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A Casual Look At Football Fashion
A Casual Look At Football Fashion
Monday, 7th Dec 2009 23:39

The Football Supporters Federation is very active in supporters issues, here is a n interview in their latest magazine with Peter Hooton of the End fanzine 

Those who bought the early issues of the Ugly Inside, would have noticed the similarities between the UI & the End a seminal fanzine from Merseyside, here we print a recent interview with End founder and Farm Singer Peter Hooton, those that would like to read further or find out more about the FSF can go to www.fsf.org.uk   

 

We’re all about double-bubble. So when we interviewed The Farm’s front man Peter Hooton about

his seminal 1980s Liverpool fanzine The End for tfs 17, we made sure we picked his brains about the

Scouse style shifts said publication delighted in detailing. Handily, an eye for detail is something Mr

Hooton’s evidently been blessed with – and his memory’s not bad, either. As tfs’s resident trainerspotter

Jez Robinson discovered during a lengthy afternoon discourse on Merseyside with the great

man himself. Here are the edited highlights…

Have Mersey on my sole…

peter hooton

tfs: So Peter, you were around the scene when

people in Liverpool first started to wear what we’ll

refer to for the purposes of this interview as “the

gear”. What sort of reaction did these pioneers get from their

fellow football fans at the time?

PH: “Well, the main thing was the straight jeans really –

seems funny looking back, but that was the main thing

people picked up on, initially. You know, state of his jeans –

people calling you “puff” and “divvy”. There’s a lot of interest

in the casual thing now, and it’s so widespread I think it’s

important to remember that it wasn’t all adulation for people

involved at the start.

“In the very early days, by 1978 say, it was a mish-mash of

styles, the Liverpool crew, with an almost punk infl uenced

look. The thing was, in Liverpool and to an extent in

Manchester, I suppose, the music crowd and the football

crowd weren’t two exclusive groups like they were in most

other cities. Lads who went the match went to gigs and clubs

too, so there was a crossover in terms of where people went

in town, and what clothes they wore at the match. It was all

mixed up for a while. I remember going to Chelsea in January

‘78, wearing a black duffl e coat, straight jeans, and black

plimmies like you used to have for PE at school.

“There was carnage that day, because the Liverpool crew

looked so different to everyone else. We stood out like sore

thumbs. Then it was, like, mohair jumpers, straight jeans,

duffel coats, Peter Storm cagoules, and adidas Samba. And,

people often forget to mention, blue snorkel parkas. Not

like the green ones you had for school as a kid, but the blue

version, with great fur on the hood.”

tfs: In the very early days then, do you recall the whole thing

being much more about buying into an overall look than into

specifi c labels?

PH: Defi nitely. The uniform back then was blue snorkel

parka, Fred Perry shirt, Lois jeans and, fi rst, adidas Samba,

then adidas Stan Smith. And, of course, the wedge hairstyle

– that was everywhere. That look certainly crossed over to

Manchester around that same period too.

“The Samba back then were a slightly different shape to the

ones that came later I think. Samba were the fi rst trainer to

be sported by lads all over Liverpool, if I remember rightly.

But then the Stan Smith simply swept everything else

away, and was the shoe to be seen in for several months.

Strapovers were the thing to have after that, when someone,

an Evertonian called Tommy, came back from Switzerland

with a pair. Trainers with straps across instead of laces

became the Holy Grail for a while after that. Other brands

soon caught onto the trend, and makes like Kio certainly

had a following too, on Merseyside fi rst and certainly in

Manchester around the same time.”

tfs: For the benefi t of our younger readers, Mr Hooton, do

you think it’s fair to say terrace fashions were evolving far

faster in those fi rst few years than they’ve ever done since?

PH: “Things did change very quickly, yeah. By the week, it

seemed. But by 1980/81, there was a lot more sportswear in

Liverpool – Lacoste, Sergio Tachinni, Ellesse, Fila, all that stuff

was everywhere – and the trainer thing was going mad, with

people obtaining them from Europe by any means necessary.

“It became the thing to have trainers nobody else had, and

there were more than enough young entrepreneurs willing

to go to the continent and feed the market, shall we say.

Ideally, people wanted a style nobody had ever seen before,

but trainers in different colours to those otherwise available

were also very much sought after.

“People would talk endlessly about tongues, heel sections and

sole units, and sightings of various, sometimes mythical styles

of trainers. Remember, this was all when the internet was a

twinkle in some American computer scientist’s eye. Obtaining

these items meant either going to what people still called

the continent and getting them, or, in most cases, knowing

someone who did. And lads making a living out of sourcing

trainers and sportswear were commonplace in Liverpool at

the time. We used to get loads of letters at The End from jails

all over Europe!”

PH: “September 1982 when Liverpool went to Arsenal.

The London clubs had been very slow to pick up on the

whole fashion thing, and we always used to be surprised

that they were still wearing flying jackets and boots and

all that. I can remember being down in Newquay in 1977,

just after Liverpool signed Kenny Dalglish, and there

were Millwall fans on the campsite. We were all made up

with each other because we all had Lois jeans on, which I

thought was very strange at the time. They used to call us

“soul boys” down there, which we could never understand,

thought we’d taken a wrong turning on the way to some

nightclub, I think.

“Then, when we went to Arsenal in ‘82, every one was, like,

“Look at the Cockneys!”, because they had more sportswear

on than we did – and there’d been no sign of it at all on

our visits to the capital the previous season. Nothing.

At Tottenham in 1980, I’d been kicked unconscious by

Cockneys, basically because I had a red pair of Puma

Menotti on and certainly stood out from the crowd. They all

looked like Giant Haystacks – their look, if you like, was all

back end of the mod revival, Sham 69, and Ska influenced

really, at that time. Within a year or so, though, as I say, it had

all changed beyond recognition.

“There was a lad from London called Mick Mahoney who

was a playwright at the time, and he wrote articles for later

editions of The End, including the famous one In Search of

the Casual, about the evolving football fashions of the day

in London. It wasn’t really a Liverpool word though, I don’t

think, casuals.

tfs: Liverpool legend has it that it was just such a group of

enterprising international clothiers who fi rst hooked Wade

Smith up with the trainer that’s since arguably succeeded in

becoming the most famous of them all – adidas Forest Hills?

PH: “The Wade Smith story says it all really – and it’s actually

true, too! In late 1980, he had a little concession in Top

Shop in Liverpool, and he was trying to persuade adidas to

supply his store with these Forest Hills trainers, which he’d

seen being brought back from Europe. Anyway, adidas had

thought that Forest Hills was too much of a luxury trainer to

do any business in England, due to the state of the economy

and unemployment fi gures at the time. Their retail price

was £29.99, which was an awful lot of money. Consequently,

there were only a few hundred pairs in the country, which

were gathering dust in a warehouse somewhere. Wade Smith

eventually got ten pairs out of them, and had sold the lot

within days. Anyway, he got the rest of the stock they had

and sold the lot by Christmas. A couple of years later, when

he had his fi rst shop on Slater Street, in about 1982, he got a

load of adidas trimm-trab when nobody else could, despite

the fact he couldn’t get them from adidas themselves, and

they let him start importing what he wanted after that.

“I’d pretty much got out of trainers by that stage, though – the

whole look had started changing into a much more dressed

down thing, certainly in Liverpool. There were a lot of tweed

jackets being worn, crew neck jumpers from Marks and

Spencer, suede fronted cardigans, Hush Puppies, cord jackets,

and cord shoes, too, they were the thing to have. I was a bit

obsessed with them for a while.

“I think the whole pot smoking culture played a big part in the

development of that whole “scruff” look, too. A lot of people

looked like out of work geography teachers, around that time.

And there was a lot of Pink Floyd being played. The hair got

longer, and it went on into hiking boots and Barbour jackets,

and mountaineering stuff, which was very big.

“So, just when the rest of the country was going mad for the

whole sportswear thing, in Liverpool, certainly, there was a

move away from all that into something else again. Anything

with labels plastered all over it was considered right out and

the loud sportswear went the journey, to a large degree.”

“After the articles in The Face and suchlike, about “Casuals”,

people were looking to jump on the bandwagon. Garry

Bushell started writing about it in Sounds, and their letters

pages started fi lling up with stuff from football lads. Bushell

came up to Liverpool to see us – The Farm, like – and was

saying he’d look after us, and what the “movement”, his words

not mine, needed was a band to front it up. Telling us all

about his Charlton Athletic connections and how he knew

exactly what was going on.

“He was, like, “come to London with me and let’s get this thing

started.” We were, like, “No!” The other person who suggested

the very same thing around the same time was Bill Drummond

– a mad man, and maverick genius if ever there was one. He’d

picked up on what was going on, and wanted to put us in

tracksuits – way before they were the street fashion they are

today – and have us with big, hard dogs with spiky collars

and that. As usual, he was ahead of his time really, because we

could have been East 17 six years before East 17 happened. We

met him in the Vines in Liverpool, and he told us his plans for

us. But we weren’t having any of it. We left on good terms, but

left it at that. Thankfully! ”

peter hooton

 informing supporting campaigning www.fsf.org.uk

Photo: Action Images



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