Blood, sweat and nostalgia on the pitch
Loaded’s former editor has written an enormously appealing homage to male bonding in five-a-side football, discovers Nicholas Blincoe
Above Head Height, James Brown’s account of a life playing pick-up games of football, is like an overgrown teenage nephew: spotty yet enormously appealing. It feels appropriate for a book that springs from Brown’s childhood experiences. “When you’re playing football you don’t feel those bruises… It’s not only the adrenalin that numbs the pain, it’s the love of the game. The avoidance skills appeared in the street or primary school playground with British Bulldog or 15-a-side matches. Jumping through woods or over fences, being chased out of allotments, you’d feel brambles or splinters grazing you but you wouldn’t feel the pain until later.”
Brown is part of a generation who jumped tracks from the music press in the 1980s. He was the founding editor of Loaded, a magazine that celebrated the exuberant “Lad Culture”, and he brings the same lurid, chatty style to this book. It is filled with boasts, namedrops and insider references.
“When I was editor of Loaded, the music promoter Vince Power rang up and asked if we’d help [organise] a fivea-side tournament at the Phoenix Festival… We had Billy Duffy from the Cult… but we also called in Stan Bowles and former Liverpool player and Predator boot inventor Craig Johnston… I scored a beautiful goal but then had to remind myself it was against Frank Sidebottom, a man who was clutching his papier-maché head as he dived to stop the shot.”
The names are incidental: the focus of Brown’s book is football at its most informal. The professional game, with all its glitz and skill, is so much a part of the national life that it overshadows the version played on Saturday mornings and weekday evenings in draughty sports halls, thumping up and down wood and concrete, with a rotating cast of the players that never adds up to an even number.
Brown might bill Above Head Height as the story of British five-a-side but in fact he makes only the most perfunctory back-heel towards the increasingly corporate and rule-laden five-a-side game, with its competitive leagues, purpose-built arenas, and the seed-like rubber crumbs from the artificial grass that coat the players’ carpets back home. Instead, he writes about the camaraderie forged between men with hangovers. His playing mates once worked for Creation Records, or sang in The Nightingales, or they are David Baddiel. Yet despite the celebrity names and rock ‘n’ roll references, their stories will be familiar to anyone who plays in a regular game, where the responsibility for bringing bibs has been informally passed from one player to another across the generations, and it is not unusual for fixtures to continue over 30 years.
Brown has slotted into two games that date back to the Eighties, long before he moved down from Leeds, one that began life with Oxbridge law students, the other with music business types under a flyover crossing Brick Lane. He deftly evokes it as a weekly ritual where people can know each other intimately, without ever learning one another’s names. They are only ever: “Old Geoff, Big Geoff, Geoff Nutter, Beardie Dave … Big Ben, Little Ben, Blind Ben.”
Above Head Height sprang from a piece that Brown wrote for The
Telegraph after the kingpin of his Shoreditch game died. No wonder the book is so peppered with nostalgia and ghosts. Among Brown’s interviewees is Irvine Welsh, who believes these informal football games may be the last acceptable form of all-male cohort.
Welsh’s insight recalls the moments in the new film T2: Trainspotting, where childhood games are shown to
Brown now plays up to four times a week, with football replacing his older addictions
be the glue that keeps friendships going. If Brown plays to connect with childhood, the flipside is that he also plays to chase away the anxiety of aging. Of course, his grandiosity means that his anxieties are more serious than most peoples: he left Loaded with alcohol and drug problems. But he now plays up to four times a week, with football replacing his older addictions, and rubbing alongside his newer addiction to Haribo sweets. In the end, this is a book about the search for stability: “a focal point… when things don’t last long enough any more. Phones are upgraded annually. Leeds managers change every halfterm. Tinder relationships last a night.”
In his more reflective moments, Brown questions the values that underpin this most casual of games: what does it mean to “wear a game”, in a memorable phrase, to have the right to tell the stories that revolve around it. Above all, what does it mean to be a friend? Or to lose one? This is not a perfect book, but it feels like one that knows its moment. So many men live for kickabouts, without ever asking why. Suddenly, they have a champion, and it feels as if the dam might burst.