This guest post is part of a series of first memories of football. As the piece explains, this match wasn’t my first actually footballing memory – more the first time I can recall football actually meaning something more than just being a game, on TV, where the result was a mere formality.

When it started to mean more than what it really should:

A guest post written for the football website, In Bed With Maradona, based on my curious love for an inanimate object – the Adidas Tango football.

A love affair with the Adidas Tango

Have you ever been kicked in the face by a pretty girl with a pair of Doc Martens and thought you were having the time of your life? If yes, then there’s every chance you are either a sadomasochist – or you spent most of your teenage years stood, in a moshpit, less than six feet away from your musical idols.

northernwrites – New Horizons
(A Spotify playlist for you to enjoy – excuse Spotify’s limitations on early ’90s Indie Music)

The boot in the face would regularly happen to me. It came with the territory. The bands we saw – the venues we frequented – it was just a night long cavalcade of head banging, stage diving and avoiding a fat bloke with gaffer tape on his nipples, as he soared through the air; before crashing down on the beer soaked, hard wood of the dance floor. It was the price you paid to express your love for the sounds coming out of the speakers either side of the stage. Being crushed by Sheriff Fatman was a badge of honour. Being kicked by a pretty young girl was the closest you came to sex – for another couple of months at least.

Music has always been with me. I’ve been in lucky in that regards. My uncle was manager of Thin Lizzy and Ultravox. Another worked for a music distribution company – so the house was littered with albums (including Gold/Silver presentation records on the walls) and a new, rare product called a Phillips CD Player. I couldn’t get away from it – but then I didn’t really want to try.

Pre-School music was typically controlled by your parents – on the radio, in the car or from the vinyl they had in the house. I remember the dusty, bent sleeves of “All Mod Cons” by The Jam, “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac or “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy” by The Who. I can remember being trapped in my Old Man’s living room as he played another album to death – usually “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits or “Heartbeat City” by The Cars. But what I remember most from that period is the Jukebox at the Solent Breezes Holiday Park. I could spend all day in the sea, then – come night fall, as many fifty pence pieces as Dad would hand over; to fill the Jukebox up with the records of my choice. Songs like “Close (to the edit)” by Art of Noise or “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. They may not score many kudos points, but for a little over three minutes they were all that mattered to me.

Art of Noise – Close (To the edit)(youtube)

It was when I went to secondary school that my passion for music really took off. Before that I had lived the fairly typical life of a child. I’d say I was sheltered from news, troubles and from going to a faith school in a fairly white, working to middle class part of town – children of differing races. That’s not to say I didn’t come in to contact with anyone that wasn’t white. My Mum worked in Chalkhill Estate for Brent Council – with its large 1st and 2nd Generation West Indian population. Likewise with my Old Man. His job buying and selling Fruit & Veg to shops in and around Harlesden and Wembley brought me it to contact with an array of West Indian, Pakistani and Indian adults. I even spent a large part of my childhood thinking that Choice FM’s Daddy Ernie was my uncle.

So it was the leap from junior school in the suburbs, to a secondary school closer to the heart of London that opened my eyes to a wider diversity of people and musical styles. It was still a faith school, but there was now a healthy mix of black and white, English, Irish and Polish – and each kid seemed to have their own musical tastes.

At home I might still be listening to the same chart stuff as before – with the Old Man still over playing his one record of the year (Paul Simon’s “Graceland”) – but at school, thanks to my new classmates, I was being introduced to the wonders of the unfamiliar sound of American Hip Hop; Def Jam and the Beastie Boys to be precise.

My gateway release to the new world was definitely “Licensed to Ill”. I won’t ever name those outside of my family directly, as this is my blog – and just in case I ever type anything defamatory. So forgive me if I simply refer to people as “a mate” or this “boy/lad/fella/girl”.

So – there was this lad at school that wasn’t allowed to listen to “Licensed to Ill”. His family were fairly strict – other than bizarrely allowing him to watch old kung fu movies. The fact that there was an album out there that someone wasn’t allowed to listen to – well, naturally, I had to buy it.

Minor confession time here – most of my album purchases between ’86-’90 were done so with money that was given to me to buy a travelcard. As kids, and pre-ticket barriers, we quickly cottoned on to which stations would be manned and at what times of the day. Therefore, as long as you had enough money on you to pay for the ticket in case you were caught, you could easily take a punt and keep your travel money for something far less boring instead (if I add spaces, is it no longer copyrighted?).

“Licensed to Ill” was picked up through this redistribution of wealth on a Friday from Our Price in Notting Hill. By Monday, I had studied the lyrics and was now able to drop innuendo, profanities and talk about a Brass Monkey without really understanding what I was going on about (Dear 11 year old self – a Brass Monkey is a drink).

The next couple of years continued along a similar theme. The outside world threw up the sort of 80s pop chart party hits, that most retro nights play as though they are the bastard child of Jive Bunny. In my world, hidden away in my bedroom, I was the DJ at my own private party – guestlist limited to one. N.W.A., KRS-One and Big Daddy Kane were vying for top billing alongside Depeche Mode, Dinosaur Jnr and the Pixies. Yet something was missing. The music was there. The connection to the music was most definitely there; the ability to go absolutely mental and dive from precarious positions – not so.

All that changed thanks to a union of like minded individuals, a collection of mixed tapes and the fact we could all, just about, get in to gigs. My memory is pretty sharp – I can picture people sat on top of speaker stacks. The floral skirt of a girl that kicked me in the face and the park we sat drinking wine in before we went to see Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – but I am at a loss to remember which our first gig as a group was? I know I bought “101 Damnations” by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (to give them their full name) but can’t remember if we saw that tour – or the “30 Something” tour. We saw Mega City Four on the “Who cares wins” tour – but was that before or after the album came out? We saw the Happy Monday’s from the back row at Wembley Arena in 1990. It sounded terrible, they looked terrible – plus ca change and all that.

We definitely saw The Family Cat and Ned’s – the former at the Venue in New Cross, the latter at The Kilburn National – but the internet is telling me those were in 1991. When did we see Dinosaur Jnr at the Mean Fiddler, or was that the Astoria?

Either way, you get the message. From mid-1990 to going our separate ways (me because I choose/was given no option other than to go to a new college) at the back end of 1991 – we went to a gig nearly every weekend. We saw big acts in massive venues, to small acts in the back room of a pub. We went to Indie nights, thrash metal nights, Shoe gazing nights (those were mainly to support other mates who had designs on being the next The Cure) and timidly even went to Hip Hop events. We went to gigs in Wembley, Camden, Central London, South of the river and as far north as our travelcards would take us.

And now for the second confession of this piece. The group shared music. I shared music. I copied music. I accepted copied music. I was the first of the group to buy The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses. It must have passed through at least 20 grubby, thieving little school boy hands before it got back to me. No one gave a second thought about what we were doing. Home taping wasn’t killing music – we didn’t even know what a download was at that stage. All we knew was that it seemed the logical thing to borrow an album, fall head over hells in love with it, and immediately rush out to buy it. Sometimes you were never quite sure whose copy you were passing on. All you knew was that eventually, everyone in the group would have it. And that was how it was meant to be.

No matter how drunk I got at those gigs or how late it was before I went to bed, I can still vividly pick out the songs, the faces, the band members and the friends around me. There is the claim that your school days are the happiest time of your life. I hated school. There isn’t one day from school I would choose to live over again. But the nights after school – when we spent every last penny on albums, concert tickets and booze – those nights I will cherish for as long as I can still hold on to the memories.

First record bought – Tottenham Hotspur’s 1982 FA Cup Final song (Chas & Dave with squad members)

First Stage Dive – The Family Cat (The Venue, New Cross – 19 January 1991 – I jumped in to the crowd and almost landed on Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine)