"Dirty Northern B*st*rds!" And Other Tales From The Terraces: The Story of Britain's Football Chants
224
"Dirty Northern B*st*rds!" And Other Tales From The Terraces: The Story of Britain's Football Chants
224eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783960613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"Dirty Northern B*st*rds!"
And Other Tales from the Terraces The Story of Britain's Football Chants
By Tim Marshall
Elliott and Thompson Limited
Copyright © 2014 Tim MarshallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78396-061-3
CHAPTER 1
First Half
Football Chants in Britain Today
It's cold, wet and muddy. Perfect conditions for Chelsea v. Newcastle on a Saturday afternoon in late February at Stamford Bridge.
The Chelsea midfield genius, Bobby von Dazzler, five foot six of pure talent, is busy sashaying through the Newcastle defence – the term 'silky skills' is being used by the talkSPORT commentator – when suddenly the Newcastle centre half enforcer, Ernst Strongman, six foot six of solid oak, decides 'that's quite enough of that': a tree trunk of leg scythes down the gazelle. The injured party utters a scream that can be heard in row Z, collapses like Bambi on ice and then rolls over four times, which is three times too many for a real injury, but one less than is required for even the home fans to start laughing at the acting skills.
And then from the Shed End comes the chant: 'You dirty northern bastards! – You dirty northern bastards!'
By now the beautiful game is heading towards World Wrestling slam-down levels of theatricality. Ernst has both hands at his head, then palms outstretched in an 'I never touched him' gesture and, finally, a look of sheer incredulity on his face when the referee blows for a foul. (This can progress to holding one's head in both hands and even sinking to one's knees at the injustices of life if a yellow card is produced.) Ernst's team mates are by now either surrounding the referee, wagging their fingers in a 'no, no, no' manner and pointing to other parts of the pitch where various alleged transgressions have taken place without such punishment, or are holding their foreheads against their rivals' foreheads as though trying for a part in a new TV wildlife programme. At least one goalkeeper will race towards the mêlée to act as peacekeeper and then get involved in a pushing match with a player, possibly one from his own team.
Von Dazzler is still on the floor holding various parts of his anatomy, including his head, even though it had been a yard above the tackle. Unless restrained by the club doctor he may still get the odd roll or two in.
Four slightly overweight men in yellow fluorescent jackets have appeared on the pitch carrying a stretcher and are accompanied by an anxious-looking woman from the St John's Ambulance Brigade. At this point the Newcastle fans, 100 yards away at the other end of the pitch, will have convinced themselves that Ernst never touched Bobby and so break into the correct response to the 'Dirty northern bastards!' chant, which is: 'Soft southern bastard! You're just a soft southern bastard!' This is based on the belief that even if Ernst had shot Bobby with a Kalashnikov rifle, Bobby should still just get up and get on with the game, because that's what a northerner would do.
The Newcastle fans, to a man, woman and bairn, are 100 per cent sure about the iniquity of the home team and their tendency to cheat. It is 20/20 vision, rock solid clear to all of them that von Dazzler had not been fouled. Even the ones who had been under the stand buying an overpriced meat pie know for a fact that it was a fair tackle because their mate told them so when they got back to their seat.
Now, ignore for a moment that Soft-Southern-Bastard Bobby might actually be from the Netherlands, which is slightly to the north of Chelsea, and that Dirty-Northern-Bastard Ernst hails from Nigeria, which is south of the King's Road. What is important here is the Industrial Revolution.
The broad-brush reality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has left us with a residue of the idea that the North is the land of coal fields, ship-building, steel factories, rows of red-brick two-up-two-downs and dark satanic mills as far as the smoke-filled eye can see. Think Lowry, the Jarrow March and Coronation Street.
The South, meanwhile, is awash with stockbrokers in country mansions who live up the hill from a million characterless Barratt houses inhabited by people who, to a man and a woman, vote Tory and dream of escaping to the country. Counties such as Wiltshire, Devon and Dorset do not appear in this mental map of the south. There are a few cheeky chappies dotted around as well, but they are all down the Queen Vic wearing coats festooned with pearls and asking each other if anyone wants to buy a motor. Think the Chelsea Flower Show, To the Manor Born, EastEnders and Only Fools and Horses.
The modern realities of the north and south need not trouble us once we enter a football stadium, or indeed any conversation about football; the old stereotypes are much more satisfying and lend themselves to far better, indeed funnier, chants.
So, by signing for Chelsea, or indeed any club south of Leicester, honorary soft southerner status is conferred, and honorary dirty northern bastard is conferred on anyone signing for a team north of Peterborough. Between Leicester and Peterborough? No one knows where that is, but some have driven through it and lived to tell the tale.
Question – Why dirty northern bastards? Answer – Because legend has it that northerners keep coal in the bath. The fact that no one does that any more, and that the practice was never that widespread even back in 't'old days' is immaterial.
Why soft southern bastards? Because legend has it that the southerners are less hardy and play a soft version of football, unlike northern teams which 'get stuck in'. This ignores generations of hatchet men playing for the London clubs, typified by Ron 'Chopper' Harris at Chelsea in the early 1970s.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the north/south divide was not as pronounced. Once it began, the differences accelerated. The need for coal expanded that industry more in the north and Wales than in the south. The move from the countryside into the urban areas created the great northern cities, and the industries they produced made the north dirtier than the south.
When the job losses of the 1980s hit the northern cities, a thousand news reports and documentaries brought out the footage of the General Strike and the Great Depression. This gave us context for what was happening, but also reinforced the stereotypes (at the same time Harry Enfield came out with the character 'Loadsamoney', reinforcing the stereotype of the London wide boy).
We can leave to one side the fact that the south has areas of hardship matching those in the north; that it used to have mining communities, docks and great satanic factories. We can ignore this because we all know that the natural order of things, viewed from the north, is that the south is populated entirely by effete, theatre-going, middle-class softies who probably drink wine and watch foreign films despite them having to be subtitled.
The north, on the other hand, is full of real men who are hardy enough to go through a winter clad only in a cap-sleeved T-shirt with maybe a whippet around the shoulders to keep out the cold.
Mind you, if you look at the south from a southern football fan's viewpoint it is full of sharp, tough Cockney types with a ready wit and a surfeit of diamond geezers. Viewed from the south, the north has a population of barely educated troglodytes who converse in a language comprised mainly of grunts.
The stadium is where the old rivalries, the stereotypes, the identities and the collective memories – some grounded in reality, some not – burn the brightest. Here, in a modern mass-culture, partially homogenised society, the tribes survive and revel in their differences. Anyone seeking to understand this small island off the coast of the Eurasian continent, which has given the world so much, could do worse than to go to Anfield, Old Trafford, Villa Park and White Hart Lane, watch a few games and ask a lot of questions – because some of the answers are there.
In the stadium the differences surface with an exaggerated vengeance. Every stereotype is magnified, and in the religion of football songs, nothing is so sacred that it cannot be sacrificed on the altar of wit. The songs of praise are offered up to the gods on the pitch, while the songs of abuse are usually directed at the opposing tribe with the funny accents from up the road.
It follows, in the logic of football fans, that if you talk different, you are different. The alleged moral deficiencies of the north were recognised by Plymouth fans a few seasons ago when they displayed a remarkable concern for that partially hidden blight in our country, domestic violence, with the chant:
Go to the pub – Drink ten pints.
Get fucking plastered – Go back home.
Beat up yer wife – You dirty northern bastards.
Beat up yer wife – You dirty northern bastards.
Mind you, their definition of north is somewhat generous. Bristol City and Bristol Rovers fans, for example, are accused of being 'Dirty northern bastards' by visiting supporters from Devon.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the type of beer drunk before a game could come in handy as a measure of moral worth and degree of masculinity. Sadly, the north has begun to limit its intake of Tetley Bitter, Newcastle Brown and John Smith's. In the future, everyone will drink that great leveller – lager. Lots of it.
Accents, industry, geography, even perceptions of weather all play a role in the banter – everyone thinks Manchester is the wettest place in the world, even though it's only ranked eighth in a list of Britain's rainiest cities. All these perceptions are reflected back through the media in a process that has kept them refreshed. The stereotypes sometimes fade, but then along comes another news event, another documentary, and another comedy regional character that slows the forgetting.
We partly live in another country – the past. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, if you leave to one side accents and a few culinary delights, our lives, north and south, are mostly lived the same way. We accentuate our differences for the purpose of football and/or comedy, but it's mostly pantomime. There's no real deep resentment of each other. I find we mostly like each other, especially if teasing is allowed, preferably with a resounding chorus of 'Soft southern bastards!' Other sports don't have this, but let's face it: golf and lacrosse aren't currently well suited to it.
The stadium with its crowd cover, the residual working-class culture and the acute tribalism of football, all lend themselves to the equivalent of 'He's behind you' calls, but with a lot more swearing. The pantomime is partially based on the same group experience and on which audience it attracts. Like pantomime, football can be a laugh, not to be taken too seriously. However, as we know, everyone in the north is on the dole. Reading fans mistook the Madejski Stadium for a job centre when they taunted visiting Leeds fans with the little ditty, 'You're only here to find a job'. The response of 'We filled your ground for you' met the counter chant: 'We pay your benefits'.
According to some southern fans, there's 'one job in Yorkshire, there's only one job in Yorkshire'. Northerners are at a disadvantage when it comes to the 'one job' chant because there's no riposte. As anyone emerging from Euston or King's Cross for an away game can tell you, there's a McDonald's across the road advertising for a cleaner, and a TGI Friday's nearby wanting a waiter, and so 'Two jobs in London, there's only two jobs in London' simply doesn't work as a football chant. (Middlesbrough had a nice twist on the 'one job' chant with 'One Job on Teesside, there's only one Job on Teesside' in honour of their striker Joseph-Désiré Job, who had six seasons with them in the 2000s.)
The actual rates of unemployment, of course, are more complicated than the chants born of the stereotypes. For example, in early 2014 unemployment in the north-west was running at 7.9 per cent and in London at 8.1 per cent. In the enclave of York, unemployment frequently stands at a quarter below the national average. However, the north-east (10.3 per cent) and Yorkshire/ Humberside (8.4 per cent) were both higher than London. If you did do a straight north/south divide you would get higher rates in the north, especially as the south-east as a whole had the lowest rate in the country at 5.3 per cent. These statistics are of no real use to fans from London clubs when visiting Yorkshire because a chant of 'Your unemployment is 0.3 per cent higher than ours' isn't going to get much traction. It is far more fun simply to wave £20 notes and sing 'Stand up if you've got a job'.
Scousers, on the other hand, tend to be accused of having criminal tendencies. This is so well known that even northern fans will happily respond to Liverpool's 'You'll Never Walk Alone' with 'Sign on, with a pen in your hand, and you'll never work again', before demanding to know 'Does the Social know you're here?' Cockneys, which for these purposes means everyone between Stevenage and Southampton, can accompany this inversion of the classic by waving £20 notes at the Liverpool fans. Northerners, especially those from Yorkshire, would not be so foolish as to risk the notes blowing away in the wind and so do not indulge in this practice.
The anti-Scouse songs became fashionable in the 1980s, a decade when Liverpool FC was on a high and Liverpool the city was on a low. Unemployment hit the area very hard and the antics of the local council, led by the sharp-suited, hard-left Socialist Derek 'Degsy' Hatton, who was accused by the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock of wreaking 'grotesque chaos' in the city by 'hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers', ensured Liverpool was on the news bulletins on a regular basis. Mr Hatton went on to burnish his left-wing credentials by becoming a male model, a PR man, chairman of his son's website company and, currently, a millionaire property developer living in Cyprus. Nice work if you can get it.
The Toxteth riots reinforced the negative image of Merseyside, and fictional figures such as Yosser 'Gizza job' Hughes from Alan Bleasdale's TV series Boys from the Blackstuff became synonymous with Scousers.
The loss of life at the Heysel and Hillsborough stadium disasters (in May 1985 and April 1989 respectively) made things immeasurably worse. The death toll was, of course, the biggest tragedy, but both events, in different ways, reinforced the negative stereotypes. Heysel made some people think there was something particularly vicious about the Liverpool fans, even though the behaviour of the hooligan element, leading to the wall collapse, was typical of many followers of the big English clubs at the time. As we know, at the time and subsequently, Hillsborough was blamed on the victims, and the years of searching for justice were met with either indifference or the belief that the Scousers were whinging again.
Liverpool and Everton fans venturing south have been greeted (to the tune of 'Feed the World') by 'Feed the Scousers, let them know it's Christmas time!' If they get bored hearing that, they can also enjoy 'Does the Social know you're here?' and, during the days when Paolo Di Canio played for West Ham, they could head to Upton Park to hear that old favourite, 'We've got Di Canio, you've got our car stereos'. Then there's the cheery – 'Heeeeey eey Scousers! Ooh ah! I wanna know – where's my stereo?'
It's no surprise, therefore, that some Liverpool and Everton fans have been known to turn inwards with the chant 'We're not English – we're Scouse'. There's also the reverse humour song to the tune of The Scaffold's 'Thank U Very Much' – 'Thank you very much for paying our giro, thank you very much, thank you very very very much'. You're welcome.
Tranmere Rovers fans may be from Merseyside, but are keen to point out that they are across the Wirral from the Liverpudlians by singing 'We hate Scousers!', in case anyone mistakes them for a curly haired, moustachioed, tracksuit-wearing, jobless car thief. One of the Tranmere Rovers fans may even be posh. I've never met him or her yet, but you can't rule it out. If so, they may tell you about the Wirral Riviera. The Wirral Riviera? Give over. It doesn't exist. Like the English Riviera, it's a reverie. The Wirral, and the area around Torbay, are perfectly nice places that don't need the Italian word for 'coastline' at the end, but again this appears to be the Tranmere types making damned sure you don't mistake them for a Scouser, or a 'woolly back' from Lancashire. The Scouse accent is possibly the most geographically compressed in the UK. Most of us would be hard pressed to tell a Newcastle accent from a Sunderland one. But move a few miles out of Merseyside and it's instantly recognisable as not Scouse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "Dirty Northern B*st*rds!" by Tim Marshall. Copyright © 2014 Tim Marshall. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,PMT (Pre Match Tension),
First Half: Football Chants in Britain Today,
Second Half: If You Know Your History,
Extra Time: 'You're 'Avin' a Laugh',
Acknowledgements,
Index,
Copyright and Song Credits,