Tuesday 2nd Nov: Liver Birds, Bunnymen, Everton and The Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance

Blame it on The Liver Birds, Nerys Hughes and Polly James, not the ones atop the Royal Liver Building. Blame it on The Boys From The Blackstuff. Blame it on an obsession with Echo and the Bunnymen and, only marginally less so, The Teardrop Explodes. Whatever, I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the city of Liverpool.

It probably did originate with Sandra and Beryl’s adventures from their bedsit in Huskisson Street. To a 6 year old from middle class suburban Nottingham, Liverpool really did look like another world and its inhabitants truly alien. There was a spirit. The Liver Birds, intended as a response to the Likely Lads, were so much more feisty than their Geordie counterparts, who, by comparison, seemed world-weary and beaten.

A previous blog (https://peeveeh.wixsite.com/ziggerzagger/post/weds-29th-sept-glass-onions-the-annie-road-darts-team-and-a-tough-evening-for-frank-clark) has already dealt with the ‘joys’ of trips to Anfield as an away supporter and the feeling of being somewhere totally different to anywhere else. Those trips were scary, but exhilarating and there still seemed a magic about the place.

Boys From The Blackstuff took us deeper and darker into a city like no other; a city that the government had effectively gone to war with, written off. It’s a long and complex story, brilliantly told in Simon Hughes’ There She Goes: Liverpool A City On Its Own.

Then there’s the music. For a period, The Bunnymen were everything. Dark, brooding, magnificent. The self-proclaimed “greatest band of all time.” Their brilliance and the atmosphere around them captured forever in this film of The Crystal Day from the Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj49UtA3t6o (Part One, the build-up)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTixTfVD7k (Part Two, the gig)

By the time of the Crystal Day, I’d already taken the plunge and moved to Liverpool to study at the Poly. From home on Spellow Lane, just alongside Goodison, we embarked on the bike ride around the city that traced the shape of a Bunnny-god. Breakfast at Brian’s Lean and Hungry, served by the man himself, a punch drunk old boxer. Next, a haircut at the legendary Victor’s salon, where the feel of cold steel on the neck was the only real option. Victor was fabulous but shaky. Sometimes you got out uncut. Finally, a round trip on the ferry, tickets all stamped to give access to St George’s Hall for the first gig there since the Beatles. The Bunnymen didn’t do things by halves.

The Bunnymen characterised the city. Dark but funny. Cool in a knowing sort of way. There were a lot of in jokes and themes. Stuff that felt exclusively Liverpool. Not for the woolly-backs. Echoed, pardon the unintentional pun, by the football fans who had already moved on from simple casual or scallydom into something much more sartorially weird and heavily influenced by the heroin epidemic and music that worked well on smack.

And it was a dark time. Heroin truly was everywhere. In that house on Spellow Lane, we lost a mate to it, who threw himself off the towers in Everton Valley. Unemployment topped 50%. Large swathes of the city were a derelict wasteland. Theft was rife - we gave up locking the doors. Getting them kicked in cost more than anything we had to have nicked, especially once Granada on County Road stopped letting us rent a telly from them. Poly was repeatedly closed as the city, under Militant, ran out of cash in its fight against Thatcher. We went on a lot of marches. At Government level, memos were sent planning the managed declline and withdrawal from the city.

And yet… it was magical. That spirit lived on and nowhere else felt like it. The pubs, the clubs, the waterfront, the people. The clubs. From the small, pokey Blue Angel (The Raz) where the Beatles had played to the opulence of the State Ballroom. And then, there was the Grafton Rooms, possibly the scariest, maddest might out ever and no place for an out of town student, which, of course, made it just the place for this out of town student.

I couldn’t afford to travel home to watch Forest often and I couldn’t bring myself to visit Anfield regularly (though I did accompany mates there when I had to!), so got a season ticket in the Enclosure at Goodison, more out of pity than anything. Early Howard Kendall, tiny ‘crowds’ all very dismal. And, of course, they went all brilliant on me! From that Adrian Heath goal at Oxford onward, they became a thing of great beauty. The 3-1 demolition of Bayern in 1985 still remains one of my greatest football memories. Watching in silence from the Enclosure as Everton demolished Forest 5-0 in December 1984, less so.

And in 1987, I left. I tried to find work there, but it was as hopeless as you might expect. I ended up in London and rarely returned to Liverpool, other than for the odd Forest away-day at either Anfield or Goodison. It was at the turnstiles to the latter, sometime in the mid 80s, that I first met Brian legend Julie and started my fledgling ‘career’ in writing for that gloriously shambolic fanzine. Happy days and I‘d clearly become a right fashionista as Julie has written recently in Bandy & Shinty of ”knowing it was him by his dungarees.” Oh dear! In fact, happy days on all levels - the “psycho bitch landlady” Julie wrote of in the same piece was none other than the first and little-lamented Mrs Zagger.

Which brings us to Hillsborough. There’s little to add to the chronology and analysis of that terrible day, 15th April 1989. There are articles and books aplenty written by more knowledgable, more closely involved, better writers than me. From a personal persective, I travelled up from London by train with an old school-friend, Tim. We met up with my old Dad and my brother, who was up from Reading. Our story will be much the same as any other Forest fan on the Kop. Station, ground, crowded terrace, usual build up, nothing untoward, assumption of crowd trouble, responding with hostility. Gradual realisation, noting the first obvious death, stunned as the true horror unfolded. I’m not sure we even spoke. Heading back to the station, the ever increasing numbers, the rumours, the fear. On the train to St Pancras, trying to console and reassure the Scouse dad, in bits, who had not been able to find his lad. No mobiles, of course. Dad and lad reunited at the barrier, walking away not wanting to intrude on such a moment. That evening, meeting the girlfriend of the time, who was acting in a West End production with a now pretty major TV and radio celebrity. Telling her and that celebrity about the day, over way too much to drink. Listening to him, famously Scouse, recounting my story, including the Dad and lad on the train, as though it was his on the radio the next day. Odd behaviour.

The following week, Julie, same mate Tim and myself travelled to Liverpool to lay a Forest-badge shaped wreath in front of The Kop. I recall nothing else about that day. I think we went by train. I don’t think we stayed over. No idea really. I’d imagine we drank a lot.

And that was it. The cover-ups, trials, lies, outrage, the filth from the S*n, all closely followed. The outrage and sadness shared from a distance, other than the day of the 25 year anniversary of the disaster when another Forest friend, who had almost lost his brother in Pen 3, and myself spent a weekend in Liverpool, having been to lay another wreath at Anfield. And what a night that led to… complete obliteration in an incredible karaoke joint on Mount Pleasant, possibly Smokie Mo’s. Old fellers who should’ve been in Vegas for real, powerful women who made Shirley Bassey sound shy and retiring and two legless, inept blokes from Nottingham doing You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling to a very undeserved but much-appreciated kind, rapturous reception. We didn’t have to buy another drink all night, such was the generosity once we’d explained why we were in town and people’s ears had recovered from the atonal assault. Sinatra and Martin we were not.

Which I think, karaoke night aside, is how it has been for most of us from the Forest perspective. 20,000 or so of us stood helplessly and watched 97 people, some only children, being crushed to death in criminal circumstances. My experience is that this is not something that is ever up for discussion. I’ve not discussed it with family, mates, colleagues, partners, anyone. I’m sure most are the same. So, why is this? After all, we are all living with horrific stuff buried somewhere in there. The group The Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance (HSA) would suggest that witnesses are likely to have suffered PTSD to some degree. HSA offer therapy for this and their offer of support extends to Forest fans who were witnesses, a group they feel have been largely ignored. They reached out to Forest fans on the most recent anniversary and were contacted by many who stated that they felt no one had ever cared about or listened to them, which is tragic.

So why have we not spoken about it? Some of it is bravado and machismo - we just don’t need or do that sort of thing. Some of it may be our ‘nature’. Someone once said to me that we’re an enigmatic lot, us East Midlanders. Don’t get too up, don’t get too down. Sort of enjoy a bit of misery. Phlegmatic, I think is the word. Your Arthur Seaton, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning type of character. That’s us. You can see it in football. Won the European Cup twice. Yeah, duck, it was OK, but a bit crap, realleh…

Another thing, for me personally and I’m sure for others, is a feeling that we don‘t deserve to grieve or have negative feelings about it. It’s someone else’s tragedy. It’s not for us to intrude on it or ‘claim’ any of the sympathy or support. That would be crass and insensitive. And maybe that’s how outsiders view it too, hence the abysmal, pathetic Fulham keyboard warriors having a snide poke at me last week for having mentioned that being at Hillsborough kind of gets losing at home to Fulham in perspective. Maybe I’ve no right to feel that?

And then we open the can of worms that is, “it should’ve been you lot on that terrace,” which raises its head every so often. So we’re meant to feel guilty for that decision are we? It might’ve been a poor decision and maybe the club with greater support ought to have been on the Kop, but the outcome would, in all likelihood, have been just the same, just with a different city in mourning.

Whatever, Hillsborough has affected me and this is the first time I’ve ever said that. 32 years. From 25 to 57 years old. Things have never been the same since that day. Mood swings, over-fondness for drink and, at times, drugs. A perpetual reliance on anti-depressants. A feeling that nothing is really ever going to last. Destruction of relationships. A sense of pointlessness. Guilt? Possibly. Helplessness? Certainly. It comes out in dreams. Anger. Never-ending social and political anger at the demonisation by the ‘ruling elite’ of a city’s people and football fans and working people in general, that led to the conditions that permitted the tragedy to happen, made it almost inevitable. And still those sort of people hold power. It bothers me on a big scale and it bothers me on a football level as the game gets more and more taken over by the same elites, the same tax-dodging offshore investment types (players included) who plead for your loyalty but actually don’t care about normal people even enough to pay the taxes that support them.

To finish, a plug for the great work of HSA, who, in addition to their core work for survivors of Pens 3 and 4, have recently started a WhatsApp group for affected Forest fans and other witnesses. You can see more about their work here: https://www.hsa-us.co.uk/

and they are also active on Twitter, @HillsboroughSu1. A Not For Profit Organisation, whose work depends entirely on donations, I urge you to support them as best you can.