80s Casuals

The 80's were a fantastic time to be coming of age. I was born in 1970, so that era was very special to me.

I lived in Wigan; my first venture into the fashion arena was around 81 or 82, when I got on the school cross country team so my dad bought me a pair of Reebok Gazelle. My athletic endeavours didn't last that long, but I enjoyed the status of being the first lad on our street to have a pair of Reebok and it was better than wearing Adidas Kick look a likes from Asda with four stripes on them.

Fashion was more than important it was your trademark and the brands helped hide any insecurity you may have had as a teenager.

I was into buying allsorts, first off there was the Patrick kagool, then the blizzard parka, then I got my first Lyle and Scott jumper which was a light blue v neck. My Mam used to give me money for dinner at school, but I saved it and made myself some butties and before long I had the £30 or so that it cost and walked all the way to the golf shop at Haigh Hall to buy it, then my Mam shrunk it in the wash when I'd had it about 3 weeks so I started dipping a pound or two here and there from her purse to pay for it's replacement.

By 1983 shitstoppers had been replaced by flares and I think by about 84 I had a particularly debonair wardrobe which included 2 pairs of Wrangler flared cords (brown and blue) a pair of Lee flared jeans with the bottoms cut off, a Benetton rugby shirt, sweatshirt, and shirt, a Nike Windrunner several pairs of trainers including Adidas ZX 400, Adidas First tracky bottoms, a Kappa Jumper, Fila Tracky bottoms and a couple of Marks and Spencers round neck woollens. Life couldn't get much better really could it?

My first experience of hooligan violence was at the Rugby rather than the football. Rugby League is to be fair mainly confined to the M62 corridor so there's a lot of rivalry. That glorious first rush was when Wigan played Leigh in the Challenge Cup semi final at Knowsley Road in St Helens. There was no segregation and me and some of my mates had tagged onto some of the older lads for safety, we stayed near them behind the try line in the ground and realised that the we were slowly but surely being joined by more and more lads who we recognised from Wigan and other's we didn't. When Wigan scored a penalty it went off. The excitement of that first affray is something I've never quite recaptured.

After the match it went off outside the ground as well, I was in a surge of about 100 Wiganers charging up the road towards some Leigh supporters with some copper in a high visibility jacket stood in the middle swinging his stick around shouting, “Come on then I'll have you all you fuckers.”

He looked a right nob, he was more out of control than we were, I've never like the Old Bill since that.

A lot of the time it was blissful poverty, no money so dress well to look wealthy. There was one time a mate of mine's mam and dad had gone away and left him in the house for the weekend, we all got scalled up, raided our parent's drink cabinets and went round.

Among the delights mine host had acquired to make the party go with bang were a dog eared copy of Penthouse, some lighter gas, some solvent for cleaning stains off vinyl car seats and a few pills the doctor had given his mum for insomnia.

We were all out of our trees in about 40 minutes and just before we all passed out I thought it would be a good idea to try and get some birds round, so I rung one of those 0898 chat lines that BT were running at about a pound a minute to try and get some girls to the party.

Anyway I woke up in the hall at about 6 in the morning underneath the table the phone was on, with the phone off the hook, I picked up the handset and could hear voices so put it back in the cradle and sneaked off home.

When my mate's phone bill arrived, it was about six hundred quid, to put that into perspective you could buy a house in Wigan for ten grand at the time (and there's probably parts of Bolton where you still can). To this day I'm not sure that he knows how that phone bill came about.

Football wise I had two teams, there was the Latics who were in the third and Liverpool were my big team.

I remember the first time I went to Anfield with Mike I asked him what to expect, he said, “Don't wear white trainers”

Come half time the steps turned into a waterfall of piss and when we left my shoes were crusted in a mix of cigarette ash and urine.

Things could get complicated, I remember being at Anfield for the United game once and it went off in The Arkles, I was just getting stuck into the Manc bastards when I realised they were from Wigan, or there was the time we played St Helens in the rugby and had a row with some mates we had from Liverpool. You could be on the Kop for the United match and there'd be Wiganers with woolly accents who were with Liverpool, Scouse Evertonians who were there to team up with United, lads from Warrington who sounded more Scouse than us but were with the Mancs.

I've heard a lot of tales about travel to the match but not heard anyone match this one, me and my mate Mike (who I must put on record as being single handedly responsible for all my strays off the straight and narrow) had a mate who's nickname was Jimmy Hill because of his pointy chin, Jimmy's dad worked for British Rail and got issued with a pass for every member of the family to use the trains. It was basically a card that said “Staff Privilege Free Travel” or something like that and it had a grid where Jimmy's brothers and sisters could write in up to 8 free journey's a year.

We coerced him into lending us these passes (we must have swapped them for a mucky video or something) and would go into the local Woolworths, where they stocked some erasable biro's that Parker Pens were selling, write in ‘Wigan to Liverpool return' and the days date, go to the match and then rub it out when we got home and give him them back.

There was one time me and Mike were meant to go to Chelsea away but I overslept and he went by himself. Anyway I was woken by my old man coming to check in my bedroom that I was there, Mike had been nicked at one of the barriers with this pass and had given my name and address to the Old Bill and they'd rung our house to check his details.

On the Latics side of things we had some blinding days, Blackpool was a favourite, there was one do up there either 86 or 87 when there were 54 arrests with 49 of those arrested being from the Wigan area. I think Blackpool and their main boy Benny got a bit pissed off everyone used to turn out for them in numbers because it was a good day out. However our real venom was reserved for Bolton.

In May 1986 ( I think it was the 16th to be precise and we'd been wearing pegs instead of flares for nearly a year) Wigan Athletic played Bolton Wanderers at home. At around 2pm an incident occurred at the Market Tavern public house where a group of Wiganers set upon a group of Bolton fans who were drinking inside the pub.

As a result of the incident Mr Andrew Greenwood and a friend of his from Bolton spent two weeks in hospital recovering from their injuries. Mr Greenwood received 220 stitches in his back for multiple knife wounds.

That coincidentally was the day that Mr and Mrs Lavin decided to move themselves and the rest of the family away from the hustle and bustle of Wigan to the bucolic airs of Horwich which lay within the Borough of Bolton and was home to some of Bolton's most unruly fans known collectively as the Horwich Casuals.

It took about 6 to 8 months for the death threats to die down and by late 1987 they'd stopped pulling knives on me in the pub.

By that time things had moved away from the sportier brands of the early mid eighties and I was shoplifting to support my addiction to labels like Ciao, Ball Jeans, Iron Wash Jeans, Liberto, Armani, Lacoste, Timberland and Best Company. People around me had similar tastes, by that time the Burberry jacket was dying off and people were coming up with Pop 84 or Marc O' Polo sweatshirts.

We were shopping at places like Woodhouse and Wardrobe around St Anne's square in Manchester or Reiss (which was in it's infancy at the time) and Phil Blacks or De Guy or Mezzanine.

By 1989 I was good friends with a lot of the Horwich Casuals and although I had a few ventures into other towns with them on Friday night I was still a Wiganer and I refused outright to go to the match with them.

My loyality has and always will be with Wigan and Liverpool, but things were starting to get uncomfortable with the police. The “hoolivan” with its cameras was at every game and questions were getting asked in Parliament and I knew something bad was going to happen then we heard about the dawn raids happening to Man City and Chelsea.

In 1988 I went to University in Leeds, I came home one weekend in 89 and there were a few gruff Scoucers drinking with the Horwich lot who claimed to be working on a building site in the area and who liked to drink and fight so wanted to hang around with us.

I asked them names of well known Kopites and Liverpool scallies but they fell silent.

At 5:30 on a Monday morning in April 1989 16 addresses in Horwich had warrants served and 16 men were detained in connection with organised football violence, I was away in Leeds at the time. The Scoucers were from the regional crime squad, I don't think I went to another match until 1991.

By 1989/90 I was into the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, I suppose an embarrassing silence is the best way to cover my fashion statements of that era, the rave scene was good and things were plentiful even though I didn't have a job but by 1992 I was becoming a wash out and a skeleton.

I didn't want to take poorly synthesised MDMA anymore, I liked fisticuffs and rough and tumble but the judiciary was leaning more and more towards custodial sentences so I opted for Thai Boxing as the outlet for my aggression. It's legal and fighting infront of a crowd of 400 people is a great lift but the referee and rules make it a more sanitised experience. Being in a firm of 200 charging at Blackpool's mob outside the Gasworks Social Club is a very empowering experience for a working class lad. By 1994 I'd visited Thailand to train and have a holiday and now I've engineered my life so that 50% of it is spent in Siam.

Life here is great, I still train in the beautiful sport but don't fight (I was never really that good). I've had the privilege to train and spar with some of the most successful Thai stadium champions and IBF boxing world champions. Life can be infuriating here for a westerner at times, but the laid back nothing matters attitude that can be irritating is what also makes it such a great place to live; there's never a day goes by that you don't see something that blows your mind, I was sat in a bar not too long back and a ladyboy walked past pushing a pram with a baby in it, you get surprises like that almost every day. I also recently had the privilege of interviewing Peter Hook of New Order for an online publication I write for over here when he played a DJ set in Bangkok; he's a hero of mine and New Order's music has greatly influenced my life.

The bars in Bangkok, Pattaya and Samui are crawling with ex and current hooligans, I call them Rusty Stanleys you can hardly go into a pub without bumping into someone you had a row with 15 years ago. All the main firms are represented here, Cardiff, Leeds, Borough, Stoke, Chelsea, Arsenal, Millwall, United, City, Liverpool, Forest, Everton, it's an endless list. Most of the animosity's forgotten (notice I used the word most) and it's good to have a laugh about things, you've got everything a bloke needs here and you're far from the critical eye of political correctness so everyone's in an easy frame of mind.

You walk into bars like the infamous Dogs Bollocks or the Lazi Pig (run by FYC's one and only Lee Spence) and they're full of 35 and 40 year old blokes thinking they're 20 again; chat about Charge Sheets and old scars litter the air like old Bovril cups and fag ends used to litter the Kop at 6pm on Saturday.

These days, like a lot of people I can't afford to get nicked, but the spirit's still there, fashion wise over here shorts are a daily necessity because of the weather, there's a brand you can't get in the UK called Molecule, they're the nuts. I've got bits and pieces of Stone Island stuff (the jeans are indestructible) I like a lot of the Adidas retro trainers even though they give me ingrowing toenails, I've Sergio Tacchini tracky tops in the wardrobe back in England and like Lacoste and Ralph Lauren polo shirts. I do find it hard to walk past the Lacoste shop here without nipping in although it's a real pain when you find a beauty and then see a copy of it for less than a fiver on a stall.

Thailand takes up most of my life now. My novel Last Seen in Bangkok is available to buy through www.lulu.com or you can visit my website, www.lastseeninbangkok.com.

I've got a bit of an identity crisis now what with Latics and Liverpool both being Premiership, OK no I haven't it's Latics through and through. It was priceless being sat in a bamboo bar during monsoon season in Chiang Mai Northern Thailand last year watching Latics making their Premiership debut at home to Chelsea on telly, watching them get robbed to a one nil defeat and hearing my old mate Brian Cannon leading the JJB in a chant of “We're going to win the League, We're going to win the League and now you're gonna believe us …..”

If you'd told a 15 year old me that was what would happen in twenty years time I probably would have slashed you.

Oh and PS if you're the t##t that gave me the tattoo's with the blue pen in the Dog's Bar when I fell asleep there the other week, the Nazi and National Front ones I didn't mind so much but the Bolton Wanderers ones went a bit too far. Cheers !

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