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 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? 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.” being much more about buying into an overall look than into specifi c labels? 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.” 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? 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!” 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. 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? 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 Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
You need to login in order to post your comments |
Bristol Rovers Polls |