HERE'S A FEW PAGES FROM FOOTY ROCKS

SOUY MADE MY MATE GAY!

Graeme Souness Made My Mate Gay.
This would be the tabloid headline if the story I’m about to tell you happened this week and not 25 years ago.
Yes, Graeme Souness - a volcano wrapped in a full-length coat; his anger always ready to erupt like molten lava over an Italian village. ‘Twas ever thus.
Souness played for Boro from ‘73 to ‘78. I first saw him in 1974. Throughout his playing career he was always liable to give you a good kicking, but in his early days at the Boro under Big Jack Charlton, he was simply vicious. If he could have worn boots with rotating razor blades he would have jumped (two-footed) at the chance.
Souey didn’t just tackle firmly, he mowed ruthlessly into opponents, savaging them and then emerging without a scratch. But despite his ferocity, by mid-70’s standards he was always well turned out. He was neat, he was tidy, he had a substantial moustache, a big disco perm and he was lean and muscular.
In short, he looked very gay, though not for one moment did Souness - as a man with an unblemished record of heterosexuality - think that himself. However, Souey’s mixture of on-pitch violence and muscular good looks awakened the latent homosexuality in one Teesside boy.
Frankie was a regular 70’s Teesside lad. He liked drinking Cameron’s beer, wore Brutus fader jeans with huge 24” flares, listened to Cockney Rebel and enjoyed going to Ayresome Park. The ‘74 Second Division-winning side was a killer team and we all enjoyed our football that season. I hadn’t noticed at the time that Frankie was more passionate in his love of Souness than the rest of us and of course we had no idea our hero looked like the sort of bloke you might meet in a San Franciscan bath-house.
Remember, it was the 70’s, and none of us thought we even knew anyone who wasn’t straight. Such things were a mystery to us. Somehow we had got the idea, probably through watching Dick Emery that being gay involved mincing around with a pink handbag and calling everyone ‘Ducky’. We were very naive. We thought doing it doggy style would involve the participation of a real dog. We thought blow jobs involved actual blowing - “Wouldn’t it inflate your balls?” I remember being told categorically that oral sex just meant talking dirty. If someone really had told us Cunnilingus was an Irish airline we would have believed them.
Our only exposure to sex was Page Three in the Sun and hoping your mam and dad were out when A Bouquet of Barbed Wire was on the TV. So we didn’t spot the signs. We didn’t see that Frankie wasn’t just a fan of Souness; he was actually in love with him.............

“WHY IS IAN RUSH BETWEEN YOUR LEGS?”

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I can’t remember her name now. She peeled the skin tight Ramones t-shirt up and over her head, revealing a large pair of pendulous breasts capped with bubble gum pink nipples. I was impressed and said so.
She unbuttoned her jeans and let them fall to the floor. My nostrils flared. My mouth was dry. My pupils dilated. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. I thought I’d seen it all. I was a man of the world. But I wasn’t prepared for this.
Staring at me from between her legs was the rather washed out but unmistakable mustachioed face and proboscis of Ian Rush along with the LUFC badge. She was wearing Ian Rush knickers.
“You must be a big Liverpool fan” I said unable to take my eyes off him.
“I don’t think I could bear the idea of Rushie brushing up against next my genitals. Mind you he is red hot in the box” The potential for similar jokes was limitless I realised much to my own smug satisfaction.
She looked puzzled, took the knickers off and inspected the crotch where Rushie peered out in that endearingly dopey, large nosed way he has.
“Who’s Rushie?” she asked
“He’s the fella whose huge nose has been between your legs all day”
“Oh. I thought that was Freddie Mercury.”
She must be blind I thought, which given the appalling state my naked body was something of a bonus.
“He never played for Liverpool though did he.” I said hopping onto her bed ready for action.
“He might have done, I don’t know anything about football” she laughed and sat on top of me.
“So if you don’t know anything about football why are you wearing Liverpool FC knickers?”
She shrugged and smiled “I didn’t know I was did I. I just put them on in the dark. My mam probably bought them for me.”
“What did you think LUFC stood for then?”
She shrugged and laughed again “I don’t know. Lovely underwear for cunts maybe?”
I was laughed. She was the best girl I’d met that day. I was going to ask her how she’d come to own the underwear but more pressing and frankly more exciting matters were at hand and it slipped my mind. An hour later we went our separate ways never to meet again.
Anyway, I tell you this brief, meaningless mid 80’s sexual encounter in order to illustrate something important about modern day football.
Now while wearing football themed underwear is always endearing, especially on a woman who likes the Ramones, it clearly doesn’t prove undying allegiance to the club. In fact all it probably does prove is they like buying cheap underwear off the market..................................

A MINUTES SILENCE FOR THE DEATH OF THE MINUTES SILENCE

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Some of you will think after reading this that I’m some sort of cruel, morally-vacuous creature with no empathy for my fellow humans’ suffering. Trust me I’m not, I deplore bigotry, cruelty, war and being beastly to animals. I want a world based on love and generosity, not on hate and violence, and it’s precisely because of this that I want our football ground to stop observing minute’s silences.
Who decides about these things? The latest one was for Ken Bigley (though apparently not for the two Americans who also suffered the same fate - are their lives different in some way?) and good old Brian Clough got one.
Are we supposed to equate these two things? What does it all mean? What are we doing holding a minute’s silence at the football? Are we showing respect? If so, is it to the victim or to each other? It must be the latter because otherwise why would we be asked to do it in public? And what happens if you didn’t like Brian Clough? Are you obliged to be quiet or can you express your disagreement? No of course you can’t. There’s some kind of collective if synthetic moral outrage if anyone breaks the silence by shouting, say, “come on Wales” or “fuck off Wales” as they did on Saturday.
The way these things are forced upon us feels wrong. It feels like I’m being told what to do and what to think. It’s prescribing my emotions. I can’t feel sadness and empathy for every human tragedy - I just can’t - and the truth is, as terrible as many things are, if you let yourself get too caught up in them, you’d become a weeping wreck and utterly dysfunctional. So maybe this minute’s silence thing is to give us all a chance to pause and think ‘thank God that didn’t happen to me’.

FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH BORO’S SLAPPERS

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I first went to Ayresome Park in 1973 to see them play Hull City. It was 1-0 to the Boro. A Mills goal. Just over 9,000 were there. Most of us stood in the Holgate End on flaking concrete terraces. The players were balding, chubby, and long-haired and some had thick bushy sideburns that you could hide an owl in. We didn’t go for the glory; we went because it’s always been a laugh. It’s always been fun. But it’s really not anymore.
 We should be joyful at our current relatively high status. But many of us are not. And be warned, all of you who support teams striving for that European place, this can happen to you; for we at the Boro are, like California, a few years ahead of the game.
This is the problem - we’re so bored and discontented by the football we play, how it’s played and a lot of the players who play for us that all the passion, attraction and excitement is getting sucked out of the whole concept of going to the match.
We have been one of the most consistently boring clubs to watch for at least ten years now. This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a few dodgy games; this is a whole extended culture of football tedium. If we’re coming to your club to play you, I bet you groan. Middlesbrough is a by-word for boring, and this season is just as rotten.
 This is bad enough, but on top of that we have possibly the worst reputation for buying over-priced, over-paid, under-committed players. This really needs saying. We shouldn’t try and pretend it’s acceptable.
 Most of them have been little better than average, some of them have been appalling; others have just taken the piss out of the club financially. But they all shared one thing. They didn’t give a shit about the club and just drained us of huge amounts of money and left as soon as they were offered a job anywhere else. Now I know we don’t suffer uniquely from this. But it has become a way of life at the Boro.

new previously unpublished

WHAT’S WHAT: A ROCK N ROLL GRANDDAD

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As odd as it may seem, and it seems very odd indeed, people write to me for advice on all sorts of things. This is as varied as how to get into journalism, what are the chords for the middle bit of ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ by Blue Oyster Cult and why does my cock burn so much when I have a piss? I could only answer the last one.
But the oddest question came from a guy in Keighley and, as befits a Yorkshireman, it was short and to the point. “How come you ended up such a mad fuck?” Good question. This is one of the many reasons:
Fred. It’s not a glamorous name. It’s functional. Frederick is a posh name that posh people give to their posh kids. Fred isn’t. Fred is working-class. Or at least it used to be until the middle classes recently started giving their offspring working-class names like Alf or Doris as though to take on some quaint credibility.
This particular Fred was my granddad, but the name became synonymous in my mind with his character. There were things that were clearly Fred and things that were equally obviously not Fred at all. Rugby league was Fred, as was creosote, potatoes, mint imperials, horse muck, penknives and bags of nails. Horse-racing wasn’t Fred in the slightest - “for stuck up folk and those that wish they were”. Soft toilet paper wasn’t Fred - “tell me what’s wrong wi’ newspaper, it does the job champion” - and southerners were not Fred. “Full of wind and piss jus’ like their beer,” he’d say with a grin. He didn’t mean it really. Only he sort of did.
But Fred wasn’t normal. And that’s why I loved him. Fred showed me that it was usually a good idea to do things your own way and not take too much notice of what he’d call ‘neatly ironed’ people. And he didn’t just mean their clothes.
He took me to my first football match, my first rugby league game and he set an example that I never forgot. All of my passion for football, rock ‘n’ roll and all the other good things in life were awakened in me by Fred. So in a way, everything in this book, is in part all due to him.
Fred was born at the end of the 19th century. His dad was a miner in a pit just outside Castleford. A place called Friston. Fred lived all his life in Castleford and never, ever left Yorkshire in his whole life and for most of that life he worked down the pit hacking out coal with a bloody big pick and shovel. He was hard as nails - you had to be to work three miles underground stripped to the waist for five-and-a-half days a week - and yet underneath he was as soft as shite.
His hands were rough and leathery from years of graft and were missing two fingers he’d lost down the mine. His lungs were full of coal dust and when he breathed it sounded like a train pulling into a station. He didn’t just wheeze, he rattled. It even made him laugh:
“Bloody ‘ell, listen to me, I sound like a pigeon stuck in a chimney.”
Fred’s last years were his best years. After he retired he went on a kind of spiritual journey to discover all the things that he’d been too busy to discover before. He became, much to the amusement of everyone who knew him, a kind of West Yorkshire renaissance man and to me, as a kid growing up, he was a hero because he was the only grown-up I knew who behaved like a kid.
He didn’t patronise me the way other adults did. He’d treat me like I was his little mate and he showed me enjoyment in life’s simple things. Whittling wood, digging a garden and sitting on a fence in such a way as to make your farts come out in a high-pitch squeaky manner were all arts I learned from the old bugger.

new previously unpublished

CODE OF THE ROAD

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As night falls we slide into this little club. It’s dark and quite small; like a long corridor with a band at one end. It’s as dark as black velvet in there with just very low orangey lights and the band are playing ‘Flute Thing’ by The Blues Project I think or something like it and I’m digging it big, being a man who loves the blues in all its forms; the music takes me and makes me its slave every time; it’s the father and yes it’s the mother and the son and daughter and the fucking holy holy ghost and that’s what I feel to my soul.
We get a table next to people who are smoking roll-ups and they look like they know high from low and so we get talking to them between numbers. They’re locals, stoner sorts and are probably the kids of rich people, they had that look and they think we talk weird; which we do.
And we’re there for a few hours and we get royally fucked up and we’re feeling good as this band is doing all sorts of bluesy jazz stuff; not rock ‘n’ roll but slick as you like.
“This lot can really play Tony,” I said. “They’ve got all the fucking chops and we’ve got nowt compared to them. They can do all the suspended 9th chords and everything.”
 Tony grinned at me like he grins at everything in life; a big shit-eating grin, his chipped front teeth exposed and his swimming-pool blues eyes laughing at me.
“Aye, but we’ve got big balls man...,” he said in his Whitley Bay accent, “...and we know how to rock ‘n’ roll. These musos couldn’t rock their way out of a paper bag. It’s not up here,” he points to his head, “it’s in here.” He points to his heart: “Divvent forget that bonny lad.”
Later our for-one-day-only friends invite us back to their gaff for a bit of recreational intoxication. It can’t have been far because we walked there in ten minutes. The night folded itself around me like a warm bath. Hunter is singing something and I’m pissed out of my brain and here I am in southern California’s navy blue night and the Pacific is crashing into the shore somewhere in the distance and sirens wail and the air is sweet and warm and all this is swimming before my eyes and in my brain and Lenny is writing something down, playing at being Jim Morrison probably.
Their apartment is fucking lovely, all wood floor and ethnic rugs and green. They had wooden blinds and I thought that was really a bit weird. They must have been loaded to live in a place like this.
I sit down on this big sofa chair thing and this woman with green eyes sits down next me, squeezing up real tight and says she’s called Rachel or Raquel or something and I’m thinking ‘you smell really nice’, as you do when you’ve had a few tugs on herbal refreshment. She’s like earth and roses and coffee all mixed together.
I’m probably looking a bit too much; like staring really I suppose; but you know I’m losing control and I’m happy to do so. Someone puts the Allman Brothers’ Fillmore East album on and I’m flying and life is sweet. The girl lives there and she’s really something. I run a movie in my mind and I think she’s the daughter of some rich Hollywood guy - maybe she was and while I’m wondering, she’s getting in nice and close and I know it’s on. Duane is stinging me with some salt-in-the-wound slide playing and we go to her room and I’m so drunk and so stoned that I’m almost tripping and I’m looking from outside myself as it all happens and I’m thinking this is a bloody good dirty movie. Christ, look at her on the bed underneath that long-haired guy with the shiny white arse.

As light begins to penetrate my blackness I’m aware of my head hurting and my mouth dried out and smooth like plastic. Fucking hangovers. The girl isn’t there and it’s quiet and the clock reads 11.30am. The bedroom is bare; nothing much more than the big double bed and a clock. I get up and find my clothes neatly folded on a wooden chair - a note written on orange notepaper with a flower print on the top says ‘didn’t want to wake you - some of us have to work!’.
Hunter comes in as I’m pulling on my jeans and laughs at me.
“You look destroyed.”
“I feel like shit,” I say, going sweaty and cold and knowing I’m going to need to puke.
“Fucking poof,” he laughed again.
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
I went into the bathroom next door and barfed a foul-smelling stream into the toilet. As I did so I hear Lenny’s voice and he’s cheering at every retch. Fuckers. I’ve always suffered from shit hangovers and throwing up is the best way to fix it. This is a good one, all out in two good pukes. Thank God for toothpaste.
“Right, I’m fucking ready for some scran and a drink.” I am as well. You fall off the bike, you get right back on.
“Tony’s humping a lass - we’ve got to wait till he’s finished,” says Lenny.
“That’ll be all of two minutes then,” says Hunter, who looks fresh as a daisy. He doesn’t get hangovers; probably because he’s not human.
 From behind a door we can hear Tony doing his thing. Hunter opens the door, revealing Tony’s arse nestling between two tanned splayed legs. The lass leans to one side and grins. I’ve never seen her before in my life but she looks great, as all of Tony’s women seem to do.
“Howay Tony, shoot your load will you...we want to get off for food,” said Hunter.
Tony doesn’t stop, he just flips us the Vs and the girl laughs.
“Tasty lass her though,” says Lenny as we sit down and wait.
“What was that one like last night then? Come on, we want details,” says Hunter to me. “You were up her quick. You’re worse than Hairy Boy.”
But I can’t remember much except she looked great and felt smooth and was peanut butter brown all over.
“Who was she?” I ask, a bit late probably.
Hunter shrugs and says: “Dunno, she lives here though and she was all over you, jammy get. Nic, you must remember something or did you just shoot your load before you got it in?”
I tried hard to remember. I couldn’t even recall shooting my load.
“I don’t even know if I did. I can’t fucking remember anything, I was shit-faced.”
Fifteen minutes later Tony emerges, pulling on his pants and saying: “Howay then, my work here is done.”
“Dirty cunt,” says Hunter
“Nah, she was very clean actually.”

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