Accidents can happen

Every Christmas, the shelves of the big book emporia bow with a barrage of dreary footballing memoirs - stocking fillers for dads, mostly, and invariably ghost-written by Fleet Street hacks. Rarely, if ever, are they of much real interest. Occasionally, a Roy Keane or Peter Crouch might come along with something mildly controversial or amusing, but for the most part, they chart a similar trajectory: local park ➤ boys club ➤ youth team ➤ first team ➤ different clubs ➤ retirement/management/punditry. 

So it’s quite an event when a football book comes along that is genuinely worthy of note. The last, I recall, was Black And Blue, the intentionally uncomfortable read by Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. It recounts his troubled youth but also, more dramatically, his even more troubled debut for the club: away to Crystal Palace, in April 1982, he was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse - from his own fans. A month later, he made his home debut against Luton Town at Stamford Bridge, a game I was at. His arrival on the pitch was met by monkey chants and bananas thrown from the home stands. It sickens me to this day.

The following year Chelsea signed a diminutive Scottish winger from Clyde, whose mercurial talents would eventually limit Canoville’s appearances. But, at the same time, the newcomer befriended Canoville, even taking on the racist abusers, despite receiving death threats himself for his effort. “I couldn’t not intervene,” Pat Nevin said in 2017. “At the time the black players were being told to shut up about it when a lot of them wanted to talk about it. Me speaking about it may have sounded brave - unusual - maybe I was the only one at the time, but it was my background.”

Nevin is certainly unusual, which is what makes his memoir The Accidental Footballer so eagerly-awaited. The Glaswegian has long been a refreshing counter to footballing culture. In the Chelsea dressing room he was called “Weirdo” - a tag he now laughs at - purely because he read the NME and The Guardian, and listened to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins, rather than Shalamar and Kool & Gang, or whatever his bubble-permed teammates had on their Walkmen at the time. Most entries in the footballing oeuvre follow a refrain of ‘It’s is all I ever wanted to do’. Nevin had other ideas. As a child he wanted to be a teacher like his brothers, or even a professional writer. While his book’s title suggests an unplanned career path, his reluctance to play professionally came more from his love of the game: “I didn’t want anything spoiling my love of playing.” Speaking on a Zoom webinar to publicise the book, Nevin says that in his career he’s worked with plenty of footballers who’ve fallen madly out of love with the sport. These same issues might have warded him off, but didn’t. Football pulled him in, taking him first, as a professional, to Clyde, then Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere, Kilmarnock and Motherwell.

At the end of the 1987-88 season Chelsea were relegated, and Nevin was sold to the Merseyside club, but he remains today a popular figure at Stamford Bridge. This is partly down to the five years he spent there, including three seasons as part of a formidable trio with Kerry Dixon and David Speedie, producing 200 goals between them. The trio contributed to the club’s promotion out of the old Second Division, but couldn’t prevent it yo-yoing back down again, leading to Nevin’s departure. He didn’t, though, cut his ties completely, and continues to work for Chelsea TV, the club’s website and matchday programmes. Thankfully, things have moved on since the disgraceful days of Canoville and Nevin’s playing days together, and the Bridge is mostly a more socially reconstructed place, with the club doing much in football’s fight against racism.

As the book and, indeed, the Zoom webinar underlines, Nevin is one of football’s rarer coves. Eloquent and clearly intelligent, his BBC radio commentaries demonstrate a view of the game that is thankfully bereft of the monosyllabic cliches of his peers (an apocryphal tale has it that he once accepted a bet - possibly from Danny Baker - to work David Bowie references into his commentary of a Scottish league game some years ago, allegedly with statements such as “He’s a terrific Station To Station player”. Nevin has been asked by this blogger to confirm the story, but would be delightful if true). 

Music, however, remains his passion. He still gets a buzz, he says, from discovering new material, especially music you’ll not have heard of. On the wall behind him as he talks on Zoom, Bowie’s Heroes is placed prominently, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Each chapter of the book is a song title - The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues, Elvis Costello’s I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, London Calling and numerous Bowie titles, and so on - as it covers the first three phases of his playing career, in Glasgow, London and Merseyside. Each is a convenient fit to the narrative, but it does also emphasise Nevin’s encyclopaedic musical knowledge. 

Pat Nevin: the Johnny Marr years

The webinar meanders between questions about football and questions about music, with anecdotes about writing for the NME (he even shared a flat with that publication’s Adrian Thrills early in the day) and attending John Peel’s birthday parties (despite having played for arch rivals of Peelie’s beloved Liverpool). In his playing days he bore little resemblance to anyone else in the game, looking more like one of the indie rockers he obsessed over. A picture of Nevin in camel overcoat and black beret bears more than a passing similarity to Johnny Marr. He even appeared in a Fuzzbox video. 

So, you could say that in a world of sheep-like social conformity, as football is, Nevin was - and remains to this day - a refreshing alternative. “I loved being called ‘Weirdo’,” he recently told The Times’ Henry Winter. “I remember taking Simple Minds’ album [1982’s New Gold Dream] into the dressing-room, saying, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it was, ‘Get that shit off’. Seven years later they’re all listening to Simple Minds.” Today he will occasionally DJ in clubs, playing Joy Division and the butterfly it produced, New Order, amongst his decidedly well-curated set lists.

After music, one of Nevin's other big differentiators from regular footballing folk is that he’s a deep thinker. Not that all footballers are brain dead, of course, but at the core of The Accidental Footballer is an unease with the sporting world around him. Preferring a night out at the Royal Ballet, rather than Stringfellows, would have marked a player out in the 1980s and, frankly does still. We shouldn’t, here, discount the fact that professional, elite football still doesn’t have an openly gay player, not that Nevin is. But football has never managed difference well. Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux, who cites Nevin as a role model, was frequently the subject of homophobic innuendo, simply because he, too, read The Guardian, could string a sentence together, and didn’t pursue the same lifestyle as others in the sport. Just the other day my girlfriend remarked that you never see any professional players of an Indian or Pakistani background. How things have come since Paul Canoville made his debut, though after the apparent booing during the taking-the-knee gesture before Chelsea’s game at Aston Villa last Sunday, we may not have come as far as we’d like to think.

Paul Canoville in action

The Accidental Footballer shows a football professional whose view of the game, limited to just the three phases of his career, is one of contrast. Journalistically, it recalls the highs (and lows) of playing and balances them with the cultural upheavals of the period. At 58, Nevin is proud of his roots and the principles he acquired from growing up in an East Glasgow tenement. His dad boxed, and taught him how to do likewise. When he lost a playground fight with five other boys, he joined his brothers in exacting revenge, one by one. For such a relatively small feller, he never shirked. It’s what has empowered Nevin to take up causes, such as the racism Canoville faced, even confronting members of the National Front. The same with tackling the homophobia he and Le Saux faced, simply for being…well, nothing more than different.

“We’ve not fixed racism,” he told the Royal Blue Mersey Everton fan site in an interview about The Accidental Footballer. “We’ve come a decent distance but we’ve not fixed it within society. We’ve certainly not fixed homophobia. But when a footballer comes out, that will normalise it further. There’ll be a hell of a lot of people like me, standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the cause. It will be great to see when it happens.”

One of the more uncompromising sections of the book focuses on the historic sexual abuse scandal that emerged in 1996 surrounding Celtic Boys Club. Nevin trained with the club himself as a youngster, but was released for being too small. Revelations by former Scottish international-turned talkSport presenter Alan Brazil, that he’d been abused by a club coach, reverberated around the game, opening up the path to wider allegations of abuse at other clubs, Chelsea included. “I couldn’t not write about what happened at Celtic Boys,” Nevin told Royal Blue Mersey. Ignorance, he says, was the result of a lack of eduction. “That level of ignorance does not exist anymore, which is great, but it’s really sad that it took that to actually happen.” He says that none of the kids involved were to blame: “Certainly not the ones who suffered from it, but neither were the other kids who weren’t abused.” Paedophiles, he says, are good at hiding. “They’re manipulative. So I had to write about it, although there were plenty of other things in the book I enjoyed writing about more than that.”

Indeed there are. Music, largely. His friendship with Peel - even sitting in for him on Radio 1 - his regular DJing sets at The Victoria pub in Dalston, the gigs he worked around his playing schedule (even travelling to Paris midweek to see the Cocteaus), or even being excused the second half of a Chelsea game to get to see New Order. But even in his music life, Nevin’s stance on things could attract trouble - he once had a knife pulled on him at a Clash concert by a thug who took issue with his campaign against racism. He still stands against it, and wholeheartedly embraces the institutional approach football now takes against it. “The great thing now is that I don’t have to stand up there shouting and bawling in front of everyone else,” Nevin told Sky Sports recently. “There are better people doing it now. Raheem Sterling can do it. Marcus Rashford can do it. But I do feel vindicated that I was there saying it all the time.” Nevin remains active with the Paul Canoville Foundation, and he is clearly pleased that things have moved on since his teammate’s horrific 1983 debut. “You won’t see a banner for me at [Stamford Bridge] but you will see one for Canners and that is great. I don’t need a banner. Canners, for what he did, needed a banner. It is so important.”

By focusing on his playing years, which ended in 2000 after returning to his native Scotland to turn out for Kilmarnock and later Motherwell, The Accidental Footballer draws attention to Nevin’s time in the game when things, like the player himself, were different. The Premier League was only eight years old when he retired, and he’d largely missed out on the astonishing wealth that professionals today command. Not that he seems bothered. He’s a proud working class Glaswegian, whose principles are solidly based on a fairer society. 

To return to my premise, he remains one of my favourite people in football and, for those five years he graced Chelsea’s numbers, for his history at my club. But, mostly, he’s one of my favourite individuals - erudite, intelligent, principled but not hectoring, and with - without doubt - the finest Zoom background you will ever see a footballer, past or present, putting on show.

The Accidental Tourist is out now, published by Moonray.

Size doesn't matter: Elbow's Giants Of All Sizes

With time on my hands, I've taken to perusing Elbow's press coverage on the occasion of their eighth and latest album, Giants Of All Sizes, finding its way into the world. And so, a casual Google galavant reveals a predilection for journalists to make reference to Guy Garvey's avuncular nature. "Cuddly", is an oft-repeated description, along with "bear-like", which all border on sizeist judgement of the bearded 45-year-old from Bury. Quite what Craig Potter, his brother Mark, and Pete Turner, the band's other members, feel about this is not known, but it's common for a band with a charismatic lead singer and chief lyricist, to attract most, if not all, of the attention. Peter Gabriel (one of Garvey's musical idols) built up similar internal resentment when lead singer of Genesis, to such extent that Phil Collins has been quoted as saying that they were in danger of being known as "Peter Gabriel and Genesis".

Why this is relevant is that despite Garvey's apparent ursine appeal, Elbow's eighth and latest album, Giants Of All Sizes is, according to the band, anything but cuddly. "It's certainly not an uplifting album," Garvey recently told a journalist, explaining that the band wanted to make an album reflective of both their mood, as well as the mood of the times. That doesn't mean a lot of ambient Thom Yorke-style droning in a minor key, however: at essence, Giants is still an Elbow album, with the warmth of Garvey's voice binding a band comfortable in its own musical skin, experimenting with sounds and instrumentation without going too far, mood without being too Enoesque. But within that experimentation and instrumentation there is certainly a darker tonality, even from the off, with opener Dexter & Sinister and its disjointed time signatures and non sequitur breaks addressing a number of things on Garvey's mind, from Brexit to bereavement (including the death of his father) and, in his own words, "the general sense of disaffection you see all-around at the moment". The track rings the keynote for the rest of the album, one which draws on a certain Lancastrian bleakness that has run through all their work, as it does with their great mates Doves and I Am Kloot. That's not a lazy southern trope, but think about it. I've never been entirely sure whether it is to do with geography, like the rain-soaked cobbles of Coronation Street, or something else, but it's there in almost everything coming out of the north-west, The Beatles' childlike acts of whimsy notwithstanding.

Musically, some might find Giants musically narrow, nine songs with a very similar range and notably lacking in the sort of anthemic bluster that made the nation fall in love with them via the album Seldom Seen Kid and their closing ceremony performance at the London Olympics in 2012, where One Day Like This seemed to supplant Land Of Hope And Glory in the nation's communal singing preferences. Frankly, though, this lack of width makes for a better album, one which accentuates the combination of Garvey's voice with Turner's at times McCartneyesque bass, Potter (C)'s keyboard washes and Potter (M)'s understated guitar work. Despite being more compressed and lyrically reflective than either Build A Rocket Boys! or The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, Elbow's last de facto albums, Giants is nonetheless immediately accessible, even when tackling some of its weightier subjects, such as the undertone of Brexit in Empires, with its fairground Wurlitzer stabs part of a layered fabric interwoven with such existential questions as "How can a bland unremarkable typical Tuesday be Day of the Dead?".  Others, like The Delayed 3.15, with its string section find melodic companionship with some of the less bonkers elements of prog rock, a musical genre often misunderstood and invariably mocked, but which had more in common with jazz as anything else. Doldrums even points back to prog's true origins, with a decidedly Beatles-like groove and Garvey's vocal treble-tracked to the extent it sounds like they were recorded in a broom cupboard. As a result, it's a track that, strangely enough, benefits from being listened to on headphones. The band's assertion that this is a bleak album is a bit of a misnomer, but paying close attention to the lyrics throughout reveals the true state of Garvey's mind. White Noise White Heat, for example, provides a stark reflection on the nightmare of Grenfell Tower and the injustices handed down to its victims, wrenching the song's emotional heft further with strings and brass. It is, perhaps, the closest Giants gets to a "soaring"™anthem like One Day Like This, should that be what you'd buy an Elbow album for.

If I might return to Garvey's avunicularity, it stems from his voice. With his Bury accent heavily inflected in the delivery, each song rings with autumnal comfort, no more so than the beautiful My Trouble, with the vocal perfectly mixed over a combination of bass, strings and the subtlest of drum machine rhythm tracks, building to a hymn-like chorus of "Come get me/Guide and check me/Sail and wreck me/Soak me to my skin." I defy anyone not to sing along at the top of their voice while driving along to it.

At the arrival of On Deronda Road, the penultimate song, I reached the point where I realised why I find Giants Of All Sizes so accessible. It's not because this particular song is notably catchy, there are no obvious hit-making hooks, and in some respects it's a somewhat brief interlude. No, it's the realisation that I'm listening to something from Trick Of The Tail-era Genesis. Now, don't baulk at that suggestion (trust me, naysayers, it's a quality album), but the vocal harmonies and textures hark back to that 1976 album's most beautiful moments, in particular, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford's 12-string guitars producing something ethereal on songs like Entangled and Ripples. In fact, this vibe continues with the closing track of Giants, Weightless, which takes inspiration from both the death of Garvey's father and the continuation of life with the birth of his son. It is a truly beautiful song and easily one of the best Elbow have committed over the course of their eight albums. Whether by design of sequencing or simply the way it fell out of the writing process, Weightless concludes an album written around gloomier themes with a sense of uplift, of hope and admission that, maybe, the world isn't all bad. Or, perhaps, Garvey is driving at a bleak future for his offspring. Either way, it's a song of balanced grace.

When not making Guy Garvey out to be some sort of Lancastrian Yogi Bear, media reaction to Giants Of All Sizes has been a little mixed. Some reviewers have (quite rightly) claimed it to be Elbow's best yet, while others are still just not sure. My view is that it is brilliantly intriguing, musically, and obliquely reflective, lyrically. If this is a key test to go by, I listened to it on repeat for most of Saturday afternoon, hearing something new each time, pulling it closer like a warm blanket on a cold, wet October afternoon, a comfort no Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks will ever fulfil.