Sweet and Tender Hooligans

What's interesting about Awaydays - the film based on Kevin Sampson's book about football hooliganism in the late 1970's - isn't the supposedly shocking violence, or the sub-Trainspotting scenes of heroin taking, but its depiction of a very particular British sub-culture.

The film does this with the obsessive eye for period detail of a Jane Austen adaptation. Only, in Awaydays, it is old school trainers and Adidas wind cheaters that are fetishised rather than Easter Bonnets and Empire line dresses. The storytelling is straightforward and the fight scenes are wholly unconvincing (I've seen scarier episodes of The Bill) but it gets the clothes and the haircuts right.

Set in the Liverpool suburb of Birkenhead in 1979, Awaydays follows the attempts of Carty - a lower middle class lad - to join The Pack, a fearsome group of Tranmere Rovers fans. The Pack's fashion sense is precisely rendered: a fusion of mod (Fred Perry T-shirts, parkas) casual (box-fresh trainers) and soul boy (white jeans) that looks startlingly modern against the backdrop of brown suits, donkey jackets and flared jeans worn by the supporting characters.



The film is only ever partly about football hooliganism. It is also about male bonding and the way that men tend to measure friendships through the obsessive documentation of their interests: clothes, records and drinking in this case. There are no significant female characters in Awaydays, with the sole exception of Carty's sister. Significantly, his mother is dead and the film begins with a visit to her grave, an event from which Carty flees to begin his initiation into The Pack. The only other women to feature are brief objects of either lust or derision, treated as casually by the film as the men in it.

Despite this there is a lot of unrequited love about: between Carty and his sister - who idolises her brother to the point of incestuousness - between Carty and the lads on the terraces who are suspicious of his middle class manners and ultimately reject him, and between him and Elvis, the film's real hero. Awaydays is in love with Elvis, a Scouse bohemian with a floppy fringe and an immaculate wardrobe. Elvis in turn is infatuated with both a doomy rock'n'roll mythology and Saturday afternoon violence. And while Carty earns the begrudging respect of the pack, Elvis begins to drift away, lost in his flat chasing the dragon to a soundtrack supplied by Echo and The Bunnymen and Joy Division. In this, Elvis predicts the supposed end of the organised gang violence of The Pack, the period a decade later when the Ecstasy culture of the Happy Mondays and Technique-era New Order nullified the culture of the terraces.



Elvis is an art school reject, a rebellious, effortlessly cool bohemian. He mixes the Mod/Casual chic of The Pack with military overcoats and foppish scarves and lives in a cavern-like flat, the walls of which are completely covered with pop art posters and occult objects. Elvis is the encapsulation of every Liverpudlian working class rock'n'roll hero and gobby popstar ever: a composite of Lennon, Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie, Mick Head, Lee Mavers and countless other wannabees. In a way, the film is actually about Liverpool. Elvis likes to stand on the banks of the Mersey uttering profundities, in love with the city's grandiose self-image and cultishness. It is a cultishness that, for all their mutual antagonism, Liverpool shares with Manchester.

Like football hooliganism this antagonism is mostly for effect. Revealingly, the soundtrack of Awaydays veers between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, four cities caught up during the '70's (and beyond) in vicious football rivalry. As well as the Bunnymen and Joy Division, there's Magazine, OMD, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League.

I watched Awaydays partly out of an interest in the territoriality of football hooliganism, the way it carved areas of the country up into warring factions. Like Orwell's continuous war in 1984 football hooliganism was never about winning. The fights were literally pointless. Neither total defeat or total victory was seriously on the cards nor was it particularly desirable. The enemy was always needed as a convenient hate figure.

In one sense Awaydays is true to this pointlessness. There are fights and retributions, but no progress or forward motion. No one wins. The crude plotting sets up a series of antagonistic face offs, a sense that one kicking always demands another. But, of course, it can't afford to be that bleak. So the end scenes have Carty walking away from The Pack, damaged but not defeated.

The films suggests that there are perhaps only two escapes from the mindless violence of The Pack: the middle class pull of career that Carty is intent on resisting and the romantic dreams of Elvis. At the end only one of them appears to be viable.

You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

Aloof From Inspiration's post on the formation of sexual desire/identity through pop, made me think about the role of clothing in focusing that desire. The look and feel of a band becomes a kind of cultural landscape that fans inhabit which has its own rules and behavoural codes, not least sexually. Not only that but in the narcissistic mirroring of star and fan lies a form of proto-relationship, the first serious one for many, where dressing identically suggests a virtual form of co-habitation, as if you are borrowing each others clothes.

If the subtext of mainstream pop has always been sex and sexual desire, then its margins have often been a reaction to that. Alternative music provides an outlet for feelings of sexual unnatractiveness, physical awkwardness and personal misanthropy. Sometimes, as in the case of The Smiths, this is expressed as a haughty disregard for sex altogether. In this case the role of clothes becomes less about making oneself appear conventionally sexually attractive than of confirming a kind of higher allegiance to something else.



Most of the bands I listened to as a teenager were deliberately sexless. The Smiths, obviously, but also Orange Juice, The Cure and countless other now forgotten C86 bands. Well, perhaps not sexless exactly, but awkward, gawky, troubled. This was in marked contrast to the priapically obsessed heavy rock/metal that my older brother listened to: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Whitesnake - christ, even the band names were filthy - music which was continuously, comically, horny (Train Kept A Rollin' All Night Long). The clothing worn by these bands was equally comical, obsessively drawing attention to lavish chest hair and bulging groins.

Against this there was also the landscape of suburban Essex in the 1980's, the well dressed lads with their peg trousers, wedge haircuts and Maze albums, the Essex Barn nightclub with Shakatak and Shalamar on the dancefloor and the endless rituals of going out on the pull.

To be an indie music fan - a puritanical, not to say snobbish genre - was to reject such overt displays of sexuality and the heavily coded us and them courtships of the dancefloor. To like indie was to align oneself with gawky romantic failure, particularly as so much of its aesthetic derived from a celebration of un-worldly, deliberately childish imagery. Not just the names (Orange Juice, The Pooh Sticks, The Soup Dragons etc.), but the clothes too. These were defiantly un-sexy, mixing an old-man/lady charity shop aesthetic (long coats, tweed and suede jackets, paisley skirts) with pre-adolescence (floppy fringes, shorts, pig tails), possibly the two periods in life when a lack of sex goes with the territory.

Orange Juice were not sexless. They were giddy romantics but in an aspiring, bookish sort of way, more in love with the idea of being in love itself. They sounded as if their idea of romantic love was a kind of tremulous chasteness, a never-quite-there moment full of witty conversation and charmingly drunken bicycle rides. Orange Juice were forever on the cusp of adulthood, or even late adolescence, balanced on an intense over excitable knife edge of anticipation without consumation. The clothes reflected this: shorts, buttoned up shirts, fur hats (for some reason), a boy scout aesthetic with a deliberate camp edge.



Although in many ways Britpop destroyed this version of indie, together with its angular awkwardness, Jarvis Cocker manged to give it a new twist. Jarvis took Indie's perennial teenager and mixed him with a sex obsessed dirty old man. He still wore the charity shop clothes but this time they were those of the 1970's would be lothario mixed with a libertarian but slyly dirty comprehensive school teacher thrown in. Acrylic shirts undone to the navel, flared suits, oversized sunglasses. Melody Maker once described him perfectly as having the look of "someone who has just emerged blinking into the daylight from a soho peepshow, escorted by two policemen".



Vampire Weekend's look brings this all somewhat up to date. They are less eccentric dandies than polite mannerists, thoroughly aware of the rules and mischeviously playing with the pedantry. There are echoes of Bret Easton Ellis and his early New England campus novels examining the microscopic hierarchies of social one-upmanship in such places. And the tedious empty perfectionism of the business card envy of American Psycho. They are perhaps the indie band gone to college, realising after years of sand being kicked in their faces that bookishness can be sexy, preppyness cool. Some mention should be made of Kanye West too, with hislatest buttoned up (and down) look, the preppy scarves and college mascots although now twinned with a more worldly post grad come down: heartbreak.

Confessions of an Interior Designer

I remember seeing a clip once from a late '60's DIY programme in which a plummy voiced man advised viewers how to cover up their Victorian panelled doors with MDF sheets. Twenty years or so later there were similar programmes telling us how to rip them back off again. All of which is to say that interior design is a fickle business, subject to the whims and cycles of fashion. Dangerously shallow waters for the tastemaker then. It's easy to look a little foolish in retrospect.

These two books published in the late 1970's and written by (now Sir) Terence Conran are a fabulous case in point. There are many odd and inadvertently amusing things about them, but not everything can be put down to the fact that the 1970's themselves were inadvertently amusing.

For a start much of the text is written through a moist haze of soft core eroticism. No, really. A lot of it seems utterly unnecessarily priapic, as if the author might be over compensating for the self perceived lack of machismo of writing about bathroom fittings to start with. Semi or completely naked ladies crop up everywhere; taking a shower, lying in a wicker armchair in sun dappled soft focus, lolling around on the bed having champagne breakfasts.



There are chapters on how to make a Seduction Den, special features on water beds (illustrated by a naked woman reclining on peach satin sheets. One can almost hear the author physically restraining himself from referring to her as a 'dusky beauty'), and such continental exotica as bidets and the use of musk.



The Seduction Den chapter is particularly enjoyable and worth quoting at length:

"The dedicated playboy or girl may decide to invest in audio-visual equipment. In this highly erotic room, its bed surrounded by a velvet cushioned lip, sexy music and blue movies help to create a den for unbridled lust."

Pragmatic advice is also to hand:

"Fur on the floor is not practical, but a thick absorbent carpet is an adequate substitute."

There's something slightly unpleasant about the use of the word absorbent there, but nevermind, the author goes on undaunted:

"A large mirror is in keeping, as are big bottles of scent, aftershave or talc, and, of course, a bidet."

Of course. And make those bottles big.



Someone called Bonnie Molnar turns up to tell us more than we might like to know about her sex life, and something she refers to disturbingly as getting "a good thumping". An erotic bedroom, she informs us, should be comfortable:

"You owe it to yourself and to your complex female sensuality to make it so."

Ah the mysteries and complexities of female sensuality. So much deeper than the man with his concerns for absorbent carpets. How to give it material expression? Will a wicker armchair meet the requisite combination of bohemian informality and gypsy passion?



Not to be outdone Roger Barasel tells us about his formative sexual experiences with chuckling male bravado:

"My first sexual encounter was, in fact, not in my own bedroom but my parents' spare bedroom, then occupied by the Austrian au pair (cultural exchange I believe it's called)."

Hats off to you Sir!

And the design? There is much to scoff at and, alternatively, much to enjoy especially if you like super graphics and loud colour schemes. Which I do. The 1970's may be the decade that taste forgot (or is that the '80's?) but who wants too much good taste anyway? I think I prefer the Robin Asquith era Terence Conran to the overly respectable version of today.



Post Script

Interior design has always been the fickle, flashier, younger sibling of architecture. While architecture strives for timelessness, interior design is happy to engage in the ephemeral. Architects have spent the last hundred years stressing structure, materials and space. Commodity and firmness more than delight. Interior design deals with ornament, decoration, colour and fabric - the aspects of buildings that Modernist rhetoric dismissed as unnecessary, extrinsic to the ineffable substance of architecture. Literal frippery.

They are also the aspects of architecture historically given feminine characteristics. Similarly, the persona of the architect - serious, professional, aloof - is seen as distinct from that of the Interior Designer: more often a woman, and if not then foppish, camp, quite possibly gay. Whilst the architect strives to be taken seriously as a professional, the interior designer is happy to splash the money around.



But they're not so different. Ultimately, Charles Jencks' endorsement of Post Modernism (published in 1977) went the same way as Terence Conran's seduction den. The current tropes of fashionable architecture will inevitably end up as someone's skeleton in the portfolio. Anything that claims timelessness is probably motivated by a fear of seeming ephemeral. The distance architecture puts between it and interior design communicates its ultimate fear that they aren't so far apart. The caricature of the interior designer is a mirror image of the architect.