BRITPOP CINEMA PWOPA NAWTY!
The history of hooligan flicks
Lights, camera... football!
Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer): What else are you gonna do on a Saturday? Sit in your fuckin’ armchair wankin’ off to Pop Idols? Then try and avoid your wife’s gaze as you struggle to come to terms with your sexless marriage? Then go and spunk your wages on kebabs, fruit machines and brasses? Fuck that for a laugh! I know what I’d rather do. Tottenham away, love it! – The Football Factory.
Selhurst Park football ground, January 25, 1995, Crystal Palace vs Manchester United, nearly 50 minutes gone.
After lashing out at an overzealous marker, United’s short-fused star player Eric Cantona is sent off. Collar upturned, he peacocks off to the dugout in disgust. From the stands, Palace fan Matthew Simmons casts aspersions on the virtue of Cantona’s mother – on balance, a mistake. Before anyone can stop him, the footballer launches himself at Simmons with an explosive, if inexpert, kung-fu kick; 200 pounds of livid Frenchman landing hard, then punching harder.
It is the most famous common assault in English legal history. Not that it affects the game’s premier thug-philosopher, who walks off the pitch and onto the silver screen.
During the 1990s, football fandom became a growth industry. Once a large – and largely working-class – subculture, it boomed with the economy and the rise of the New Lad.
The 1990 World Cup saw two extraordinary occurrences: a semi-final place for England, who – rather less extraordinarily – lost to West Germany on penalties, and a half-decent football song in the form of World in Motion by New Order, co-written with the ever-present Keith Allen. In 1992 came the Premier League, and with it millions of pounds in sponsorship and satellite television rights, not to mention Nick Hornby’s memoir Fever Pitch, an ode to obsessive supporters.
As Britpop chronicler John Harris put it in his book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, “In Hornby’s wake it was no longer sufficient in public life simply to enjoy football as a sport; a tribalism had also to be adopted, or feigned, if one wished to hold one’s own in polite society.”
When Oasis released Definitely Maybe in ’94, it was advertised in soccer magazines such as Shoot. When it debuted at No.1 in the charts, the nearest competition was The Three Tenors in Concert 1994 featuring the BBC’S World Cup theme, Nessun Dorma.
Indeed, by the time England hosted Euro 96, it felt like an extension of Britpop’s patriotic exuberance. The nation held its breath as England reached the semis again, losing to Germany on penalties again, and occasioning another notable football song: Three Lions by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner with The Lightning Seeds, which looked back to the national side’s last significant win: at the 1966 World Cup.
British cinema was just as slow to celebrate. When Saturday Comes (1996) starred Sean Bean as a suspiciously long-in-the-tooth Sheffield United hopeful who must choose between the boozer and the big time, but its Roy of the Rovers-style wish fulfilment already seemed decades out of date.
The turn of the millennium then brought knockabout mockumentary Mike Bassett: England Manager and Mean Machine (both 2001). The latter was a Guy Ritchie-fied remake of Burt Reynolds flick The Longest Yard (1974), which saw jailed England captain Vinnie Jones out-acted by a prison full of Britpop cinema recidivists like Jason Flemyng and Danny Dyer.
More successful was Bend It Like Beckham (2002), a culture-clash comedy drama about an Indian girl, played by Parminder Nagra, with a forbidden passion for football. “I realised no one in Britain would be interested in a worthy film based on a race element, so I thought of doing Bend It Like Beckham,” director Gurinder Chadha explained to Sight & Sound’s Edward Lawrenson. “People said football films didn’t work, and in any case where were we going to find an Indian girl to play football convincingly? I was furious. Does Harrison Ford jump out of helicopters?” Despite an appearance from the Golden Boy himself, the results are surer-footed off the pitch than on it.
Historically, Britain has been much better at making films about football violence than football itself. Although hooliganism was forced underground in the 1980s, it still made for incendiary viewing, with Alan Clarke’s TV film The Firm (1989) emerging as the genre’s undisputed top boy.
Starring Gary Oldman as ‘Bex’ Bissell, leader of West Ham’s Inter City Firm (ICF) hooligan group, it depicts him as an upwardly mobile family man, hooked on ‘the buzz’ of violence. Oldman’s ferocious performance, Clarke’s
“GARY OLDMAN HAD TO SLASH MY BUM WITH A STANLEY KNIFE. LUCKILY HE HAD A GOOD ACTION – MY BUTTOCKS WERE SAFE”
searching Steadicam and the still-confronting scenes of Stanley knife violence keep things from the kitchen sink.
“Wonderful film, isn’t it?” says actor Phil Davis, who plays rival firm leader ‘Yeti’ with an icy blonde hairdo that makes him look like a malevolent Mr Whippy. “It was a good shoot, quite tough. There were some moments when sparks flew just a bit on set, but it turned out beautifully, I thought.” It may be hard to credit, but the original cut was even more violent.
Davis recalls: “The last fight, where Oldman beats me up, was far worse, because there was some buttock slashing that didn’t make it in. It was really unpleasant. When I was lying on the floor, he leaned over me with a Stanley knife and slashed my bottom open! That was the measure of Clarke. Luckily, Gary was very good at the action, so I never felt in any real danger. My buttocks were safe.”
All the same, it packs one hell of a punch, resonating with filmmakers to this day. Just a few years later, Davis directed debut feature I.D. (1995) from a script by former undercover cop James Bannon and screenwriter Vincent O’connell. Based on Operation Fulltime, an attempt to infiltrate the hooligan gangs of West Ham and Millwall, it follows policeman Reece Dinsdale and his colleagues into deep cover among the troublemakers of fictional Shadwell Town FC.
According to Davis: “One of the lessons we learned from The Firm was that it wasn’t about disenfranchised, bitter, twisted, unemployed youngsters hitting back at society. They were doing it for fun, that’s the truth of it, they were doing it for the buzz. It was like a drug, and it affected the undercover police officers as well as the people they were investigating.”
Effective, if indelicate, the film features some remarkable crowd scenes inside actual football grounds, our heroes lost – both literally and figuratively – among a sea of hostile fans.
For the most part, filmmakers shot in nearly empty stadiums, trying to make 500 extras look like 5,000. Co-star Sean Pertwee recalls playing up to a stand full of Leyton supporters.
“They came along and we gave them some rubber bricks with nails in to weigh them down, and they took all the nails out and threw the nails at us,” he says. “There was us giving it the large one, and them, the real deal, throwing nails at us. It was terrifying.”
Davis continues: “None of the other football hooligan films have done what we did, which is go into the grounds – perhaps they wouldn’t be allowed to now – so it was a thrill.”
“It was mind-blowing,” says Nick Love, writer/ director of The Football Factory, when he read Bannon’s original treatment. Why? “It was all people I knew.”
A South London football fan with a Millwall tattoo on his lip, young Love was “a peripheral football thug, a wannabe, not a genuine one. I got involved with people that were genuine football thugs, and I realised I was very far from one.” The difference? “Being scared, being a coward. If you have a bit of contact with another firm, and bump into each other on Bermondsey’s back streets on a Tuesday night or whatever it is, and there’s a load of Birmingham Zulus coming down the road at you, you test your mettle, do you know what I mean? I remember feeling, ‘You’re a fucking fake, mate, you don’t want to be doing this.’”
Ironically, given the debates surrounding its depictions of violence, The Firm would prove a turning point for the director.
“That was the one that got me to make movies in the first place,” says Love. “I was 18, just out of rehab, and I watched The Firm and said to my girlfriend, ‘I’m gonna make movies,’ and she said, ‘Fuck off!’ Three weeks later I was working as a runner, so that movie completely changed my life.”
Though it may surprise those more used to the brute force of The Football Factory, Love’s debut was a deceptively sweet coming-of-age movie starring future Eastenders heartthrob Paul Nicholls. Displaying the best qualities of Britpop cinema, Goodbye Charlie Bright (2001)
begins with a chase through a primary-hued council estate, features appearances by ’90s stalwarts Danny Dyer, David Thewlis (Naked), Frank Harper (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Jamie Foreman (Gangster No. 1) and Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia), and boasts lovely, limber camerawork.
However, according to Love: “Charlie Bright tanked. Before the call came to make The Football Factory, I was selling Christmas trees, I had no money and I was fucking desperate.”
Published in 1997, The Football Factory is a savage, state-of-the-nation novel with the beautiful game representing the battleground for the soul of working-class Britain.
Like the film, it follows Tommy Johnson, a proud member of the Chelsea Headhunters, who spends matchdays with his mates fighting rival firms. “You can’t change human nature,” he muses. “Men are always going to kick the fuck out of each other, then go off and shaft some bird. That’s life.”
Author John King says, “The Football Factory isn’t about football or football-related violence as such, but England and Britain and the wider society.” It works hard to place us in the heads of characters who feel perpetually left out in the cold. Of mid-level thug Billy Bright (played by Frank Harper in the film), King writes, “He was white, Anglo-saxon, heterosexual and fed up with being told that he was shit.”
Directly and obliquely, the book references Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), perhaps the ultimate exploration of youth violence, and it deserves to share shelf space with Irvine Welsh, King’s contemporary.
King says: “Writers such as Irvine and I were teenagers in the 1970s and young men in the 1980s, which was a much more chaotic and fertile period than the 1990s and 2000s.
“So our writing is more lawless I suppose, and comes from a poorer, more political time. Both Trainspotting and The Football Factory are political novels in my view, but the films much less so.”
Like Welsh’s writing, The Football Factory features exhilarating sections of turbo-charged, stream-of-consciousness action and, as in Trainspotting, the way that loosely connected stories build into a matrix seems to render it all but unfilmable.
And so it proved on the first attempt. Vertigo Films, the company founded by producers Allan Niblo (Human Traffic, 1999) and James Richardson, started shooting an adaptation with an untested TV director and stars Sean Bean and Dougray Scott.
A week into filming, according to Love, Niblo phoned him up and said: “Listen, we’ve just collapsed the movie because the rushes are so bad, and there was a revolt against the director. They wanted me to stop selling trees the next day and stand in, and I said, ‘No, I won’t do that. I can make this film, but I’m not going to shoot someone else’s movie.’
“They called me back later that day and said, ‘What if we were to bin all the rushes, sack all the cast, have you write a new script and start pre-production straight away?’ I said, ‘Yes I’ll do it,’ because I had no other choice.”
Another Charlie Bright talent fallen on hard times was Danny Dyer, and according to Love: “He’d been in Human Traffic, and was a drunk. I’d watched him fuck up his career already in those days. I remember meeting him in the Groucho Club and giving him the script, saying, ‘Listen, you have one fucking opportunity, Dyer. Do not fuck it up.’”
Dyer remembered things slightly differently in 2010 book Straight Up, recalling that Love slammed The Football Factory screenplay down and said, “Look at that will you? I wrote that fucking script for you, as the lead, but because you are fucking running around and acting like a c**t, I can’t offer you the part.”
Suitably chastened, he auditioned, beating Tom Hardy to the role of Tommy Johnson.
The director’s first note was appropriate, if pointed: “You fucking dare turn up late once, or pissed, and I’ll punch you in the mouth.”
The need to prove yourself, particularly in battle, runs deep in Love’s work. Written over a weekend, and suitably pacy, his Football Factory script asks an open question – is the violence worth it? – and then shows how, to Tommy and his mates at least, the answer is a resounding yes.
Like John Hodge with his Trainspotting (1996) script, Love streamlines the source material, softening the edges without selling the book short. The result may lack subtlety, but as a portrait of a misreported subculture it’s as persuasive as Human Traffic.
To illustrate its point, the film introduces four contrasting pairs of friends/rivals: Tommy and best mate Rod (Neil Maskell); firm bosses Harris (Tony Denham) and Bright; young guns Zeberdee (Roland Manookian) and Raff (Calum Macnab), both “thieving little c**ts”; and OAPS Bill Farrell (Dudley Sutton), Tommy’s grandad, and pal Albert (John Junkin), two war veterans planning to retire in Australia.
Each pair is looking for an escape in or from violence. “There’s nothing different about me,” protests Tommy, a classic conflicted Britpop cinema hero. “I’m just another bored male, approaching 30, in a dead-end job, living for the weekend. Casual sex, watered-down lager, heavily cut drugs. And occasionally kicking the fuck out of someone.”
When it comes to the latter, Love throws us straight in at the deep end, sending Tommy & Co. into battle with a rival firm outside a pub in London (left). But even in their downtime, the pull between war and peace is a strong one. When Tommy and Rod spend the night with two girls, the former wakes to death threats from their Millwall-connected brother, who gets a cricket bat to the head from Rod.
Billy Bright, meanwhile, has a Begbie-esque penchant for casual violence – at one point launching an empty pint glass over a shoulder – but makes his living selling flowers.
Love is refreshingly frank regarding the film’s Britpop cinema inspirations. “Yeah, I ripped off Trainspotting,” he admits.
As well as a proudly parochial soundtrack by The Streets, The Libertines and Primal Scream, among others, it borrows Danny Boyle-isms such as introductory intertitles, freeze-frames and a constant, cajoling voiceover.
Love says: “I remember one of the lads’ mags saying it was Trainspotting with Burberry caps and I thought, ‘That’ll do’. Danny Boyle gave me some help in the edit. He was a big fan of Charlie Bright and let me know that, and I was touched as Trainspotting was amazing, so The Football Factory was unashamedly a nod to it.”
Other moments half-inched from iconic films include the coach driving off without Zeberdee and Raff, inspired by The Deer Hunter (1978); a replay of Joe Pesci’s ‘funny guy’ routine from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990); and the savage head-in-the-car-door beating courtesy of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998).
Mostly, Love plays these greatest hits with a looseness that belies the material. “It’s got to be fast and fun and quick and elevating – adrenaline-fuelled and dynamic,” Love recalls Boyle saying. “Don’t start pondering on the politics. If you want to deliver something that becomes a memorable experience, you’ve got to hit them with it.”
The film achieves this with digitally treated shots of the London skyline that make it look exotic rather than ordinary, and glitchy CCTV close-ups that add immediacy to the action.
“My emotional and social influences came from Alan Clarke, but stylistically they came from American movies,” says Love. “I always thought, like Guy [Ritchie] did basically, that we should make English movies feel American. As much as I love Ken Loach, I didn’t want to make movies that felt like his, I wanted them to feel warm: a bit of attitude, a bit of swagger. I grew up in the 1980s when everything was a heightened colour, especially football stuff. I had a lemon-yellow tracksuit at 11 years old!
“Also, the estates I used to walk about when I was a kid felt very colourful, because you’re young. Even though they were breezeblocks, your memories were colourful.”
The scenes in which Tommy ponders his future amid premonitions of death are the least successful, a clumsy attempt to mimic what critic Murray Smith called Trainspotting’s ‘black-magic realism’. Indeed, sports writer Richard Williams decided that, “As a piece of cinematic art, The Football Factory makes Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels look like Wild Strawberries (2004).”
But the film, like the best of Britpop cinema, crackles with energy and character. “Look at it now and you can absolutely see the flaws all over it,” says producer Allan Niblo, “But one thing it did have, was it had a voice in it, and that voice was new and distinct.”
Perhaps The Football Factory works because it makes the audience feel part of the gang. The characters may be amoral, but they are unrepentant in their quest to enjoy themselves and they spend far more time bonding than battering people.
Love says: “The Football Factory is about four male marriages, about how guys treat each other. Where I grew up was tough, but there were real moments of tenderness. I remember feeling in this hard environment, moments of beauty with each other.
“Really what The Football Factory is about is male love. A lot of young public school boys love it. They think it’s the violence they like but it’s not. On a certain level it’s that, but what keeps them going back and learning the lines is something more visceral. It’s about the way the characters treat each other, the unspoken love for each other and loyalty for each other.”
In other words, those choosing Love are also, whether they intend it or not, choosing love.
“THE DIRECTOR’S FIRST NOTE TO DANNY DYER WAS APPROPRIATE: “TURN UP LATE ONCE, OR PISSED, AND I’LL HIT YOU In THE MOUTH”