Soccer and Society, vol. 5, No. 3 Autumn 2004, pp 392–403ISSN 1466–0970 print/1743–9590 onlineDOI: 10.1080/1466097042000279625 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

Hit and Tell: a Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir

STEVE REDHEAD

Taylor and Francis LtdFSAS5305.sgm10.1080/1466097042000279625Soccer and Society1466-0970 (print)/1743-9590 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd53000000Autumn 2004SteveRedheads.redhead@westnet.com.

This is a review essay on the genre of British soccer hooligan books. These ‘hit and tell’confessional tales of soccer casuals fandom are told in the form of an historical memoir. Fiveexamples of hit and tell books are reviewed and assessed against the novelistic accounts foundin contemporary football fiction books by authors such as John King and Kevin Sampson andthe more rigorous demands of the sociology of soccer culture. It is argued in the essay on hitand tell writing that such populist publishing can be harnessed to fill in gaps in historical andethnographic work in the sociology of soccer fan cultures, but that what is needed in the future,

above all, is better theorizing of soccer culture and its modernities.

Introduction

The Euro 2004 Championships in Portugal brought more than just the shockresult of the new century – a Greece victory over the fancied hosts. It also broughtthe nomination, seemingly against all the odds, of England soccer fans as candi-dates for ‘fair play’ awards for their off the pitch contribution to the competition.This accolade came despite massive media publicity about the deportation of someEngland soccer fans and numerous news clips of their bar brawls with Portugueseriot police. Once England were out of Euro 2004, beaten, albeit on penalties, bythe more skilful and adventurous team of the home country, twenty something cultfiction novelist Helen Walsh

1

writing in

The Guardian

, argued that ‘thug life is notthe English disease – it’s a sign of the times everywhere’ and the ‘time has comefor our noble representatives in the media to start loving the English again’.

2

Further, Walsh argued, ‘as a mixed race girl who’s followed football for years,home and away, it’s asinine to continue to ignore the huge progress we’ve made’.In an era of New Labour league tables and quality assurance, such claims seem, onthe surface, to make logical sense. The performance-based criteria of the modernage should be recognized and produce its reward. In this version of the story of ourtimes, modernity, or post-traditional society, has triumphed and soccer hooligan-ism, a part of the traditional past, is no more - or at least not a high priority lawand order problem in the wake of mass media images of Al Qaeda terror and Iraq’sinsurgencies.

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Soccer and Its Modernities

But this divided, even ambivalent, reaction, involving journalists and novelistsocial critics, to a major soccer competition, and the behaviour of spectators, is infact nothing new. Arguably this contested process had begun with the reaction toEngland supporters at the World Cup in Japan 2002 or even before this period atEuro 2000 in Belgium and Holland or at Euro 96 in England.

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Certainly in the late1990s, after Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power in the UK, there was consid-erable media coverage about the improvement of the behaviour of soccer specta-tors, at club and national level, as Labour, and Britain, modernized and became,in Blair’s vision, a new young country (again). Labour even adopted Ian Broudie(of The Lightning Seeds) and laddish comedian soccer fans, David Baddiel andFrank Skinner’s Euro 96 anthem ‘Football’s Coming Home’ as their own politicalchant: ‘Labour’s Coming Home’! As the 1998 World Cup in France got underway, however, British media reporting changed. As with some of the subsequentoverhyped coverage of Euro 2000 and Euro 2004, the media zeroed in on whatthey saw as the soccer ‘thugs’. The ‘return’ of soccer hooliganism by (mainly)English and German fans, as well as indigenous French and other local youth, wasportrayed as something out of another era, when in actuality it had simply becomemore marginalized at Premier League football matches in Britain in the early andmid 1990s; that is, before Blair and after Thatcher. Another novelist, Peruvianauthor Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote provocatively in

The Independent

at the time ofFrance ’98 that:

the spectacle of hordes of drunken English hooligans attacking passers by,charging adversary fans with sticks, stones and knives, engaging in ferociousbattles against the police, smashing shop windows and vehicles and, at times,the very stands of the stadium, has come to be an inevitable corollary ofmajor matches played by England, and of many in the British League. Andyet the fact is that for anyone who lives there, England is a country excep-tionally peaceful and well mannered ... How do we explain this curiousphenomenon? Let us discard from the start the ideological thesis, accordingto which hooligan violence is a heritage of Mrs Thatcher’s economicreforms, which have burdened British society with the deepest imbalancesand pockets of poverty in Western Europe.

4

So, we are tempted to ask, as we look back on almost a decade of modernizing(or de- Thatcherizing) Britain (and football) under Tony Blair, which is it? Are wemodern or traditional? Is thuggish behaviour an English, or British, disease? Aresoccer hooligans back? Did they ever go away? If so, when did these eventshappen? And, anyway, how do we know? If the sociology of soccer culture, andespecially the sociology of soccer hooliganism, had done its job more effectivelyover the years, or transmitted its work better via the media, perhaps we would not

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have to ask these questions. One of the most prominent means, apart fromsociological work, of producing ‘evidence’ in our accelerated media culture ofdiverse modernities

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about this phenomenon has, over the last decade, been thesoccer culture memoir. There are essentially three versions of this product offootball fandom: one is journalistic, one is novelistic and one is academic. I wantto concentrate in this review essay on the first of these but with reference to theother two.

Hit and Tell

After Nick Hornby’s early 1990s bestselling memoir

Fever Pitch

,

6

there has been aseemingly inexorable output of a new genre, what I call here ‘hit and tell’,especially devoted to revealing confessional soccer hooligan stories. The so-called‘hoolie’ shelves of bookshops are weighed down with the volumes and mainstreambookshops sell them by the truckload. Originally what was once referred to as thenew football writing

7

eschewed hooligan stories but as the 1990s wore on a marketwas created for the hit and tell accounts which were often ‘fictionalized’ (certainlyin form if not in content).

The ‘fiction’ category was literally accurate in some cases as a new breed ofcontemporary fiction writers, which I have elsewhere, with heavy irony, labelledthe ‘repetitive beat generation’,

8

proceeded to paint a more convincing picture ofthe history of modern British soccer fan culture and its hooliganism than hadmuch formal ethnographic work by sociologists of soccer deviance or evenundercover journalists and police. Writers with literary credentials like RoddyDoyle and D.J. Taylor were included in the anthologies, and burgeoning move-ment, of new football writing which was essentially seen, self-consciously, as a newbourgeois genre in literature. Soccer in Britain was, at the same time, beingmodernized and resold, as a commercial product, to a more middle class, familyoriented audience, what sociologist of soccer Anthony King called the ‘newconsumer fans’.

9

Later in the decade, cult fiction writers like John King, whose‘realist’ novel

The Football Factory

sold hundreds of thousands of copies, wouldcreate what they definitely saw as a new ‘working class’ fiction around soccer,explicitly designed to upset the ‘middle class literary set’ in Britain who hadembraced this strand of popular culture for a while after Italia 90 and then uncer-emoniously dropped it. The loose football fiction trilogy of novels by John King,

10

together with Kevin Sampson’s

Awaydays

,

11

alongside sections of much of thefiction of Irvine Welsh, gave accounts of soccer fan culture and territorial malehooliganism – and much else about our contemporary cultural ‘modernities’ –which felt ‘truthful’ in a way that many media reports, academic treatises, politicalcurrent affairs discussions and, indeed, ‘bad’ hoolie books did not.

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The first ofthis football fiction trilogy, John King’s

The Football Factory

, was initially drama-tized by Paul Hodson as a stage play and eventually made into a feature film bydirector Nick Love several years later. Released to much media moral panic

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shortly before Euro 2004, the film was widely criticized because commentatorsclaimed it used ‘real’ football hooligans as actors and advisers. An argument canbe made that writers like Irvine Welsh and John King produced fiction output, aswell as non-fiction drama for television, film and theatre, which was actually moreevocative of the culture they were describing, and its history, than much of thesociology of soccer culture in the 1980s and 1990s which often employed a footballfandom component to authenticate its research. These cult fiction writers alsohelped to clearly distinguish the hit and tell books from ‘new football writing’:‘

Fever Pitch

with testosterone and eight pints of lager ... King writes powerfullywith a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannotbe ignored’, as

The Glasgow Herald

reviewed one of John King’s novels.

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Thesenovelistic accounts of British soccer hooliganism since the 1970s, interesting and,also, problematic as they are, will not take the primary focus of this review essay.

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Rather, I want to turn to the trash or pulp aesthetic of the soccer hooligan memoir,displayed in the journalistic brand of hit and tell, in order to push the sociology ofsoccer fan culture forward.

Terrace Retro

The amateur journalistic ‘insider’ accounts are now proliferating at a pace andform a veritable library of hooligan stories. There are many dozens of them, witha variety of club firms or gangs involved. The best example of the hit and tell genreare the confessional writings published by Milo Books, five of which are underreview here, but other publishers have also been cashing in.

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Milo, a small scaleLancashire publishing business originally located in Bury and recently moved toLytham St Anne’s, is the brainchild of Peter Walsh, who has produced provoca-tive investigative journalism on contemporary gang violence for various differentmedia.

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One of the criticisms of the sociology of soccer fan culture, especially in theUK, over the last decade is that it has too often descended into ‘uncriticaljournalism’

17

and has neglected sociological theory – indeed it has been dubbed as‘uncritical’ and ‘undertheorized’ by critics within the debates which for a whiletook on the unappealing status of ‘football wars’.

18

Anthony King’s

The End of theTerraces

specifically

19

singled out my own writings and those of Richard Haynes,Rogan Taylor, Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong, as well as other work inthe field of sociology of soccer culture by implication. King’s charge was that therewas a widespread ‘false populism’

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within contemporary sociology of footballwhich ‘amounted to little more than journalism’. Other participants in the debatesmade similar observations.

Four of the Milo books under review here, by Allt, Nicholls, Jones and Rivers,and Cowens

are

all ‘uncritical journalism’. These sorts of books are part of a ‘cult’publishing category. Hit and tell literature is unashamedly partisan and boastful,recounting 20 years, or more, of violent male football fandom associated with a

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particular British league club and its ‘mob’. They are written in the form of fanmemoir. None of them have any pretensions to ‘academic’ style or protocol.

21

They are often formularized and written in deliberately ‘trashy’ formats.Quotations and conversations are seemingly made up at will. The authors arealmost always male and in their late 30s or 40s, old enough to have ‘been there,done that and bought the T-shirt’. By virtue of their age they have become self-styled oral historians and archivists of a period when post-industrial Britain, andits soccer culture, was undergoing fundamental ‘modernization’. But these writ-ers, for the most part, baulk at expertise, criteria for measurement and learning.Indeed academia, like the media, in many ways is the enemy, partly responsible forthe myriad misrepresentations of soccer fan culture and its history which thesebooks perceive as a fundamental problem and consequently seek to put to rights.The hit and tell books celebrate and romanticize a whole hooligan subculture.

That said Phil Thornton’s book,

Casuals

, is the best journalistic account ofBritish youth cultural history since the 1970s that I have yet read. Labels andsoccer have gone hand in hand since the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘subcultural’period, becoming mainstream sometime in the mid-1980s and an internationalyouth style ever since. Casual history, in fact, is the missing key to the sociologyof British soccer hooligan culture over the last 30 years and is the underlyinglink between all of these five books under review. Casual designer fashion hasbeen intertwined with the history of football fan culture and soccer hooliganismin Britain since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and remains intertwined today.

22

The shape and contours of the events of hooliganism at and around footballmatches over a quarter of a century connect with the rise and fall and rise(again) of soccer casuals. Phil Thornton acknowledges that casual culture hasbeen ‘all too often disfigured by needless, internecine violence’ and has ‘alwaysbeen a lifestyle that operated on the margins of criminality and gangsterism’.

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Phil Thornton is in his late 30s and for at least a decade has been involved in(critical) journalistic work on music, fashion and football and the archiving ofthe ‘last’ British youth culture, the soccer casuals. With Peter Hooton, leadsinger of The Farm and editor of

The End

fanzine, he is part of a Merseysidewriters collective called Partizan Media, its online fanzine

Fried Icecream

and thewebsite

Terrace Retro

. Thornton has been connected to football fanzine culturefor many years and contributes to the Manchester United fanzine

United WeStand

. Importantly, Thornton writes in an accessible journalistic style but is aswell read on the background of British youth culture since the 1970s and thehistory of hooligan subcultures in general, as many academics. He neatly situatescasuals in a subcultural timeline from the scuttlers of the late nineteenth centurythrough teds, rockers, mods and skinheads of the 1950s and 1960s and thepunks of the 1970s.

Casuals, as Thornton points out, began as a post-mod, post-skinheadsubculture in the 1977-8 football season in Britain, initially in the North ofEngland on Merseyside, closely followed by Manchester, and later in London and

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Scottish cities. By the time Eugene McLaughlin and I wrote our seminal essay onwhat we called soccer’s style wars

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on the eve of the 1985-6 soccer season, the firstafter the Heysel and Bradford disasters, and one which took place against a back-drop of industrial civil war, several years of growth of soccer casual culture hadmeant that a majority of professional league soccer teams in Britain could boasttheir own casual firm, or very often, firms. Phil Thornton rightly cites urbancasual hotspots as diverse as Nottingham, Leeds, Aberdeen, Portsmouth andNorwich in his history of the last 25 years of the ‘scally’ (Merseyside) or ‘perryboy’ (Manchester) lifestyle. Thornton’s book, as he says himself, is ‘no simplisticstudy of designer labels and football thugs’.

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There is a loving attention to detailwith pop musical fads, fashion labels, hair dos and their forever changing stylescarefully choreographed. He argues that it, ‘is an exploration of what shaped apredominantly white working class youth movement in an era of ferocious attacksfrom both a right wing government determined to smash any symbol of urbanresistance and a Sohocentric media unable or unwilling to grasp what was goingon’.

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The casual scene that he traces and trawls, interviewing many of the keyfaces and revisiting most of the main events, according to Thornton ‘has beenmisunderstood and misrepresented’.

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Consequently, Thornton takes us on arollercoaster tour of British youth cultural highpoints such as acid house, hip hopand drum ‘n’ bass and shows how soccer casuals as a youth culture punctuatedthese underground histories. Thornton’s claim to be able to better represent thecasual (sub)culture is based on methodological grounds: first, that he was there, hewas part of it, he was a participant if not a participant observer; and second, thathe talked to many of the other people who also made this unique British youthcultural historical moment. The other four books cited here are hardcore hit andtell ‘pulp’ books which flesh out Thornton’s rich historical narrative.

Nicholas Allt’s

The Boys From The Mersey

tells the story of the Anfield RoadEnd casual firm (‘Annie Road’ in Allt’s scouse street slang) that he was a part offrom the late 1970s. The Anfield Road end was the opposite terrace ‘end’ to thefamous Kop at Liverpool’s then prestigious Anfield stadium, much feared byteams and fans alike. Like other casual firms across the country the older moretraditional (often skinhead) hooligan gangs were embedded in the more traditionalends in the mid–late 1970s. The younger, embryonic casual firms took upresidence in other parts of 1970s soccer grounds, partly because that is where, asyounger fans, they had always stood. The Anfield Road terrace ‘end’ spawned, inthe 1977-8 season, the ‘Annie Road’ firm or mob. Nicholas Allt’s book is the storyof the firm’s travels all over Britain and continental Europe. It begins with thefamiliar hit and tell masculine bravado boast: ‘we were the boys, we were alwaysthe boys and anyone worth his salt and honest enough to admit it knew that wewere the boys’.

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Its claim that this casual crew was the ‘first’, as with many in eachof these books, is always contentious, but the Liverpool team’s forays into Europemeant untold and rarely policed opportunites for scallies ‘jibbing’ (riding trainswithout paying) and ‘robbing’ their way across the ‘new Europe’ and importing

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back into England tons of expensive casual menswear, jewellery and sportswearfrom the looted emporiums of the continent.

The Everton memoir in this collection of books under review is Andy Nicholls’

Scally

. The book is a self-confessed memoir of a ‘Category C Football Hooligan’and the casual firms that Nicholls, an Everton fan in his early 40s, ‘ran’ with fromthe late 1970s to the late 1990s. Category C in the UK National Criminal Intelli-gence Service (Football Section) means violent supporter or organizer of violence.‘Snorty Forty’ was one of the monikers adopted by Nicholls and his fightingmates, one of whom tells the story of the notorious ‘County Road Cutters’ (Cutterswas a label taken up because of the predilection of this particular Merseyside firmto use stanley knives in hooligan encounters). Nicholls’ book proclaims that for25 years he was one of the most active hooligans in the country, a leading figureamong the violent followers of Everton FC. Like many other authors of the hit andtell genre, Andy Nicholls states that he has turned his back on his violent past, butin both the World Cup 2002 in Japan and Korea, and Euro 2004 in Portugal, UKstatutory orders under the Football Offences and Disorder Act 2000 were issuedagainst Nicholls to stop him travelling to the tournaments. Like many of these hitand tell authors, Nicholls is proud of his numerous ‘battles’ with the criminaljustice and penal systems. Indeed, the notice of his travel ban for the 2002 WorldCup forms part of the hardback cover of this confessional book, adorning his wordslike a badge of honour. As in the other histories of the casual crews though, clubrather than country is what matters. Nicholls displays a rare passion andknowledge of modern Everton FC history. Few of the people seriously involvedin casual firms up and down the nation since the late 1970s have had much concernwith the England national team; the same goes for casual firms around Hibernianand Aberdeen amongst others, for example, regarding the Scottish national team.This particular club versus country conflict mirrors a deep-seated aspect of fastchanging modern soccer fandom more generally and is more often than notresolved in favour of club. Territory, represented by the local football club, wasand is, acutely regional for the casual crews.

The ‘Celtic’ example from this set of hooligan books is David Jones’ and TonyRivers’

Soul Crew

, the story of Welsh lower league team Cardiff City’s casual firmfrom the early 1980s to the present. As the book recounts, the Soul Crew was givenworld-wide publicity by the media after a game at Ninian Park, Cardiff, betweenCardiff City of Division 2 of the ‘English’ League and Premier League team LeedsUnited in the third round of the FA Cup played in January 2002, but had in factbeen in existence for 20 years. Although the book claims that the bouts of hooli-ganism between the two sets of supporters in January 2002 was nothing out of theordinary, television cameras shot enough footage for world 24 hour televisionbulletins to feast on for days. Cardiff City’s Soul Crew in the twenty-first centurywere quickly as notorious as Millwall’s Bushwackers in the 1970s and Chelsea’sHeadhunters in the 1980s thanks to the lightning fast looping of global televisionand the tabloid press in our accelerated modernity. The fact that the Soul Crew

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were, and are, outside the Premier League symbolizes the continuing trend of the1990s when lower league casual firms took over much of the earlier notoriety of‘big’ clubs as the policing and CCTV surveillance at Premier League grounds(from 1992 onwards) took its toll on the big city mobs.

The final book under review here is the story of Sheffield United’s ‘Blades’ inthe form of Steve Cowens’

Blades Business Crew

. The ‘BBC’ (Blades Business Crewacronym) story is introduced by long-time Sheffield United fan Paul Heaton,singer in the 1980s ‘indie’ band The Housemartins and later the successful popband The Beautiful South. Heaton, as well as his strident foreword, is granted aphoto and several lyric attributions in Steve Cowens’ self-styled confessionalfootball hooligan memoir which begins in the early 1980s with the familiar rapidspread of casual culture around soccer away from the main centres of Merseyside,Manchester and London. As with most of the other hit and tell books on themarket, Cowens’ account is vitriolic about the ‘sociologists, anthropologists andother so called “experts” who have had their say’ and ‘haven’t a clue’.

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Instead heclaims to have presented the ‘narrative as honestly as possible and as accurately asmemory allows’ and to ‘know’ intimately the Sheffield United fan culture herepresented as a ‘top boy’ for over 20 years.

30

The ‘league tables’ that really matterto Cowens and his fellow club ‘historians’ are not the ones showing the position oftheir teams (or the best schools or universities); the rivalry between the soccercasual firms is what matters. So in Cowens’ case it is Sheffield Wednesday hooliganfans that come in for most disdain. In a section on the A–Z of violence, Cowenslists his all time ‘top’ soccer hooligan crews. Media favourites Cardiff’s Soul Crew,West Ham United’s Inter-City Firm, Chelsea’s Headhunters and Millwall’sBushwackers feature prominently, but so, too, do Manchester City’s early 1980smob Mayne Line Crew (named after Mayne’s coaches in Manchester, not MaineRoad) and Everton’s Snorty Forty (featured in Andy Nicholls book). The hit andtell books all reference each other (as academics do) but what matters here is‘respect’ for the crews who did not cut and run when attacked or provoked, or who‘took’ the ‘ends’ or, later, parts of stands, of the home casual crews.

The Field of Sociology of Soccer Fan Culture

After reading these five hit and tell books, it is possible to argue that we are betteroff with the ‘real’ uncritical journalism of the ‘street’ than the allegedly ‘pseudo’uncritical journalism of the sociologists of soccer culture, including myself.However there is a desperate need for better sociological theorizing in ouracademic enterprise of creating a satisfactory sociology of football, and formethodological solutions to the continuing problems of ethnographic work onsoccer hooliganism and indeed soccer culture in general. This need still remainsdespite the possibility of using material from populist publishing projects whichmight seem, in normal circumstances, to be off limits. Hit and tell books certainlyepitomize the ‘undertheorized’ and ‘uncritical’ criticisms levelled at some

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sociology of soccer fan culture work, however evocative they are of what I haveelsewhere called ‘low modernism’ and ‘low modernity’.

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But some of them, atleast, help to repair gaps in historical and ethnographic knowledge. It is hard,though, to ‘romanticize’ these hit and tell stories. They are often nasty, brutishand not particularly short.

This question of theory, and the need for it to be critical and apt, brings us backto the ‘field’. Sociology of British soccer culture, as represented by sociologicalresearchers in the UK

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and their many international colleagues, has, rightly in myview, become an exercise in anthropology.

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It has its successes and its failures butit needs to pursue its stated goals with renewed vigour in the future. We arepresented with an ever expanding number of international soccer fan cultures,especially based around nation states but also around ‘club’ and city, which can besociologically ‘known’. It is here that, perhaps, some of the sociology of soccerculture critics’ strictures

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about undertheorized and uncritical thinking in theBritish examples might have a point. But it is not undertheorizing or uncriticalthinking

per se

that is the major problem. I have pointed to some of the unorthodoxuses we might make of ‘uncritical journalism’ in this review essay. The problem,rather, is developing the most appropriate conceptual apparatus. That is whatmatters above all. So, too, does being prepared to adapt such apparatus to shiftsover time. We can see this in the persistence of debates over soccer and(post)modernity. ‘Post-modern’ as a term for many sociologists of soccer culture,

35

for example, remains an era or epoch –

after

modernity, which in itself is aftertradition. I am inclined, instead, to theorize the ‘post’ as ‘always already’ withinmodernity. There is just modernity, nothing afterwards. This distinction mattersbecause what the sociology of soccer culture offers is very detailed, intricatepictures of more or less differentiated soccer cultures on a global scale. But this isa rapidly shrinking, mediatized globe, the accelerated modern world where‘classic’ sociological theory is not always very helpful any more. We need to renewour thinking about soccer and modernity more generally.

In my own rethinking of this matter I want to argue that it is ‘modernities’,

36

and their contemporary overlapping, rather than transitions from modernity topost-modernity (or for that matter, to trawl contemporary sociology moregenerally, solid modernity to liquid modernity, or first modernity to secondmodernity, or early modernity to late modernity) that we should address. The‘low modernity’ of the soccer casuals, then, in this version of the history of soccermodernities, sits alongside, not simply after or before, the ‘new labour modernity’of England football fans with their flags of St George, replica shirts and their fairplay awards.

NOTES

1. See Helen Walsh,

Brass

(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004).2.

The Guardian

, 3 July 2004.

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3. See Mark Perryman (ed.),

Going Oriental: Football After World Cup 2002

(Edinburgh: Mainstream,2002), Mark Perryman (ed.),

Hooligan Wars: Causes and Effects of Football Violence

(Edinburgh:Mainstream, 2001) and Mark Perryman (ed.),

The Ingerland Factor: Home Truths From Football

(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). Perryman, co-founder of Philosophy Football, ‘sporting outfitters ofintellectual distinction’, has been an activist and leading participant in the movement to giveEngland’s national football fans a better image for the last decade.

4.

The Independent

, 8 June 1998.5. See Steve Redhead,

Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture

(Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, and Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004) on acceleratedculture and accelerated modernity. Also, see Steve Redhead (ed.),

The Paul Virilio Reader

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).6.

Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life

(London: Gollancz, 1992) is often mistakenly referred to, or classified, as anovel when it is in fact a memoir.

7. Nick Hornby (ed.),

My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing

(London: Witherby,1993). For an assessment of the new football writing from the perspective of the sociology of soccerculture see Anthony King,

The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s

(London: Leicester University Press, 1998), Chapter 13.8. See Steve Redhead,

Repetitive Beat Generation

(Edinburgh: Rebel Inc, 2000), passim, but especially myinterviews with Irvine Welsh, John King, Kevin Williamson and Gordon Legge, and my editorialintroduction ‘The Repetitive Beat Generation – Live’.

9. Anthony King,

The End of the Terraces

, Chapter 14.10. John King,

The Football Factory

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) was the best selling first novel. Thesecond and third books in the trilogy were

Headhunters

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) and

EnglandAway

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1998). John King went on to plan a second loose fiction trilogy, onmusic and white male British working class identity, of which two novels have so far been published:

Human Punk

(London: Jonathan Cape, 2000) and

White Trash

(London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). His,unconnected, sixth novel,

The Prison House

(London: Jonathan Cape) was published in 2004.11. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1998, the historical context for

Awaydays

is the rise of Tranmere Roverscasuals in 1979. As an avid Liverpool fan, Kevin Sampson, former manager of Merseyside band TheFarm, also wrote his own retort to Nick Hornby’s

Fever Pitch

memoir in the hilarious non-fictionaccount of following Liverpool FC home and away in the 1997-8 season,

Extra Time: A Season In TheLife Of A Football Fan

(London: Yellow Press, 1998). Sampson went on to write a number of unrelatedcult fiction novels for Jonathan Cape. The Farm’s ‘All Together Now’, remixed from the 1990 hitversion, was re-released to coincide with Euro 2004.

12. Also, the best of the novelistic and journalistic hit and tell books differ qualitatively from the worst. Inthis latter category, see the so-called ‘evidence’ of hooliganism in accounts by a number of authorswhose true confessional books really do seem fictional; for instance, amongst many possible examples,Colin Ward,

Well Frogged Out: The Fans’ True Story of France 98

(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1998), andDougie and Eddy Brimson,

England, My England: The Trouble With The National Football Team

(London: Headline, 1996).13.

The Glasgow Herald

, 5 October 1996.14. The novelistic and journalistic aspects of the genre are, inevitably, intertwined. Irvine Welsh, for

instance, penned the introduction to Martin King and Martin Knight,

The Naughty Nineties:Football’s Coming Home? (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999) and John King wrote the introduction toMartin King and Martin Knight, Hoolifan: Thirty years Of Hurt (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999).Both the above books explicitly take on, via the subtitles and the sub-text, the Broudie/Baddiel/Skinner version of the new football fandom of the 1990s. Bizarrely, in one of the hit and tell booksabout each club’s supposed soccer culture ‘faces’, Irvine Welsh is interviewed as the Hibernian‘hoolie’ (hooligan) representative. Irvine Welsh is most certainly a lifelong Hibs fan and his books,films and musical ventures are packed with ‘Hibs Boy’ references and barely disguised real hooliganevents. He knows a lot of people who could be described as ‘faces’ but even he would not make sucha claim. Amongst other projects, Irvine Welsh has been working on a film about Cardiff City’s SoulCrew football firm.

15. The publishers of these books, because of their supposed ‘hooligan’ content, tend to be small scaleoperations; see, for instance, London’s John Blake Publishing, responsible for several examples of thehit and tell genre in books such as Cass Pennant’s West Ham United Inter-City Firm hooligan firmmemoir, Congratulations: You Have Just Met the ICF published in 2002.

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16. Amongst other investigative journalism, Peter Walsh, who is in his early 40s, wrote the ground-breaking Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs, self-published by Milo Books out ofLytham St Anne’s in 2003. He has been a professional journalist for the Manchester Evening News,The Sun and The Daily Mail amongst others. As well as being the publisher of many of the hit and tellbooks, he co-wrote one of the best known of them in 1997 with Mickey Francis, Guvnors: TheShocking True Story of a Soccer Hooligan Gang Leader (Bury: Milo Books) on one of the 1980sManchester City football firms, the Guvnors.

17. Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, Chapter 1.18. Ibid. Anthony King, in a later, paperback edition of The End of the Terraces published in 2002,

withdraws some of the personalized criticism of fellow sociologists of soccer culture he made in theoriginal manuscript, but his attribution of ‘uncritical journalism’ remains a valid debating point forthose involved in the field. For my own assessment of some of the ‘football wars’ and ‘academic menbehaving badly’ debates, see Steve Redhead ‘Post-Fandom and the Millennial Boos’ (Unit for Law andPopular Culture Occasional Papers, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 2000). I amgrateful to Anthony King for subsequent correspondence and conversations which helped to moveforward the debates in the important joint enterprise of being ‘for the sociology of football’.

19. Ibid, pp.4-15. 17.20. Ibid., pp.1-1521. All three dimensions (journalistic, novelistic and academic) of hit and tell are connected at some

point. The most cited, and approved, academic book on soccer culture in journalistic as well as novel-istic hit and tell writing is Gary Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing The Score (Oxford: Berg,1998) which is an award winning anthropology of Sheffield United ‘Blades’ hooliganism over a20 year period, often told in the style of South Yorkshire street slang. Another participant observationstudy, John Sugden’s excellent ethnography of the hooligan blaggers of soccer culture in Britain inthe late 1990s and early twenty-first century, Scum Airways: Inside Football’s Underground Economy(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002), admits a ‘complete violation of …usual academic standards andstyle’. John Sugden also cites Martin King, Martin Knight and Peter Walsh as influences on the bookand its writing.

22. The changing designer labels and fashions of soccer casuals since the late 1970s are best seen visually.For a recent photographic account, with some explanatory text, of casuals in soccer fan history over thelast 20 years, see Lorne Brown and Nick Harvey, A Casual Look: A Photodiary of Football Fans 1980sto 2001 (Brighton: Football Culture UK, 2001).

23. Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult (Lytham: MiloBooks, 2003), p.10.

24. See Steve Redhead and Eugene McLaughlin, ‘Soccer’s Style Wars’, New Society, 16 August, 1985.25. Thornton, Casuals, p.9.26. Ibid.27. Ibid.28. Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew, Football’s First

Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004), p. 9.29. Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer Hooligan Top Boy (Bury: Milo

Books, 2001), p.xx.30. Ibid.31. See Steve Redhead (ed.), with Derek Wynne and Justin O’Connor, The Clubcultures Reader: Readings

in Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), especially my editorial introduction, and SteveRedhead, Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues: The Transformation of Soccer Culture (London:Routledge, 1997).

32. For two good examples of rigorous sociologies of soccer culture based around British soccer clubs,see John Williams, Stephen Hopkins and Cathy Long (eds) Passing Rhythms: Liverpool FC and theTransformation of Football (Oxford: Berg, 2001) and Garry Robson, “No One Likes Us, We Don’tCare”: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (Oxford: Berg, 2000). See my review in Sociology35 (2001) 1004-5.

33. See, for a well thought out schema for future research in the sociology of soccer culture, RichardGiulianotti and Gary Armstrong, ‘Introduction: Reclaiming The Game – An Introduction to theAnthropology of Football’ in Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong (eds), Entering The Field: NewPerspectives On World Football (Oxford: Berg, 1997).

34. See Anthony King, 1998, The End of the Terraces, and the paperback edition 2002

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35. For instance, see Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity,1999).

36. See Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist For An Accelerated Culture and The Paul Virilio Reader. Seealso We Have Never Been Postmodern, 2005, forthcoming.

BOOKS UNDER REVIEW

Nicholas Allt, The Boys from the Mersey: The Story of the Annie Road End Crew,Football’s First Clobbered-Up Mob (Lytham: Milo Books, 2004). Pp 296.15.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-24-5

Phil Thornton, Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion, The Story of a Terrace Cult(Lytham: Milo Books, 2003) Pp 287. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN 1-9038-54148

Andy Nicholls, Scally: Confessions of a Category C Hooligan (Bury: Milo Books,2002) Pp 288. 14.99 (hardback). ISBN 1-903854-11-3

David Jones and Tony Rivers, Soul Crew: The Inside Story of Britain’s Most Noto-rious Hooligan Gang (Bury: Milo Books, 2002) Pp viii+216. 7.99 (paperback).ISBN 1-903854-08-3.

Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew: The Shocking Diary of a Soccer HooliganTop Boy (Bury: Milo Books, 2001) Pp xxxiii+250. 7.99 (paperback). ISBN0-9530847-8-7