Can I join the Red army? Tonight Liverpool take on Chelsea in the biggest all-British football match in decades - the Champions' League semi-final. But who does the neutral support - a Russian billionaire's plaything or a club that has long been the heart and soul of its community? Easy, says Stephen Moss. But is 24 hours in Liverpool enough to make him an honorary scouser?
Wednesday April 27, 2005
The Guardian
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-très bon article du guardian
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It's 8pm on a Monday night at Dickie's. At least I think it is. I was attracted to Dickie's, which is close to the Adelphi hotel in the centre of Liverpool, because of its pleasingly down-at-heel appearance, the three bouncers on the door and the fact that as I was passing - at just before eight, mind - a middle-aged woman was being carried out.
Inside, the karaoke is already in full swing. It is still light outside, but the greying, overweight, underdressed clientele is already having a great time. At £2 for a large tumbler of red wine, so am I. When I get a refill, the woman behind the bar asks me if I want ice in it.
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This is a magnificently vivid place. Men with square boxers' faces, women with hair the same red as Cilla Black's, pool players with cigarettes clamped to their lips, and defiant, burning-bright torch songs. A middle-aged man gives a brilliant rendition of King of the Road, a short woman with big blonde hair follows it with a spirited Stand By Your Man (and, slightly wobbly, immediately leaves, alongside said man), and an elderly woman brings the house down with That's Life - "I've been up and down, and over and out, and I just know one thing - that's life!" Who needs Aristotle?
I have only been to Liverpool twice before, en route for Aintree. This time I am staying - to try to get a sense of what makes it tick. When Liverpool take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League semi-final tonight, the nation must surely unite behind the democratic Reds against the plutocratic Blues. We are all scousers now. But what is a scouser and how do I become one?
I begin my quest at the cultural heart of Liverpool: Anfield. The key thing to realise about this footballing Mecca is that the area doesn't just contain one football club but two - Everton as well as Liverpool. Goodison Park is only a stone's throw from Liverpool's stadium, though happily there isn't too much stone-throwing. Retribution is subtler: the streets adjacent to Goodison are covered in shit because Liverpool fans make a point of walking their dogs there.
The local pubs also make clear their affiliation, and I have a lunchtime drink in the Arkles, emphatically in the red camp. Barman Kieron Hilton explains the appeal of being a Liverpool fan. "People pay out thousands of pounds for shrinks and they're told they have to lose some aggression or anger. At Anfield, you pay £27 and you can sing, you can shout, and you can get rid of all your aggression."
Liverpool fans like to see themselves as culturally different from those of any other club. Their songs are more complicated; their banners wittier; their identification with the club absolute. "It's not about money or success," says Stephen Done, curator of the Anfield museum. "It's to do with a philosophy and an attitude. Steve Heighway [a Liverpool star in the 1970s] called it 'The Liverpool Way'. To play honourably and honestly, to give your heart and soul to playing for the club. And then at the end of the season, what will be will be."
Done recites the litany of triumphs - four European Cups, 18 league championships, six FA Cups - but says that the pursuit of prizes is secondary. "Liverpool fans aren't glory hunters - buying into some glamorous club that simply wins everything. We've got fans who were here with us through those long dark years in the 50s when we were a second-division club going nowhere. There was no glory then, yet the biggest attendance in the history of Anfield was in the early 50s."
I ask Done what I have to do to become a Liverpool fan in time for tonight's game. "Well, you'd better learn the songs," he says. "You have to know the words to You'll Never Walk Alone. That's a basic requirement: stand there with your scarf and sing You'll Never Walk Alone at the top of your voice." You'll Never Walk Alone I can probably manage, but I'm not so sure about Scouser Tommy - a song that imagines a soldier from Liverpool lying mortally wounded on the battlefield and reciting, with his dying breath, great players and results from the club's history. I fear this epic may be beyond me. Liz Crolley, a lecturer in football at Liverpool University, says that a supporters' website recently made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that all new fans should compose a 60-verse song about the club as an initiation rite.
Crolley, a long-standing supporter, is also besotted with "The Liverpool Way". "We admire Jose Mourinho, but we couldn't have him as our manager," she says. "He's too flash. It's just not our style. Not all our fans are poor; there are rich ones, too. But they hide their wealth; they almost feel guilty about it. No one is ostentatious."
As well as knowing the songs, you need to be a dab hand with a banner. Done mentions some of the classics, including what he considers the all-time gem, a homage to player Joey Jones unveiled on the terraces of Rome in 1977 before the European Cup final - "Joey ate the frogs' legs, made the Swiss roll and now he's munchin' Gladbach". "I defy anyone to find a banner which is better than that," says Done. "Joey Jones was probably the least talented of the team in that wonderfully gifted double-winning side of 77, but he had a heart as big as Liverpool and the fans loved him."
The demands of being a Liverpool fan seem rather arduous. You need what Kieron Hilton calls "cracking wit"; more than that, though, you need passion and warmth. At the club's large shop, where I buy my scarf, hat, "Scouse community" passport and a biography of Bill Shankly, they are doing brisk business selling red charity wristbands commemorating the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters. Beneath the plaque outside the ground that names the victims of Hillsborough, many of them teenagers - the age 17 recurs with grim frequency - are several hundred floral tributes marking the recent 16th anniversary of that tragedy. This is a club, and a city, that cares.
But does it care too much? The critics who label it "self-pity city" certainly think so. One football reporter told me he had never witnessed as many one-minute silences as he had in Liverpool. The view was represented in its most extreme form by the Spectator editorial after the murder of Ken Bigley. "A combination of economic misfortune ... and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They ... see themselves, whenever possible, as victims, and resent their victim status, yet at the same time wallow in it."
The article was wrong about so many things, not least the number of victims of Hillsborough, that it is fair to assume that the still anonymous writer was someone with only the scantiest knowledge of the city, a Tory whose shorthand for Liverpool would read yob culture, workshy, Derek Hatton, Militant. The leader of the council, Mike Storey, says that such outdated views are still surprisingly prevalent. "Perceptions haven't caught up with reality: we have low unemployment, one of the lowest crime rates in any metropolitan area, and the population of the city is rising for the first time in 70 years."
Mike Hill, director of recruitment agency Bluefire Consulting and a passionate Everton fan (lest I give the impression that this city is entirely red), has been campaigning to attract Liverpudlian professionals, who fled in the depressed 80s and early 90s, back to the city. That means countering London-centric prejudices. "It's fair to say that if you want to come to Liverpool and reinforce the stereotypes via examples that you may see on the streets, I'm sure you can find those stereotypes - the solariums and the shell suits and the overall chav culture. There's certainly evidence of that, but walk around any provincial city and you'll find individuals like that ... There's a highly entre preneurial culture in Liverpool which has developed over the past 10 or 15 years."
There is no escaping the shell suit, though. In fact, a key question in my attempt to become an instant Liverpudlian is should I buy one for my tour of the city's sites. "If you do, make sure it's a good one," a journalist who covers the city tells me. "Go for Lacoste." But Gemma Bodinetz, artistic director of the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, talks me out of it. "I don't see many shell suits," she says. "It is a city of labels, however. I always feel slightly underdressed. People like their Dolce & Gabbana. The girls always look as if they're about to go out nightclubbing when they could just be going round Tesco."
Bodinetz came up from London to work at the Everyman and Playhouse two years ago and says she has been struck by the engagement of the Liverpool public. "Before I even took up this position," she says, "I was having a cup of coffee outside a cafe with a literary manager, and people were stopping and telling me how I should be running this theatre and what plays I should be putting on. I could sit outside any theatre in London all my life and nobody would really care. They possess these theatres, they possess their culture; they want to do it, they want to write it, they want to be in it, they want to dance in it, they want to write a song for it."
In 2008, Liverpool will be European City of Culture. The only visible sign of that at present are the roadworks in the centre of town, but Storey promises a year-long festival that he hopes will complete the transformation of the city from social and economic basket-case to European super-city. However, Paul Jones, a sociologist at Liverpool University, adds a note of caution. "What people like Councillor Storey and others who are rebranding the city don't talk about is inequality or poverty or racism or sexism," he says. "It's not as if these things have gone away, and the real challenge for the city is to lessen inequality. It's not just to make Liverpool a better place for a small number of young urban professionals. There's a real danger that significant numbers of people are being written out of Liverpool's identity."
Jones tells me I should have a bowl of Scouse - a thick broth made from leftovers - while I'm in Liverpool. But the yuppie cafe in which we meet, a white-walled, pastrami-on-rye kind of place, doesn't have it on the menu. Sociologically significant, he thinks.
At the risk of indulging in lazy journalism, and even though Jones warns me that all generalisations are wrong, I need some shorthand to define the Liverpudlian. Bodinetz suggests articulate, engaged and passionate. "They like heart," she says. "The dry end of theatre doesn't go down well, but if something has heart they will travel any distance with it intellectually." I would add self-possessed, mocking, defiant.
When I take the Mersey ferry, which proudly claims to be the world's oldest, I only have a few minutes to buy a ticket and there's no one on the booking desk. There is, though, a woman at the gift desk, head bowed, writing something. I ask her how I buy a ticket. She looks up, smiles and says: "You ask me and I sell you one. Do you want to try it?" It is not said unpleasantly, but I am taken aback. It is very, well, Liverpudlian, has an edge you probably wouldn't find in Godalming. "I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow," as a woman with honey-blonde hair and a fabulous tan had belted out at Dickie's. Does Jose Mourinho know what he's up against?
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