Here’s a serious question for you; how many truly exceptional bands of
the last 50 years or so have come from the north east? From my perspective I’d
say only 3; firstly, The Animals, whose visceral R&B stomp, may have been
inspired by the Louisiana swamp but it was a beast that grew legs and a tail in
the shadow of the Wallsend and Walker shipyards, providing the authentic sounds
of the Tyneside mid-60s. Go forward half a decade and Lindisfarne’s blissful
Broon Ale and resin soaked late hippy, good time folk rock encapsulates the
early 70s era of long hair, loon pants and signing on at the local Labour
Exchange like no other. Finally, from the punk wars to the present day, that
ex-pit village Lorelei Pauline Murray has soared and swooped like a stentorian
Ferryhill siren behind the microphone with the truly brilliant Penetration for
40 plus years and counting.
After that, we’re struggling to make a convincing case for any other
outfit being entitled to their own personal monument inlaid into the sidewalk
outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Gateshead High Street branch, though
Kitchenware Records did their best. Martin Stephenson is an eccentric jewel in
the troubadour style, but his lack of quality control means there’s just too
much froth in his back catalogue to afford him such uncritical praise. The
exact opposite is true of Paddy McAloon, who drifted out of the game after two
truly superb Prefab Sprout albums. The Kane Gang could have been contenders,
but they supernovaed too soon.
Otherwise we’re looking at individual musicians rather than whole bands;
Bryan Ferry (team mate of Howard Kendall in Pelton Fell Juniors football team,
amazingly enough) and drummer Paul Thompson were the focal point and rhythmic
heart of Roxy Music respectively. Bryan Johnson screeched and yowled his way
from the Marden Estate to Miami Beach for 36 years with AC/DC until his hearing
gave out. David Coverdale may sound like a minor member of the Royal Family
these days, but he was brought up to preach the blues in Saltburn on Sea.
Meanwhile, Chris Rea, Dave Stewart and Mark Knopfler did as much as anyone else
to usher in a dreary era of CD-friendly complacent, driver-friendly AOR;
whether you’re thankful to them for that is a matter of personal choice. Of
course there’s also the singing milkman Gordon Sumner, but I’d rather listen to
the Mackem punk tendency of The Toy Dolls, Leatherface or The Angelic Upstarts
than that tantric arsehole.
What about the scene, such as it is, these days? Tough one. The
contemporary does not lend itself readily to perspective, but perhaps Maximo
Park may one day be remembered more for their music than their singer’s array
of ridiculous hats. Field Music are the slow burning darlings of the Radio 6 intelligensia who seem set to
endure. Krautrock-flavoured techno boffins Warm Digits are forever spoken of as
being on the cusp of greatness or so it seems. After that, we’ve got has-beens,
never-wases, great lost talents, obscure alternatives and ambitious youngsters,
but what we don’t have is a defined regional legacy from a substantial canon of
revered work that Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh can all
boast.
However one defines the north east as a region, which for the purpose of
this piece I’m suggesting (with some caveats I shall return to) goes from the
Tees to the Wansbeck, rather than as far as the Tweed (compulsory mention for
Trevor Steven to assuage Evertonian interests at this point), it seems initially
astonishing that there hasn’t been a homogenous sound born of a particular era,
though that can be explained by the loose cultural and geographical ties that
countermand any social cohesion between the centres of population seen as
integral to any putative NE identity. I take as my text the 2004 rejection by
voters of Labour’s flagship project for regional devolution, courtesy of a
highly effective campaign funded by John Elliott, the man behind EBAC dehumidifiers
and washing machines whose business sponsors the Northern League, which poured boundless
scorn on the prospect of another tier of expensive and arguably unnecessary
bureaucracy. To the great surprise of outsiders looking in, the avowedly
negative attitudes of the no campaign were kicking at an already wide open
door. Let’s be absolutely clear about this; there is no such thing as a shared
north east regional cultural identity. Instead there are several distinct
mutually
hostile centres of population vehemently opposed to any moves towards
homogenization. There’s no coincidence in the fact that Royston Vaysey was born
on Teesside.
In Middlesbrough, their renascent sense of being of and from Teesside is
a modern invention that only partly masks their innate historical Yorkshire
allegiances. Sunderland sees itself as the dormant volcano of the Land of the
Prince Bishops, whereby the County Palatinate in the lee of the Wear is an
entity ready for reanimation; a process that may be helped by their 2021 City
of Culture bid. Tyneside and South East Northumberland (the only bit of
England’s Border County that anyone lives in, bar the lawless descendants of
those Border Reivers still at large) remains the supposed heimat of John Hall’s mythical Geordie Nation. Once one factors in the local allegiances and
tensions, it becomes abundantly clear why over 2 million people from an
arbitrary area spanning 70 miles from top to bottom and possibly 20 miles wide,
have never coalesced at a particular time to produce a coherent set of similar
sounds. If the famous north east can’t get half a dozen young shavers to write
a few decent pop songs at any point in the last 3 decades, it’s no wonder
politicians and the population in general can’t work towards a non-existent
shared set of regional aspirations, beliefs and values.
Go back 200 years to the start of the 19th Century; as the Industrial
Revolution gathered pace on Tyneside and Wearside, when Middlesbrough boasted a
population of 25, other than coastal ports and fishing villages, the only major
centres of population were scattered market towns like Hexham, Morpeth, Barnard
Castle, Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Durham, with the latter pair bolstered
by their theological and academic importance. Now, long after the era of coal,
steel, shipbuilding, railways and heavy engineering has passed, other than the
three urban conurbations athwart the Tees, Wear and Tyne, the region consists
of myriad isolated communities, whether bourgeois dormitory settlements or
blighted post-industrial sink towns; separated by geography and emasculated by
cultural deracination. Go north of Newcastle, west of Sunderland or south of
Middlesbrough and there’s nobody really living there. North Northumberland, the
Tyne Valley, South and West Durham, as well as the Tees Valley and North
Yorkshire are pretty much empty and isolated. Some of those mini areas of
population are gorgeous little spots, like Stanhope, Fir Tree, Alnmouth or
Blanchland, but there are also places like Chopwell, Pegswood, Horden and
Wheatley Hill; abandoned, ignored and scarred by every indicator of chronic social,
cultural and economic deprivation imaginable: bad housing, poor schools, inadequate
healthcare, multi-generational unemployment, and a shrinking population, not to
mention endemic drug and alcohol dependency. The real legacy of Thatcherism.
Meanwhile the IT revolution, a call centre economy, out of town shopping
malls and 24 hour supermarkets mean our cities have lost their economic
relevance, other than as glorified, booze-fuelled leisure theme parks. The
economically vibrant sip £10 cocktails in swanky bars carved out of the
basements of Grade 2 listed buildings that once hosted the mercantile camp
followers of heavy industry that made the region so prosperous, for the few if
not the many. Meanwhile the darkened alleys and shop doorways are awash with an
ever expanding gallery of comatose Spice addicts, dying from austerity. The
suburbs and exurbs stuffed with new build luxury homes; the city centres now
partly vertical villages of high rise condominiums for debt-heavy, current and
former student hedonists and partly teeming slums characterised by the squalid
homes of multiple occupancy that provide minimal to inadequate succour for the
marginalised and needy. Nowadays, the wider north east has no input into
contemporary culture because The Haves haven’t the time or the wit, while The
Have Nots are denied access.
It was all so much easier to explain the paucity of NE musical talent
during the ascendancy of the Post War Social Democratic Consensus; perhaps
Geordies, Mackems and Smogs might not have wanted to plug in a guitar or rattle
a drum kit, preferring to listen and watch, pint in hand, rather than create
their own vibe, but that’s because received wisdom still holds that, while the
telly was in black and white and only showed two channels, every lad from South
Bank to Shieldfield played football from morning to evening, six days a week
with Saturday being the north east Sabbath; a Holy Day of Obligation when the
whole region worshipped at the Cathedrals of St. James, Roker and Ayresome
Parks.
And so, at last, we come to the topic I’m actually writing about; the
regional myths referred to in Arthur Appleton’s epochal apocrypha The Hotbed of Soccer; The Story of Football
in the North East. Published in 1960, it set the tone for coverage of the
game in the region for decades thereafter, which mainly consisted of uncritical
retellings of Appleton’s contentions with a contemporary flavour. When Appleton
committed his thoughts to the public domain, the north east had accrued 10
league titles, though none since 1936, and 7 FA Cups; in the almost 60 years
since then, Sunderland brought another FA Cup win to the table, while Newcastle
have added 2 European trophies and Middlesbrough a League Cup. It is still a
paltry harvest and a reason why Appleton’s view of football obsession and the
idea that top quality centre forwards could be summoned by shouting down any
pit shaft was challenged and examined by Harry Pearson’s brilliant, evocative
encomium The Far Corner (1994), which is
unquestionably my Desert Island book. Harry’s affectionate nostalgia is a
beguiling love letter for a regional game that was about to change utterly and
become unrecognisable to our grandfathers’ generation; new all-seater stadia,
Sky money and local lads in the first team as rare as rocking horse shit. Has
all of this change been for the better? Try
asking fans of Hartlepool, Darlington, Sunderland or Middlesbrough. Even those
of Newcastle United aren’t having the best of times, despite the presence of
Benitez in the home dugout at SJP.
Conditions do determine consciousness, meaning the current situation
influences attitudes far more than fading memories of glorious failure and the
excitement provoked by an unpredictable ride. The sense of bemused detachment
and crippling alienation that both insidiously and exponentially grew to become
general among north east football fans after the publication of The Far Corner is the overarching mood
of Michael Walker’s 2014 book Up There;
a sober and solemn assessment of football in the region he made his home after journeying
from Belfast as an undergraduate in 1984. Walker, like Pearson and Appleton
before him, tackles the crippling weight of excess emotional baggage that
hampers any evaluation of the role of the game in the region’s psyche. He too
is drawn in by the near mythic past of teams and players from the past:
Victorian and Edwardian visionaries like James Allen and Colin Veitch, local
legends, born and adopted, such as Raich Carter, Wilf Mannion, Hughie Gallagher
and Jackie Milburn and those whose final curtain call was in days so recent the
sound of terminal applause still hangs in the air; Juninho, Kevin Phillips,
Alan Shearer. However, the difference between the boyish enthusiasm of Appleton
and the charming, erudite romanticism of Pearson with the dour, pessimistic Schopenhauerian
conclusions of the taciturn Ulsterman could not be more pronounced. For Walker,
the era of prominence has passed and the final whistle is about to blow on any
notion of the north east as the hotbed of soccer and it’s hard in many ways to
disagree.
The autumn of 2017 sees few reasons for optimism regarding the future
prospects of north east football. Newcastle may be seemingly settled mid-table
in the Premier League, but the fractious non-relationship between Benitez and
Ashley has the potential to disintegrate at any moment, at which point all bets
on survival would be off. In the Championship, Middlesbrough have had a
surprisingly slow start and lie outside the play-off spots, while Sunderland
have endured a predictably tortuous run of form. Second Choice Simon was soon
found out and Ellis Short seems determined to run the club into the ground,
almost as a kind of punishment for being sold a dream that turned into a
nightmare. Below that, we have to visit the Conference for other north east
clubs, such has been the deterioration of fortunes of late; newly relegated
Hartlepool are finding the going tough and poor, ignored Gateshead continue to
bob along in their deserted and hated ground, to almost universal uninterest
from the entire football fraternity in the region. Blyth, Darlington and
Spennymoor are all doing alright, sitting top half of the Conference North, but
the real success stories are South Shields FC; running away with the Evo Stik
North and a game away from the FA Cup first round, in front of regular sell-out
crowds of over 3,000.
Now, as someone who watches the grassroots game in preference to the
sordid avarice of professionalism, I will admit that much of the information in
the previous paragraph is second nature to me, because that’s the kind of
football I enjoy. For your average fan of one of the north east Big Three,
using that term advisedly, I accept that such knowledge may not be at their
fingertips, which demonstrates my belief that while the non-league game is in
rude health in this region (witness 8 FA Vase wins out of the last 9 for
instance), the top level of the game is hitting its empty head against an unbreakable
glass ceiling. Arguably Newcastle may have the potential to grow and actually
win things (don’t laugh) if one of the shady, obscure potential takeover
consortia succeed in ousting the loathed Ashley, but that day remains a long
way off. At current levels of investment, they are probably slightly
overachieving. Middlesbrough, partly because they’ve a sensible and sensitive
owner who has ploughed his life savings into the club, offer the chance for
stability in the region. Under Monk I see them as similar to West Brom; a club
that may bounce between divisions for a few seasons, but will eventually learn
a pragmatic approach, enabling them to remain in the top flight. It won’t be
exciting, but the dogged functionalism of the club will suit the phlegmatic,
cynical fan base on Teesside.
Sunderland are the ones who are in the gravest danger of succumbing to
bleak oblivion. When Niall Quinn assembled the Drumaville Consortium to buy the
club from Bob Murray, it wasn’t plain sailing immediately; indeed they lost 6
games in succession before Roy Keane was installed as manager and the
Championship title was won at a canter. Back then, everything was set fair for
Sunderland to move to another level; 48k crowds, including huge numbers flying
over from Ireland for weekends on the batter and stellar signings like Darren
Bent. Suddenly, the Irish economy went into meltdown and the Drumaville lads
bailed, allowing the Capitalist Cavalry in the shape of Ellis Short to ride in
and run the show. Unfortunately, other than a 10th place finish in
2010/2011 under Steve Bruce, the project never took flight. Successive managers
in Martin O’Neill, Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat, Sam Allardyce and
finally David Moyes incompetently oversaw 9 relegation dogfights in 10 years,
before last season’s dismal, deserved 20th place finish. With the
club hundreds of millions in debt and Short unwilling to throw good money after
bad, they are in grave danger of successive demotions and, perhaps of more
pressing concern, of an imminent, potentially ruinous spell in administration.
The worst part is that the club is a world away from attracting new buyers or
investors. Unlike the toe-curling Benitez love in at SJP, Sunderland are seen
as a toxic bad buy. With crowds almost halving (some to South Shields, some to
Spennymoor but many to sofa or barstool) and those still attending adopting a
dejected and confrontational mien from the first whistle, it is a poisonous
combination not conducive to attractive football. Underachieving, unloved and
on the verge of collapse; Sunderland FC act as a living metaphor for north east
football over the last six decades since Arthur Appleton coined the phrase The Hotbed of Soccer. Chris Coleman
looks to be a last, desperate, unconvincing throw of the dice; it worked in
1995 with Peter Reid, but Short may not have Bob Murray’s luck.
However, the north east’s relationship with football has not simply been
about the clubs. Huge numbers of players have left their fireside to find fame
far from their own native home: in the era when Appleton was writing, there
were the Charltons, Geordie Armstrong, Howard Kendall and almost the entire
Burnley first team, while Harry Pearson wrote his account, having seen David
Armstrong, David Hodgson, David Mills and Mark Proctor depart his beloved Boro,
not to mention a certain trio by the names of Beardsley, Gascoigne and Waddle
sold by Newcastle United. We’ve not even
touched upon the roll call of Wallsend Boys’ Club alumni to have graced the
highest echelons of the domestic and international game: Michael Bridges, Steve
Bruce, Michael Carrick, Neil McDonald, Alan Shearer, Steven Taylor, Alan
Thompson and Steve Watson for starters. Those lads who wore the famous yellow
and green are graduates of the NE28 conveyer belt of talent; players who
carried on the tradition of emerging from youth clubs. However, it’s a
tradition limited to only the very best of the youngsters out there. Back in my
day, I never knew anyone who played for anything other than the school team. I
was aware of Redheugh Boys Club and another one at Wrekenton and there may have
been Scouts, Boys’ Brigade or other paramilitary teams on the go, but they were
never ideologically for me.
One of the most profound changes to the way the game is played over the
past 50 years has been the evolution of how youngsters become involved, as the
amount of organised junior league football has exploded in a manner
unimaginable back in my youth. Then you waited until final year juniors and
donned the mantle of representing the school; I still have photos of Falla
Park’s 1974 team in our Birmingham City penguin kits. At high school, unless you
were brilliant or incredibly hard, you didn’t get in the first team, but there
were second and sometimes third XIs for the more Corinthian of us.
Growing up in Gateshead in the early 1970s we did actually play football
all day, every day, whether that consisted of 15 or 20 a side games on various
patches of grass with jumpers for goalposts, or individual games of gates or
doors, depending whether we were in the front street or back lane, not to
mention head tennis, kerbs, SPOT and a dozen other arcane pursuits designed to
improve ball skills. After school each day, Saturday before we went to the
match (if we were lucky or old enough), Sunday apart from when Shoot! was on, all through each and
every holiday, all I remember doing with my free time before I went to
secondary school was play football. Of course punk rock, underage drinking,
heavy petting and mindless, destructive violence obviously came more to the
fore as we subsequently matured.
Ignoring the risible folk devil canard of stranger danger, the single
main reason kids don’t play football in the way we used to is the volume of
traffic. There are so many cars on the road that many estates have had their
green spaces tarmacked over and new builds don’t factor in the idea of communal
play spaces. Instead, unless youngsters are lucky enough to have their own back
garden, they’ll struggle to find local, safe spaces to kick a ball around. The
longer this is the case, allied to the ever increasing array of technological
toys available to bairns and kidults alike, the less likely we are to see the
return of shirts versus skins pick-up games any time soon. Although as an
aside, I must mention how my son and his mates, even when home from university,
used to organise weekly kickabouts at Paddy Freeman’s Fields in High Heaton,
whereby those in various kinds of Newcastle United shirts played against others
attired in a dazzling array of La Liga tops. He was the agricultural stopper in
the Athletic Club away strip incidentally.
The truly wonderful thing about north east youth football in 2017 is the
enormous number of clubs, running a whole variety of male and female teams from
under 6 to under 19, that are ensuring that if a kid really wants to play
organised football then somewhere there is a team for them. Run entirely by
volunteers, and massively improved in terms of spectator behaviour from the
pushy parent millennium syndrome, teams train under floodlights on 4G in
midweek and play Saturday mornings or Sunday early afternoon. Admittedly 99% of
those playing do so for fun rather than out of ambition, but that’s what
matters. If they can remain committed and focussed on the game then there will
always be a level for them to play when they are older; just ask this recently
retired 53 year old former Wallsend Boys’ Club Veterans keeper.
Where the north east remains a hotbed is, as ever, the grassroots game;
the standard of the Northern League Division 1 has never been higher and the
levels below this are benefitting from that fact. Sunday pub leagues continue
to contract at an alarming rate, but once again social demographics influence
this; young lads don’t drink in social clubs and they don’t have locals, so
they’ve no loyalty when it comes to playing for them. Pubs and clubs are open
all hours; the idea of kicking off at 10.30 on a Sunday morning is less than
appealing to many. Also, the infrastructure and indeed the funding that the FA
has put into charter standard leagues and clubs, seeking to support as many
community outfits as possible, means there is administrative and technical support
for anyone involved in local football, should they require it.
Alan Pardew is one of those figures who unites the whole region in
abject contempt. Among his endless litany of publicity gaffes was the bizarre
assertion that north east clubs couldn’t compete with the likes of Southampton,
as they signed more middle class trainees than we did up here. Unless the
Premier League is going to be decided in a manner reminiscent of University Challenge, then we may safely
ignore his inane babbling. However, I would state that equality of opportunity
is at the lowest level in this country than at any time post World War II.
Consequently, a little economic positive discrimination for the blighted north
east could well be in order. In my mind, the two things that would safeguard
the future of north east football for future generations would be the
installation of 2 floodlit, full size 4G pitches at every school in the country
and a rolling programme of training current players to become accredited Level
1 and 2 coaches, as well as First Aiders, administrators and qualified
officials. As a result, they’d have a stake and a reason to remain involved in
the game as adults, regardless of their playing ability. Such initiatives would
really give the region a sporting chance of being the hotbed of soccer for
years to come.
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