instead of looking at football and condemning the current climate and the amount of money that players are earning, people should look at the implications of that globally, what that demonstrably means for global human capitalism.

  DB: And they should also consider whether, if it is going to be a common, global economy Ronaldo should at least not be going to a club whose greatest player in the past was Francis Lee ‘cos that in itself is an affront.

  RB: (Laughter) Yeah, that is a peculiar poem of capitalism to go from Franny Lee to Ronaldo.

  DB: It is, that’s right, that is capitalism in itself, although somehow the movement from that fat bloke to that grinning pretty monkey is a remnant in some way of what Marx always predicted for our culture. I’m sure we’re now just talking, aren’t we?

  RB: Yeah yeah we did, I felt we drifted away from making a football book to actual views and feelings.

  DB: Ask me some other questions quickly about football.

  RB: Ok.

  DB: You’re quite a big England fan, aren’t you? That’s the thing that people often talk about, club and country. And I feel from some of my, well Frank and the one or two other actually working-class friends that I’ve got, although you’re actually working-class but you’re not in this category, that there’s something a bit poofty and middle-class about supporting England. I mean, Frank does support England but in his heart he will always say he’d rather West Bromwich Albion got into the Premiership than England won the World Cup.

  RB: Really?

  DB: Now I don’t know if I actually believe him, because I think he would go mental if England won the World Cup and West Brom have got into the Premiership and although he’s pleased, he’s not dancing naked in the street – a horrible image – but anyway he might do if England won the World Cup. So there’s a sort of sense that comes off hardcore fans that supporting England is what Johnny-come-lately fans
do – with their love of Italia 90 and Gazza crying and the whole change that happened in football, rather than the hardcore club supporters.

  RB: That working-class affiliation, do you think it’s by association – the hooligan fraternity as well, I know England have always famously had a hooligan fraternity? That sort of class ownership of the sport is kind of interesting, I mean I would like to pick up on that ‘cos Frank is personally affiliated with the success of England. If England won the World Cup, I’d imagine it would be like twenty or thirty years in the future before it’s possible at all, you two would be pushed out on wheelchairs with Ian Broudie, it would be a personal triumph for you as well like a cultural and social one.

  DB: One of those people who are wheeled out on Remembrance Day.

  RB: Yeah.

  DB: And we’d have to sing the song in our creepy old voices.

  RB: Oh, with tears in your eyes. And I’d like to think that by then you’d have somehow lost an arm and you’d have your sleeve pinned to your jacket.

  DB: (Laughter) Somehow I’d been involved in the Great War.

  RB: (Laughter)

  DB: Yeah, and we’d be singing it like it was the Last Post.

  RB: (Laughter) Because I feel that the paradigm of supporting West Ham is almost perfectly replicated by supporting England. You think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna be triumph, it’s going to be absorbed in a cup run or a signing,’ but ultimately it will inevitably lead to defeat and disappointment. Like Irvine Welsh feeling that in their hearts everyone secretly would prefer to support Hibs, he really believes that, and that there’s something about Hibs that everyone secretly, no matter what they say, thinks Hibs is much cooler.

  DB: There’s something magical about Hibs? I think Irvine Welsh is wrong about that. I certainly never wanted to support Hibs or indeed watch Scottish football in any way, even as a kid, when they used to have the Scottish results I used to think why, why do we have to have this? In England, no one is interested in what Queen of the South did.

  RB: No. I remember as a child thinking what a bizarre litany of words Kilmarnock, Partick Thistle…

  DB: One of our greatest jokes in The Mary Whitehouse Experience, you probably don’t remember, involved that. Because we had a sketch where the bloke who used to read out the football results was at home and of course he speaks in a reading-out-the-results way all the time…

  RB: Oh yeah?

  DB: I really like this joke which is, he is asked ‘What do you think of John Inman?’ And he says, ‘He’s not just Queen of the North, he’s Queen of the South too.’

  RB: (Laughter)

  DB: And I remember thinking, ‘I’m very pleased with that.’

  RB: (Laughter)

  DB: But er…what was I saying? Yes…

  RB: I can’t remember anything after that spectacular joke. It was a condemnation of Scottish football there which people will have to tiptoe around and take bits out of.

  DB: Yeah.

  RB: And then…

  DB: It’s all right, you can condemn Scottish football because the Scots hate us, they hate me and Frank because of that strange thing. It’s a bit like what you’re talking about, the tribalism which football inspires. Which is why I think there is the club vs country thing, you know, more self-consciously hardcore fans prefer clubs because it allows them to be more tribal. There’s more a kind of hate, there’s more sense of local ownership and all that stuff. That’s why Man United fans are sneered at for not being from Manchester you know, it harks back to an older idea of community where people actually supported their local stuff and their local area, which don’t really exist anymore but people wish it would. People wish life was like it is in The Royle Family, not the real Royal Family, the one that Caroline Aherne wrote. Anyway, what am I talking about…?

  RB: Tribalism and Scottish pride over the…

  DB: The thing about Scotland that is really a remnant of that, is that Scottish fans hate England and England fans. Since we wrote Three Lions, whenever I have gone to Scotland some cunt will shout ‘Cunt’ at me, or Frank if I’m with him, for writing that. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes it’s a bit more aggressive in the manner of Scottish people. And it’s interesting that there is no hatred back really. When we were children I was taught to support Scotland in 1974 and 1978 because England weren’t in the World Cup. And it never occurred to me to think, well I can’t because I hate Scotland.

  RB: (Laughter)

  DB: But of course, the Scots would never have supported England in all the times that Scotland haven’t got to the World Cup and England have, and therefore it’s a very interesting example of football tribalism because I always want to say to those Scottish fans, ‘Well, you make yourself look stupid by hating a country and a football team that doesn’t hate you back, you know.’

  RB: Yes, one-sided hate is almost as tragic as unrequited love because it’s an equally onanistic relationship. But I think, David, that the point you’ve made there is again the point where football becomes a reflection of culture at large. It’s just that football provided an outlet for their anti-English sentiments and the geographical, historical and military reasons for that and just provided a template, whereas England don’t have any of those grievances because of the oppression that we’ve applied to them. Stuart Lee did a very good joke when Jimmy Hill tried to defend Ron Atkinson’s racist remarks by saying that the things Ron Atkinson said about, um, Marcel Desailly, ‘Oh, it’s the same as when I get called Chinny.’ And Stuart Lee continued that, well, it’s not really, because there’s not a long history of big-chinned people being oppressed and abused by the white man, and he continued that analogy for as long as he could.

  DB:…and the comedy being about breaking a butterfly upon a wheel as it so often is with Stuart Lee, but yes he is correct about that.

  RB: And isn’t that similar to what you’re saying about Scotland in that hatred is actually a reflection of something cultural and football has really become the canvas on which that is played out?

  DB: Football is very interesting in the way that it can reflect culture in that way. That the reason Scottish fans hate England, it’s a way of creating their own identity through that hate. If you’re a small country with a bigger country nearby that you feel oppressed by, one way of creating your identity is to hate that country. In the list of what makes a Scottish person Scottish, hating England is probably up there after kilts and haggis. And so it must be because England doesn’t quite have that. That hating another country makes us what we are thing. Although it does have it a bit because I think a lot of English people now hate America, don’t they?

  RB: Right.

  DB: Not all of them but you’ll see a lot of anti-Americanism, especially from the British Left. I think that is partly the same thing. It’s about, right ok, we don’t have an empire anymore, how can we create a British identity for ourselves, let’s hate all together and communally this country which is now much bigger and more important than us. I think we’re moving slightly away from football but I think football shows it in a different way. It’s important to Arsenal fans that they hate Tottenham, that’s part of what makes an Arsenal fan isn’t it? It’s not just where you come from or liking Arsène Wenger or remembering Herbert Chapman.

  RB: Yeah, if you were to say, I am an Arsenal fan but also I quite like Tottenham, it would undermine you as an Arsenal fan.

  DB: I don’t know what it is with West Ham, but Chelsea don’t really have an object point of hatred. There is a strong anti-Semitic section of Chelsea, who will shout ‘Yiddo’ at Tottenham fans and will start shouting ‘We hate Tottenham and we hate Tottenham’, but I always feel that they have a slight inferiority complex about it, because they don’t hate Tottenham as much as Arsenal do.

  RB: It’s strange, isn’t it, because West Ham fans ‘Hate Tottenham, we hate Tottenham, we are Tottenham haters’. But when it comes to hating Tottenham, you can’t beat Arsenal.