21st September, 1996. Leeds United v Newcastle. Thirty-six thousand hearts packed into the elephantine stands at Elland Road that loom at the foot of Beeston Hill. One of them, a little lad with a mop of bright red hair, just a couple of months shy of his seventh birthday, wearing the same white shirt as Lee Sharpe, Ian Harte, Rod Wallace and the rest of the team, perches at the very front of the Family Stand, watching keenly with eyes of blue fire.
It was not my first visit to the stadium. But it’s the first that I remember well, if only for that old photograph above: a picture that I treasure, that I sometimes show off as my Facebook profile image; a picture that stands for me.
I’d been into football from a young age. In our house in Halton – like most around Leeds – you had to be. My uncle had been a keen player at school and with the local side. My grandma told stories about men whose names I then probably knew better than John Major or Bill Clinton. Even Billy Bremner once upon a time lived just up Temple Newsam Road.
The summer of 1996 brought the four-yearly European Championships to England. That was when I truly got into the game for the first time. I learnt more that year about geography and the cities and countries of the world than I had before. I had a Panini sticker book with pictures of players from Bulgaria and Denmark and Switzerland. After I read about the history of the competition, I remember asking my granddad in our backyard: “What does ‘USSR’ mean?” and “Why did East Germany play against West Germany?”
Elland Road was one of the venues chosen to host some of the group matches. I remember seeing lampposts all around town adorned with giant colourful banners proclaiming the huge continental competition. A few months after the championships closed – with another disappointment for England (on penalties, of course), and another marauding triumph for the Germans – my granddad bought me one of those banners when they were on sale as souvenirs at the Town Hall.
From then on, to be English and “to be Leeds” were irrevocably associated to my young mind and heart with football, with sport. It taught me about the world I lived in, about humanity, and about life itself. And when I go back to Elland Road to this day, the programmes may be a little more expensive, the pre-match routine may have changed (once a hot-dog and a Coke with my dad; now a pint or three at The Peacock), but I see how my story is one shared by tens of thousands.
Furthermore, I know because since then I’ve even read books which say so. On the opening weekend of Ilkley’s legendary Literature Festival, Anthony Clavane came along to talk about his much-heralded book Promised Land, a tome which weaves the story of Leeds United with that of the wider city and the Jewish community in whose heritage he and his family squarely belongs.
His book is stunning: more than a piece of sports journalism, it is an intense psychological examination of a city with a turbulent life story, an enduring image (not always complimentary) to outsiders, and a fierce and passionate character which burns to this day.
He was joined by Jason Cowley, editor of The New Statesman and author of The Last Game – a book which sets off from an encounter between Liverpool and Arsenal in May 1989, at the dawn of the age when sport became a multi-billion-pound, megastar-making, global TV industry as it emerged from the dramatic darkness of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Here on The Culture Vulture, we have asked what place sport has in our cultural life – and that too is the key preoccupation of both Cowley and Clavane. Some ask “Why?”; some reply “Why not?”. Some have said it simply depends how you define “culture”: if culture is the canon of high artistic achievement, then surely not; if it is more broadly our daily life and everything that makes up our social discourse, then yes.
For my part, I believe there’s no qualification and no doubt. I suspect Cowley and Clavane would agree with me.
The story Clavane tells is a heart-rending saga of a club that has had its “ups and downs”, and a city that has mirrored them. The life of Leeds people is so inevitably and irrevocably linked to the football club – and indeed to its rugby league club and its county cricket club up in Headingley – that sport has to be near the top of any remotely accurate and impartial analysis of Leeds culture.
And yet, what both writers tentatively hinted as the “snobbishness” of those in more established cultural circles so often prevails. Those who think they’re high-minded and cultured happily go to the theatre and to trendy over-hyped restaurants – and make sure you all know about it.
But the same people, who will tell you how they’re interested in new experiences and different people, will demur at the thought of going to Elland Road, having a pie from the van outside the ground, standing up and singing ‘Marching on Together’ in unison with thirty thousand others when the players come out and start the match.
Here on The Culture Vulture, one or two contributors suggested that whilst sport may be part of our cultural life, it can’t be considered high cultural or artistic achievement.
But again, why not?
Clavane is fond of telling how Don Revie – the man who took over as Leeds United manager in the early sixties, when the club was a provincial second-tier outfit, and instantly ordered them to play in the white colours of Real Madrid, aping the best team in the world – brought in a professional ballet dancer to teach his players. Cowley (an Arsenal fan) reminded us that their long-standing Frenchman Arsene Wenger did the same when he arrived in North London well over a decade ago.
One of the old standards at Leeds United is the song which was originally released as a single ahead of their victorious 1972 FA Cup Final clash with Arsenal (‘Marching on Together’ was in fact the B-side). In the song, each and every member of the team is given a mention and honoured, from Revie “the Boss who’s right behind us… the one who fills our hearts with pride”, all the way to Eddie “the Last Waltz” Gray.
Over in Manchester, United like to dub their stadium Old Trafford ‘the Theatre of Dreams’. Football crowds – good ones anyway – are themselves like vast choirs, one part playing off against the other (one of our favourite chants at Elland Road is a call and response that goes back decades: one segment of the choir begins “We are the champions!”, the rest yell back “Champions of Europe!”, and repeat to fade). Our repertoire is eclectic: favourite hymns on the Kop nowadays include ‘Luciano Becchio’ sung to the tune of ‘La Donna E Mobile’, and ‘Leeds Are Going Up’ to the chorus of KC & The Sunshine Band’s hit ‘Baby Give It Up’. Indeed, one professional singer and voice coach studied football crowds and said that we were the most tuneful supporters in West Yorkshire.
Or like Elizabethan theatre-goers: rowdy and volatile, unlike the polite modern playhouse audiences who titter meekly at bawdy jokes about syphilis and hardcore sex, or who mildly and dispassionately applaud at the end of Hamlet when everyone’s dead. At Elland Road today, local aristocrats and entrepreneurs are packed in cheek by jowl with blokes who stink of weed and Strongbow. Of course, there were those who said much the same about the evils and horrors of Elizabethan theatre as they do about the football match today…
When I spent the summer in China a couple of years ago, I met a man in a western bar in Beijing. He had made a small fortune doing business out in the Far East. But I soon discovered he himself grew up in Leeds, and had been to Elland Road as a boy frequently, like I had years later. My friends visited that bar simply to watch the Premier League action. But he didn’t have all that much time for football any more. He described football pompously as nothing but a way in which people vent “their social frustrations”.
Even if that were ever true, how does that make the sport any different from any other art form? Isn’t it much the same for any writer or lonely artist? I spent the last three years of my life at university studying Charles Dickens and James Joyce and Geoffrey Chaucer, and all their “social frustrations” too!
Sport has the same emotional impact for some people that literature or drama or music has for others. Look at the quiet tears, the silent despair in the eyes of Leeds supporters and players when their club descended to the third tier of English football just a few years ago. Then look at the sheer unbridled ecstasy when Jermaine Beckford scored the winner against our old rivals in Manchester on that famous date that we sing about at Elland Road today, or when the same team secured promotion back to the Championship at the last gasp on the extraordinary final day of that season.
But all of this is the stuff of romance. If you don’t believe that sport can be regarded as high artistic achievement like a Shakespeare play or a Mozart concerto, just watch Lionel Messi scoring one of his always-legendary goals for Barcelona; watch Pele; even watch Bradley Johnson’s screamer against Arsenal in the FA Cup replay at Elland Road earlier this year.
As the two authors wrapped up their conversation before the gathered audience at Craiglands Hotel in Ilkley (where Clavane admitted he wanted to stay the night, as he knew it was where Revie’s Leeds team used to stay), Cowley reflected on sport’s “connectedness” to everything else, having just been casually discussing the multi-racial England football World Cup team that played in Italy in 1990, and expanding on the Premier League as a metaphor for the modern neo-classical economy, and the contemporary gulf between the rich and the rest.
And this is perhaps the most compelling argument for sport as culture. Read James Joyce and you might reflect on the history of Ireland, on the nature of time and reality, on the physicality of women, on sex, on childhood and growing up, on anything and everything. Listen to Beethoven and you may talk about Romanticism, about nationalism, about the sublime. If “culture” is a gateway between the individual mind and the rest of the world in all its flourishing entirety, then sport belongs in the melting pot along with all art and literature and music.
But even if you still don’t subscribe to my theory, there are enough of us out there who stand by it. The best possible case remains that sport is a part of people’s daily lives the world over – an integral part of who they are and what they are about.
When I left home to go to university, I wore my support for Leeds United as a badge of honour more than ever. I played my ‘Leeds United Greatest Hits’ album from my room and onto the staircase (usually either as motivation for a difficult essay or whilst getting drunk at the start of a night out). One evening I was playing ‘Marching on Together’ when a sweet-tempered Welsh friend came by and wondered what on earth I was listening to. “It sounds more like Communist agitprop,” he said.
When Leeds met Tottenham Hotspur in the FA Cup after we beat Man United at the start of 2010, I remember sitting in the common room at my college surrounded by a good dozen other lads – all Spurs supporters – watching the coverage on ITV. We held them to a draw that evening, thanks to a penalty converted in the final minute of stoppage time.
When we had another incredible draw at Arsenal the following year, it was the same story. North (the underdog, aggressive, angry) versus South (confident, complacent). Just as I occasionally (absurdly and pretentiously, I know, I know…) liked to think of my time at university. It was a part of me once again, just as it was on that September afternoon back in 1996; how I framed my world, as we all must do – the idea at the heart of that horrible, alienating, troubling, complicated word “Culture”.
The struggle of my local team through the decades is an extraordinary story, and one still going on today. And, like Clavane and so many others, a story which is within me: sport taught me about the world, and gave me something to share with the lad at school and the old man next door.
Sport is high artistic achievement; it is part of our daily discourse; and it connects us to our wider world and tells us about ourselves. If you live in Leeds, then sport is a part of your life by default. By any definition, sport is culture and culture is sport. I look forward to more of it here on The Culture Vulture.
Great blog Mark, right enjoyed that.
I need to get a copy of Promised Land 😉