Heaving with hooligans
Jeremy Clarke
To a book launch on Tuesday, hoping and praying there would be a fight. ‘O Lord!’ I prayed, ‘please let it all kick off big style.’ The book was Top Boys by Cass Pennant, who used to lead what connoisseurs would agree was the best English hooligan ‘firm’ since Henry V — West Ham United’s Inter-City Firm, or ICF. When he came out of prison, Cass sharpened up his pen and wrote Want Some Aggro?, Rolling with the 6.57 Crew, Congratulations, You Have Just Met the ICF and Cass, his autobiography. Cass has done us proud. Nowadays some WH Smith stores have an entire shelf dedicated to ‘hoolie’ books, some good, some not so good, some based on pure fantasy. Cass’s recently developed writing skills have furnished him with a prose style as unaffected and as candid as Pepys or Boswell. The Happy Hammers had the quality crew, and now it has the quality chronicler.
For Top Boys, his sixth book, Cass interviewed the leaders of football hooligan gangs past and present. He asked them the same set of questions. These included: What has been the most legendary fight you’ve been involved in? Who was the most violent, crazy set of supporters you ever came across? (About half nominate the ICF.) How important was alcohol and drugs? (Not very, said most. It was violence that floated their boat.) Is there, in your opinion, a next generation of hooligan apprentices coming through, and will they be anything like their predecessors? (Only the Leicester bloke talked about a new wave of promising youngsters. The rest were blimpishly pessimistic.) And, are [sic] your firm still doing it? (Chelsea and Millwall will still be doing it at the Last Trump. More suprisingly, I learned that Spurs and Middlesbrough are having a bit of a revival at the moment. No wonder the first two customers into the Newham bookshop when Top Boys first went on sale were both police officers.) So what a prospect! The leaders of 27 football hooligan firms, all of whom, presumably, had been sent an invitation to the launch, rubbing shoulders in a London nightclub with the cream of the ICF veterans, celebrity armed robbers, and the actor who played hard man Phil Mitchell in EastEnders. If fighting hadn’t broken out by ten o clock, I said to myself, I’d take the wonderfully economical advice that used to be printed on fireworks labels to ‘light touch paper and retire’ — in this case under a table.
The venue was Point 101, a futuristic plate-glass cube underneath Centre Point, Oxford Street. At the flash of my invitation card — a colour photograph of a pitch invasion — three nervous bouncers sprang aside to admit me. They saw I was minus that tell-tale violent glint in my eye, and I was dressed like a prat, but one never really knows. At the top of the stairs, a wall of V-shaped backs and shaved heads besieging a rectangular bar, a long mezzanine balcony overlooking the downstairs bar, with a low rail, absolutely made for chucking people off, and Desmond Decker supplying the sounds. Off to one side, a small line of penitents, at the end of which stood the black hooligan Pope himself, Cass Pennant, in a black ‘Peaceful Hooligan’ Tshirt, autographing copies and conferring confidential blessings.
I shouldered my way to the bar. I was a bit unsteady on my feet and lurched heavily into those on either side, one of whom looked at me in surprise. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘No. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My fault.’ And it was like that. Everyone apologising and holding toilet doors open for everyone else because you didn’t know whether you were looking at an elite Moscow football hooligan or a sales rep from the publishing company. Far from having a low flash point, the evening was one of irenic calm and impeccable good manners, the latter characterised, I believe, as ‘respect’.
I haven’t been to West Ham much in the last few years. The only person I immediately recognised was Bunter. ‘So this is how we’ve all ended up,’ I said, as we pissed side by side in the downstairs lavatory. ‘Poshing in a piss toilet at Cass’s book launch.’ ‘Yep,’ said Bunter, now a philosophical grandfather, hauling up his flies. We went back upstairs, but went in the wrong door and found ourselves confronted by another bar, which was empty. For a full second I was utterly panic-stricken by the thought that in the time it had taken me to go to the lavatory and back, everyone had disappeared.
Previous page
