Thunderbirds

Ipswich Town  0 Liverpool 2

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The start of a new football season feels a bit like flying to Australia; you depart Heathrow in the spring and in the space of less than twenty four hours, you’re in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth and it’s autumn.  Where did the summer go? Did it ever come?

 To add to my feeling of disorientation today, Town are playing Liverpool, who I don’t think I’ve ever heard of.  I am of course familiar with The Beatles, Ken Dodd, Jimmy Tarbuck, Derek Hatton, Cilla Black, Sandra and Beryl the Liver Birds, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, the Mersey Sound, The Scaffold, the Pier Head, Paddy’s Wigwam, Hope Street, Lime Street station, Penny Lane, racing from Aintree, the Albert Dock, St George’s Hall, the Queensway tunnel, the Three Graces, Brookside, the ferry ‘cross the Mersey, the ‘Boys from the black stuff’, Littlewoods Pools, Letter to Brezhnev, dodgy blokes in shell suits with ‘taches and perms, the Anglican Cathedral, Alexei Sayle, the Echo and Scouse, but who knew there was a football team too?  If they’ve got one, they certainly haven’t been frequenting the sort of exotic places we’ve been visiting in recent years.

It was only when staring into the distance and idly reminiscing about when Ipswich used to nearly be the champions every year, a long time ago when we was ‘fab’, that I remembered that it was a team called Liverpool that mostly were the champions every year.  Then I remembered Mich D’Avray heading home a cross from Kevin O’Callaghan as Sammy Lee sat on his bum on the wet turf and watched, and eventually, much later, Adam Tanner and Marcus Stewart scoring winning goals at Anfield.  Yes, I remember Liverpool now.

I meet Gary on the train to Ipswich, and he tells me that only one of the current ninety-two football league teams is in a parliamentary constituency that has a Tory member of parliament; he asks me which one I think it is.  I think for a moment and say “Cheltenham”.  But I’m wrong, it’s Bromley. So much for Siouxsie Sioux and the ‘Bromley contingent’, although I guess that’s what they were escaping from, even if some of them did like to wear swastikas. We carry on talking as if life is a pub quiz and Gary seems impressed that I know that when George Best played for Dunstable Town, Barry Fry was the Dunstable manager.  Suddenly, following a tangible moment of recollection that is visible on Gary’s face, he pays me for his ticket to see Stewart Lee at the Chelmsford Civic Theatre next February (£31 including booking fee) and we complain to each other about the scandal of booking fees.  I never paid a booking fee to see Rick Wakeman at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1975, or for my FA Cup final ticket in 1978, or to see Buzzcocks at the Brighton Top Rank Club in 1979, when I recall being handed tickets by a person from behind a glass screen and not having to print anything myself using printer ink, paper and electricity paid for by me.  If they’re going to riot, this is what people should be rioting about, not a few unfortunates being made to waste away their days in a Best Western.

Disappointingly, we do not see the polar bears of Wherstead today as the train descends into Ipswich, but at least the bloke mowing the grass in their enclosure lives to mow another day, and arriving in Ipswich we head for the Arboretum, travelling via the ice cream kiosks that sell match programmes. We buy a programme each (£3.50) and are both impressed by the design of the front cover, which has taken a step away from the usual boring fare, although it’s a shame about the same old drivel inside, and the price.  Portman Road is busy; very busy considering that there are another two hours to pass into forgettable history before the game begins.   Middle- aged blokes with estuarine accents hawk blue and red scarves that are half Ipswich and half Liverpool, no one seems to be buying.   At the Arb’ there is no queue at the bar, and I quickly order a pint of Lager 43 for Gary and one of Mauldon’s Suffolk Pride for me (£8.35 including Camra discount). In the beer garden all the tables are occupied, so we sit on a park bench and have barely discussed anything before Mick arrives, before leaving again to acquire his own pint of some beer or other, probably Suffolk Pride, before returning to discuss ‘half and half’ scarves, which Mick says are like being bi-sexual. It’s much worse than that I tell him, and we all laugh, much more than we probably should, and for a variety of unspoken reasons. 

Mick asks what time we should leave for Portman Road, anticipating that the turnstiles will be busy.  I tell him that its likely all our fellow drinkers will leave here long before we do because they will be wanting to experience the Premier League circus, and we should be able to rock up just before kick-off and walk straight in as if we were playing Preston North End.  My prophecy will come to pass, but we nevertheless agree to depart shortly after midday, and after Mick buys a round of three more pints, which he sensibly carries from the bar on a tin tray, that is what we do, although not before discussing why Mick may not go to Nice next weekend after all, today’s team selection, how to spell Szmodics and how I don’t feel as excited as everyone else seems to be; it’s just another new football season, another game.

Portman Road is still busy, mostly with queues for ice creams that turn out to be programmes. At turnstile 62 at the back of the Sir Alf Ramsey stand, there are no queues, but a man who looks older than me seems to be struggling to get his season ticket to work, so rather than create a queue with just me in it I use turnstile 61 and am soon hugging Pat from Clacton who then photographs me in an embrace with ever-present Phil who never misses a game.  Ever-present Phil’s son Elwood, Fiona and the man from Stowmarket are all here too of course and soon the teams are on the pitch and flames are leaping into the air which are much bigger than any flames that we’ve ever seen before at Portman Road, because these are Premier League flames.

The teams are announced by an enthusiastic bloke in a grey suit who looks about half the age of Murphy, the now pensioned-off, one season wonder of an announcer who took nearly all of last season to learn how to read out the names of the team.  Unfortunately, Portman Road is so noisy today and the PA system so unintelligible that I can’t hear a word this fresh young fellow says and am reduced to having to try and lip read as he tells us the Town line-up, but I think I do a reasonable job of bellowing like a French football supporter the surnames of the players as he says them.  Except for the obvious and necessary concrete bits, the stands are mostly a sea of blue shirts.

‘The Knee’ is taken, which we haven’t seen for a while, and the game begins with Liverpool having first go with the ball and wearing all red, pretty much like they did back in 1974 when I first saw them at Portman Road and Bill Shankly spoke to me, telling me in his gravelly Ayrshire accent “Aye, you’ve a good team”.  As ever, Town are in blue and white and when they get the ball, they send it in my direction and that of ever-present Phil, Elwood, Fiona, Pat and the man from Stowmarket. My early impressions are that there are new illuminated advertisements between the tiers of the Sir Bobby Robson Stand, one of which advertises Universal Customs Clearance, whatever that is. I like to think it is something to do smuggling because this fits in with my pre-conceptions about the dodgy owners and sponsors of Premier League clubs. I also notice that the Liverpool number four has the name Virgil on his shirt and so I think of both the Aeneid and Thunderbirds.  Sadly for Town, from his stature, Virgil looks more likely to be a classical hero rather than a jiggly puppet that appears like all Thunderbirds puppets to be suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.   Omari Hutchinson has an early shot on goal for Town but Liverpool are awarded the game’s first free-kick. After six minutes Luke Woolfenden greedily claims the first booking of the Premier League season for some shirt grabbing and torso grasping of Jota who had run around Woolfenden as if he was a large bollard with a blond wig.

The game is even, with Liverpool having more possession but Ipswich looking no less likely to score, albeit on the break.  Thirteen noisy minutes have disappeared for ever, only to be repeated on satellite tv and Match of the Day, and Omari Hutchinson is booked for a supposed foul, for which any decent player would be embarrassed to be awarded a free-kick.  We need to keep an eye on the referee Mr Tim Robinson, he may prove to be a bit of a berk.  The game continues in much the same manner to a back-drop of general noise, but no discernible organised chanting, as if the Premier League just makes everyone talk very loudly, which I think in some ways it probably does. Town win a free kick and Jacob Greaves heads the ball straight at the Liverpool goalkeeper; would Terry Butcher or Kevin Beattie have scored?  We’ll never know, so it doesn’t really matter.

The first half is half over and referee Tim Robinson, whose name is a little too much like ‘Tommy Robinson’ for comfort, confirms that he is a complete berk as he books another Town player, this time Wes Burns, for a supposed foul that most under-fourteen players would not have noticed.  Much booing ensues and I join in, swept up in the maelstrom of silliness that is the Premier League, and we haven’t even had the VAR out yet.

Less than a third of the half is left and after a Liverpool corner Omari Hutchinson breaks away, beats two Liverpool players and then shoots, but not well enough to avoid the goalkeeper’s elongated but comfortable looking dive.   “Your support, your support, your support is fucking shit” chant the Town fans at a Liverpool player whose truss has come apart, or may be at the Liverpool fans who are quietish and so far don’t compare for enthusiasm to those of clubs in the second division that are only ‘fashionable’ in their home towns.

Eight minutes until half-time and Christian Walton makes a fine diving save from a Luke Woolfenden diversion, but by way of balance Axel Tuanzebe heads the ball onto the roof of the Liverpool net before Town win a corner, and in the last action of the half the Liverpool have their first recognisable shot on goal, courtesy of the lengthily named Trent Alexander Arnold, whose  names seem to have either been arranged back to front or mostly taken from a map of Nottingham.  After a minute of added on time spent finding the ball after TAA’s shot, Robinson blows his whistle and we all get the opportunity to boo him again as he and his minders wander off for a cup of tea and to do whatever referees and their assistant’s do at half-time.

The consensus amongst those around me is that it was a satisfactory half in which Town did pretty well and arguably had the better chances to score, although it could be a worry therefore that they didn’t.   For half time entertainment Ray’s son Michael and a much larger man wearing possibly an XXXL Town shirt take part in a little quiz, the first few questions of which are stupidly easy and appear on the large screen between the Cobbold Stand and the Sir Alf stand. Later questions unfortunately, do not have multiple choice answers and are therefore read out over the incomprehensible PA system, so we have no idea what is going on.

At twenty-seven minutes to two the second half begins, and Liverpool have substituted their number 78 for a more sensible number 5, who is Ibrahima Konate and also plays for France, so is therefore likely to be pretty good.  But, eight minutes into the half and it is Town who are appealing for a penalty as Leif Davis is barged over. There is a  brief VAR check, during which I find myself praying to someone or something, perhaps divine providence, but conveniently for Liverpool and the status quo, the linesman has his flag raised for offside.  The bloke behind me jokes that with all the recent works to the stadium the electrics for the VAR haven’t been finished yet,  so the protocol is just to wait for five minutes and then say “No”.

As if being denied penalties isn’t bad enough, Wes Burns seems to be hurt and has to be substituted for Ben Johnson.  Three minutes later Christian Walton has to make a fine save and then gets lucky as the ball is crossed back in and an unmarked Jota heads wide of an open goal from close range.  Just a minute further on however, Jota scores as the ball is pulled back from the by-line and the Town defence is ripped apart.   The Liverpool fans in the Cobbold stand can suddenly be heard, and above the general hubbub comes a jubilant roar.  “Someone’s just found a quid I reckon” says the bloke behind me.

Town substitutions follow in the 64th minute with Conor Chaplin and Massimo Luongo being replaced by Marcus Harness and Jack Taylor.  Just a minute later Liverpool lead 2-0 as Salah tucks the ball neatly over Christian Walton from an angle.  Liverpool seem to have simply changed up a gear and Town have been overrun.  Omari Hutchinson manages a volley from quite close in that might have headed goalwards, but doesn’t, and the bloke beside me says “A goal would be nice, wouldn’t it?” The bloke behind me says “Yes”.   Marcus Harness has a shot, but it goes high over the bar.

More substitutions follow, Ali Al-Hamadi and Sammy Szmodics replacing Liam Delap and Axel Tuanzebe but Liverpool are still the better team.  I ask Pat from Clacton what she’s having for her tea tonight. A baked potato with barbecued chicken slices is the answer.  Fiona and I are both having left over curry from Thursday night, both our curries were home-made, not takeaways.  The attendance is announced as 30,014. It’s the first time there have been over 30,000 people at Portman Road since 20th April 1981 when we played Arsenal; we lost that afternoon 2-0 too, and I remember standing with my father in the North Stand, it was the only place where we could get in.  It was a result that severely and unexpectedly dented our hopes of winning the league and I can still recall vividly how royally peed off I was, I think I still am.

It is now clear that Town are going to lose today, and Liverpool come close to scoring several more times as Christian Walton plays an absolute blinder in the Town goal, a state of affairs confirmed by the Sir Bobby Robson stand’s embittered chanting of “Two-nil and you still don’t sing” followed by a reprise of “Your support, Your support, Your support is fucking shit”.  A monstrous eight minutes of added on time is announced to give us hope of a miracle, and last season Town would probably have won, but today it’s Liverpool who nearly score again, twice, with Christian Walton making a brilliant ‘double save’ although ‘man of the match’ is awarded to Jacob Greaves.   Scant consolation for the result arrives in the form of a late booking for Liverpool’s number 18 Cody Gakpo, which is greeted with ironic cheers and sarcastic ripples of applause from the home crowd.  The bloke behind me wonders if Mr Robinson had lost his yellow card somewhere and only just found it.

The final whistle draws appreciative applause from all around the ground and it has been a decent couple of hours of football, although after Liverpool scored Town were no longer in it to win it, only to keep the score down, which they did.  “You’re gonna get relegated aren’t ya? ” Says a Scouser to me as I walk back to the station.  “Not today” I tell him. “We’ll be alright”.  The football season has started so it may be approaching autumn, but it’s not winter yet, and I’m still hoping for an Indian summer.

Robyn Hitchcock 17 Norwich 0

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When I win a large amount of money on the Premium Bonds and the biographical film of my life comes to be made, many of the best bits of the soundtrack will be to the music of Robyn Hitchcock who has provided much of the soundtrack to my adult life.  When my good friend Mr Goold told me therefore that Robyn would be performing at Norwich Puppet Theatre, a venue a mere 24 kilometres from Mr Goold’s abode, I was obviously quick, well in truth not that quick, to buy a ticket (£18, plus £2.30 to anonymous middle men) and invite myself to sleep on my good friend’s floor for the night.  My other good friend Pete decided he would also like to come along on what his consumption of American popular culture and resultant outlook on life told him would be a road trip in the style of Hunter S Thompson.

It’s a dreamy drive through the Norfolk countryside on a September evening in Mr Goold’s golden 2004 Nissan Micra, the sun is setting to our left casting long shadows.  Reaching Norwich, having been driven for the first time in my life through Poringland, I am struck by how much like a proper city Norwich is, from its riverside roadways, medieval cathedral and monumental County Council building to its elevated four lane highway; a pity about its football club. Mr Goold’s Nissan Micra comes to rest in Magdalen car park in the shadow of a concrete flyover, our ultimate destination less than 200 metres away.  We walk through the fading light to the 15th/16th century church of St James the Less, now re-purposed as the Norwich Puppet Theatre.  I muse on St James the Less being appropriate given that puppets are like miniature people. At my behest Pete poses with the cathedral as a backdrop; I photograph him but fail to make the spire give him the appearance of a man wearing a tall, pointed hat; I can’t helping thinking that it’s an opportunity missed.  My life is full of regrets.

Inside the theatre we drink at the bar, Mr Goold drinks coffee, Pete drinks Adnams Ghostship, I down Adnam’s Broadside. We check out our fellow audience members; people in late middle age like us, Norwich’s arty set and younger people dragged along by their elders against their will. I make assumptions about people.  Eager to get ‘good seats’, when we see the first people departing the room we follow, hoping we’re not just pursuing them into the toilet. The auditorium has been dropped neatly into the nave of the church, and the interweb tells me it has over 150 seats, my eyes tell me these are split either side of a central gangway; it is steep giving a good view of the stage.

At 8 o’clock the support act, Jessica Lee Morgan and Christian Thomas play a set of unfortunately forgettable songs very competently indeed and they seem very nice.  Jessica is the daughter of Mary Hopkin and Tony Visconti and she tells us so in case we didn’t know.  After the set, as we wait for Robyn Hitchcock to appear I tell Mr Goold that from now on I might begin telling people that my mother is Daphne Brooks and Reg Brooks was my father.  In spite of the snidey implications of the previous sentence the support act are alright.

At nine o’clock Robyn Hitchcock appears, being helped onto the stage and to a seat at a Clavinova digital piano, a product of the Yamaha company.  Robyn explains that the previous evening he fell over and whilst not damaged in terms of breakages to bone and sinew, he is clearly in pain and standing up and moving about is a problem for him.  In an unfortunate way however, this is a good thing for his paying audience as we receive the rare treat of hearing Robyn playing piano and sounding not unlike the Plastic Ono band.  I can’t now wholly remember which four songs are played, but ‘Ted, Woody and Junior’, a song about three men lathering each other with soap is one, and by way of an apparent insight into this song Robyn tells us about his grandma’s Ray-Bans, which were comparable in a competitive way to those owned by Andy Warhol, and how her wearing them at home on the Isle of Wight was concomitant to and therefore related to the meeting of Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and Brian Jones in New York.  Many of Robyn’s songs are about moments in time such as this.

After four songs on the piano, Robyn shuffles out from behind it to a stool, where he is handed his acoustic guitar by Chris Thomas of the support act who has been pressed into the role, hopefully only temporarily, of carer.   Again, the audience is in luck as a less than satisfactory pick-up on the guitar causes Robyn to come to the very front of the stage to perform un-plugged and un-miked.

The first of five songs Robyn plays on his acoustic guitar is ‘I’ve got the hots for you’, a tune dating back to 1980 when Robyn existed in a previous incarnation as member of the Soft Boys, but still wrote excellent songs.     ‘Hots’ as I have stupidly decided to call it here for the sake of brevity, although these words of explanation have of course taken longer to type and read than the full title is on the life-enhancing LP ‘Underwater Moonlight’, and is a song of which I have always been especially fond. My fondness for ‘Hots’ is in a good part due its reference near the end of the song to “a piece of Hake”.  I have always enjoyed this lyric, ‘Hake’ being such a fine word and few artists ever mention fish in their songs. Tonight this song has extra poignancy as I have recently returned from Brittany where I had a particularly good time watching FC Lorient, a football team who call themselves Les Merlus, and have a mascot called Merlux; Merlu is the French word for Hake and Merlux therefore translates approximately as Hakey.  Incidentally, Lorient beat FC Nantes, a team known as the Canaries just like the local team in Norwich. I don’t think Robyn has any knowledge whatsoever of football or its mascots, but it’s as if he knew. It’s a situation not unlike that of Andy Warhol and Robyn’s grandmother.

Also within the acoustic set, Robyn plays a new song entitled ‘I am this thing’, a song which has appeared on-line but is so new it has not been played live before.  Robyn tells us that this song has been requested this evening and after the show Mr Goold tells Pete and me how he was particularly taken with the track when hearing it on-line, and it was he who had asked that Robyn play it tonight. Whilst secretly grateful to Mr Goold, we don’t let on too much and I admit to thinking the song sounds a bit like another of Robyn’s songs, although typically I can’t remember which one, but obviously it’s a good one.

After the five acoustic tunes, Robyn hobbles back to be handed his electric guitar on which he plays four more songs including a reverberating version of ‘I often dream of trains’ and the almost-title track from his new album Shufflemania, which is entitled ‘The Shuffleman’.  Robyn remarks how his fall has resulted in his becoming the Shuffleman himself, although alternatively, given the venue, his movements could be said to be puppet-like , as if Thunderbirds had had a member of the International Rescue team who just sat about and rescued people by playing groovy music.

The final quarter of the gig sees Robyn joined on stage by Jessica and Chris for another four songs, with Robyn managing to stand up to play his electric guitar. After a beautiful rendition of ‘Queen of Eyes’, which almost brings a tear to my eye as it again takes me back to 1980 and my lost youth, Robyn advises that these songs are the encores, which whilst disappointing is understandable unless Robyn can somehow be magically lifted up from the stage and then set down on it again like some sort of over age Peter Pan.  The ‘encore’ also comprises the stonking ‘Brenda’s Iron Sledge’ which includes the lyric “Please don’t call me Reg, It’s not my name”, the galloping ‘Oceanside’ and finally ‘Airscape’, probably a favourite of Robyn himself.  

Applause for Robyn and his band is not thunderous, because there aren’t enough of us in the puppet theatre for that, but it is heartfelt and enthusiastic and barely ends before the lights go up confirming that that was indeed the encore. It has been a fabulous evening and possibly a unique one, what with Robyn both playing piano and going doubly unplugged.

As a final act before departing the puppet theatre, which has been an excellent venue, I purchase a copy of a seven-inch single entitled ‘Mr President’, which I like for the picture on the cover of Robyn on the telephone against a back drop of overhead trolleybus or tram wires.  Such records and CDs along with his weekly shows on-line will now have to suffice until we can see Robyn play live again, and driving back to Mr Goold’s abode our happy reminiscences of the evening inspire us to resolve to get tickets for Robyn’s seventieth birthday concert at the Alexandra Palace next February.