‘Build a bonfire, build a bonfire

Put Bellotti on the top

Put Bill Archer in the middle

Then we’ll burn the f***ing lot!’

The last time Brighton & Hove Albion featured at any length in this story we’d just had the finest hour in our history, losing the 1983 FA Cup Final replay to mighty Manchester United after a first match we should have won, hundreds of pages ago. Good, some of you will perhaps be thinking, and we don’t want to hear any more, thanks very much: we didn’t buy this book to read about football. It isn’t a football book, sure enough, but it’s my autobiography, the club I love and the game in general has always been very important to me – and in the early 1990s it took over other areas of my life, and did so for about eighteen years, in a way I never thought would happen and certainly never intended it to.

That’s why I’ve devoted the penultimate chapter of this book to some memories from the successful battle by Brighton fans to save our club and secure a new stadium after our Goldstone Ground was sold to property developers in 1995, leaving us homeless: a battle in which I was passionately involved from first to last. Even if you loathe the game, please read on. It could have been a much-loved theatre, a cherished community project or whatever: it just happened to be the Albion, and ordinary fans, most of whom had never been involved in protests before, rallied round and defeated the usurpers who nearly destroyed our club in what is without doubt the most successful grass roots campaign I’ve ever been involved with. And I’ve seen a few.

Our struggle has been well documented in the media and print, especially in Paul Hodson and Steve North’s wonderful books ‘Build a Bonfire’ (Mainstream Publishing, 1997) and ‘We Want Falmer’ (Stripe Publishing, 2011) and former chairman and Albion saviour Dick Knight’s ‘Mad Man’ (Sports Vision Publishing, 2013). If you want to read more, I can heartily recommend all three. I’m not going to write an in-depth, chronological re-run: that’s been done. I’m just going to add a few of my personal thoughts and anecdotes as co-founder of BISA, aka Brighton Independent Supporters’ Association, which co-ordinated the fans’ protests in the mid 90s, as a member of the ‘Bring Home The Albion’ and ‘Falmer for All’ campaign teams which fought first to bring us back from exile 70 miles away and then to secure planning permission for our new permanent home, and as the club’s stadium announcer, DJ and Poet in Residence at Gillingham and Withdean, our temporary homes, for 14 years - from 1997 when the Goldstone was taken from us until 2011 when the new stadium at Falmer, for which we’d battled for so long, finally opened.

Watching a game of football had always been a simple pleasure for me, a part of my life distinct from the rest: it’s fair to say that I have spent getting on for 40 years in a left-wing punky subculture and have little or no interest in most mainstream forms of entertainment. Brighton & Hove Albion, and football in general, is one of the few areas in my life where I meet people from all backgrounds, all political opinions, all ages, all tastes. I have always absolutely cherished that: it’s one of the things that makes me love the game so much.

I never, ever expected that my political views and my love of the Albion would coalesce in the way they did. Our fight was against ruthless, predatory capitalism, red in tooth and claw. An individual named Bill Archer, living at the other end of the country and with no previous recorded interest in football, gained control of the shares in our club for £56.25. He genuinely believed that this ‘business transaction’ conducted ‘in accordance with the law of the land’ meant that he could do what he wanted with ‘his property’ and that there was nothing we fans (or ‘half brains’ as he once famously called some of us campaigners) could do about it. ‘I own this club lock, stock and barrel!’ To add insult to injury, he appeared to think that because we were from the South Coast we didn’t really CARE about football like ‘real’ (presumably Northern?) fans did and if our club was destroyed we’d go off and play croquet or something.

After his home - about 270 miles from Brighton - had been picketed for the fourth or fifth time and, following an away game at Wigan, a load of Seagulls fans had marched through the quaint little Lancashire village where he lived (guess the organiser) putting leaflets through the door of every single resident with a poem (guess the author) explaining why we were there, what their neighbour was doing to our club and what we’d like them to say to him, he began to get an inkling that he was wrong. After his name had been pilloried all over the national press and on TV as a heartless, out of touch enemy of Brighton and football in general by quite a few media-savvy Albion fans with good contacts and a way with words (‘Half brains?’) that inkling increased.

After his business, Focus DIY, had been the subject of an energetic boycott and non-violent direct action campaign, not just by Albion fans but by fellow football fans all over the country outraged by what he was doing, he got the message a bit more. (A word to Focus customers and employees on those busy Saturday mornings when Brighton fans and our allies at other clubs arrived at outlets around England, loaded big trolleys to the brim with the smallest items available, synchronised their arrival at each checkout, stood while the staff spent an aeon putting each tiny item through the till while massive crowds built up behind - and then distributed leaflets detailing why they had done what they did and walked out, leaving the cashiers needing to cancel each tiny item before they could serve the next customer. To quote British Rail: we apologise for the delay and regret the inconvenience caused. All part of the campaign.)

So what had Archer done? Armed with the shares, purchased for £56.25 as I say, he had sold our Goldstone Ground to property developers for ‘at least 7 million’ in Summer 1995, without making any provision for a new stadium. Before selling the ground, Archer removed a clause from the club’s constitution which stated that no individual could profit from its sale. I’m not going to go into a big explanation of how he got hold of the shares: it’s a long story of slow decline after our 1983 FA Cup Final defeat and financial chaos, exacerbated by the actions of other directors happy to make their shares over to him as the club’s fortunes plummeted and the actions and inactions of the previous chairman, Archer’s theoretical boss at Focus, Greg Stanley. (We’d started BISA - Brighton Independent Supporters’ Association - way back in 1992 to try and find out what was happening, and the associated Albion fanzine ‘Gulls Eye’, run by local undertaker and Albion hero Ian Hart and his friend Peter Kennard, had already been sued for libel by previous board members.)

After a mass pitch invasion at the last home game of the 1995-6 season which caused the match to be abandoned and brought our club’s plight into the national media in a big way, we were eventually told that at the end of the 1996-7 season we would be made homeless and the ground demolished, soon to become a retail park (one that many Albion fans will not visit to this day). That made us even more determined to get Archer out. We planned our actions at open-to-all BISA meetings on Monday nights at the Concorde music venue in Brighton, packed with hundreds of people, all prepared to get stuck in. There were boycotts, sit-ins, pitch invasions, the aforementioned pickets of his home and demo though his village – and the crowning moment was a wonderful demonstration of solidarity by fellow fans from all over the UK and abroad at the ‘Fans United Day’ we organised at a match at home to Hartlepool on February 8th 1997. (I had about 8 Germans sleeping on my floor that night!) We knew we were really getting to him - and eventually we ground him down.

I never thought I’d find myself at the Centre for Dispute Resolution of the Confederation of British Industry, but I did. I was there as an observer with fellow BISA co-founder and activist and good mate Paul Samrah, a local accountant who had found out about the change to the no-profit clause in the club’s constitution, alongside long standing campaigners Paul Whelch, Liz Costa, Tony Foster and Norman Rae, while a consortium led by local businessman Dick Knight had lengthy discussions with Archer about a takeover. (The Football Association, who are supposed to be football’s supreme governing body, had held up their hands helplessly, saying ‘it’s a business matter, he’s got the shares.’ At least they set up the CEDR meeting though.)

Eventually a deal was thrashed out by which Archer relinquished absolute control, and, to huge cheers, soon-to-be-new chairman Dick Knight took his seat in the directors’ box for the final home game of the 1996-97 season. Archer, and his puke-inducing sidekick and mouthpiece, failed Liberal Democrat MP David Bellotti, would very soon have nothing further to do with our club. But our ground had been sold and for the following two seasons a deal had been signed to share the stadium at Gillingham – a round trip of some 140 miles from Brighton.

 

If you’re a football fan, perhaps even if you aren’t, you’ll have noticed something missing in this tale so far: any indication of how the team was actually faring on the pitch. I’ve deliberately left that bit out until now because I wanted to give the background to our plight – but things on the field were just as bad as off it. Having slowly descended through the leagues following our heady four seasons in the old First Division from 1979-1983 and that Cup Final defeat, we had spent much of that 1996/7 season crippled by debt and way adrift at the bottom of the whole Football League, 92nd out of 92, with relegation into the nether world of the Conference looming. Performances were truly dreadful. But as we made progress in the battle against Archer off the field, so we started to do so on it, thanks to the efforts of recently-appointed manager Steve Gritt – and we ended up needing to win the last ever game at the Goldstone against Doncaster Rovers on April 26 1997 to have any realistic chance of staying in the Football League.

That day was an incredibly emotional one for us all. The previous night I had painted a big banner: ‘RIP GOLDSTONE GROUND 1902-1997, SOLD TO MONEYMEN BY ARCHER – WE WILL NEVER FORGET’. It featured prominently in many of the national press reports of the game (and the events afterwards) and is reproduced here.

I had also written a poem about my recollections of more than 30 years as a fan. Some of my most cherished memories of my short time with my father were of him taking me to that ground: I wrote it in his memory, and for all of us who were fighting to save our club. I am so proud that it now stands on the wall of Dick’s Bar, our supporters’ bar in our new stadium, and the penultimate verse, written in defiance and absolute belief that we would one day win, can be found at each gangway entrance in the North Stand, now as before my lifelong Albion stamping ground…

GOLDSTONE GHOSTS

 

As bulldozers close in upon our old, beloved home

and those who stand to profit rub their hands

so we gather here together in sad, angry disbelief

and for one last time our voices fill the stands.

This is no happy parting, but a battle-scarred farewell

though victory hopes are mingled with the tears

And I, like you, will stand here as the final whistle blows

with memories which echo down the years…

 

The Chelsea fans threw pennies. Old ones. Sharpened. I was eight.

A target in the South Stand with my dad

And he got rather battered as he held me close and tight

and confirmed my view that Chelsea fans were mad!

And there, on those old wooden seats, I learned to love the game.

The sights and sounds exploded in my head.

My dad was proud to have a son with football in his blood -

but two short years later, he was dead.

 

Eleven. I went on my own. (My friends liked chess and stuff.)

‘Now don’t go in the North Stand!’ said my mum.

But soon I did. Kit Napier’s corner curled into the net.

Oh god. The Bournemouth Boot Boys! Better run…

Then Villa in the big crunch game. A thirty thousand crowd.

Bald Lochhead scored, but we still won the day.

Then up, and straight back down again. Brian Powney, brave and squat.

T.Rex, DMs and scarf on wrist, OK?

 

And then the world was wonderful. Punk rock and Peter Ward!

And sidekick ‘Spider’ Mellor, tall and lean.

The legendary Walsall game. Promotion. Riding high.

Southampton-Spurs: that stitch-up was obscene.

The final glorious victory. Division One at last!

Arsenal, first game, midst fevered expectation.

Those Highbury gods tore us to shreds; we learned the lesson well.

Steve Foster was our soul and inspiration!

Man City came, and Gerry Ryan waltzed through them to score

And mighty Man United bit the dust.

Notts Forest, and that Williams screamer nearly broke the net.

The Norwich quarter-final: win or bust!

And after Wembley, Liverpool were toppled one last time.

The final curtain on those happy days.

And then the years of gradual, inexorable decline -

sadly for some, the parting of the ways.

 

But we stayed true, as glory days turned into donkeys’ years.

Young, Trusson, Tiltman, Farrington. Ee-aw!

A Wilkins free-kick nearly brought us hope. ‘Twas not to be.

The rot was deep and spreading to the core.

We found our voice and Lloyd was gone. Hooray! But worse to come.

Though just how awful we were yet to know.

Dissent turned to rebellion and then to open war

as on the terrace weeds began to grow.

 

The Goldstone sold behind our backs! Enraged, we rose as one

against a stony northern businessman.

We drew a line, and said: ENOUGH! And as the nation watched

the final battle for our club began.

We fought him to a standstill. Fans United. All for one.

A nation’s colours joined: a glorious sight.

And, finally, the stubborn, stony Archer moved his ground

and made way for our own collective Knight.

 

The battle’s only just begun, but we have won the war.

Our club, though torn asunder, will survive.

And I salute each one of you who stood up and said NO!

And fought to keep the Albion alive.

And one day, when our new home’s built, and we are storming back

A bunch of happy fans without a care

We’ll look back on our darkest hour and raise our glasses high

and say with satisfaction: we were there.

 

But first we have to face today. The hardest day of all.

Don’t worry if you can’t hold back the tears!

We must look to the future, in dignity and peace

as well as mourn our home of ninety years.

For me the Goldstone has an extra special memory

of the football soulmate I so briefly had.

He christened me John Charles and taught me to love the game.

This one’s for Bill. A poet. And my dad.

I performed it on BBC1’s ‘Football Focus’ before the game. A bugler sounded the Last Post. Then, amidst unbelievable tension, Stuart Storer etched his name into Albion history with the winning goal. And then ten thousand of us descended onto the pitch and literally took the Goldstone Ground home with us. Turnstiles, clock, seats, doors: anything which could be moved, and, of course the pitch. I had a piece of turf from the centre spot. It survived an incredibly emotional evening in the pub. It survived the house move after Robina and I got married in 2000. It finally died about 8 years later. A shame, ’cos I’d have liked to take a bit of it back home on the triumphant day our new stadium finally opened.

 

Our ground was gone, but on the pitch we had a lifeline. Relegation rivals Hereford (only one team went down to the Conference back then) had lost their penultimate game, which meant that we needed a draw there in the last match of the season to stay in the Football League. Thousands of us descended on their Edgar Street ground and Robbie Reinelt scored the equalizing goal which kept us up. Forget the Cup Final or promotion to the First Division in 1979: that remains my favourite memory as a Brighton fan, and it was the most important result in our history.

For me there was a special memory (or not!) that evening. Months before, when we seemed nailed-on certainties for the big drop and Hereford were comfortably in mid-table, I had done what I did as often as possible after Brighton away games and agreed to a post-match gig at the town’s real ale mecca, The Barrels: it was organized by Chris from the Hereford fanzine Talking Bull. So devastated were he and his mates that they didn’t turn up: we ran the gig ourselves, and it equalled the show at the Cricklewood Hotel in London after our FA Cup semi final victory in 1983 in the category of ‘a gig I have done but I have no idea how because I was so pissed and don’t remember a thing about it!’

Chris and his mates weren’t wrong to be devastated. Hereford went down to the Conference, and although they were promoted back to the League a few years later, they struggled with financial problems, were relegated again and sadly went out of business in December 2014. A new club will soon rise from the ashes, however, with a controlling interest owned by the fans – as it bloody well should be after everything they have had to go through. I know Brighton fans aren’t very popular round there, but I wish them all the very best for the future: their story could have been ours.

As it was, though, we were still in the League – but the next season we would be playing our home matches at Gillingham, a round trip of 140 miles by road from Brighton, about four hours by train.

 

I can still remember the first League game of that 1997-8 season at Gillingham at ‘home’ to Macclesfield. The Albion is the only major professional football club in Sussex: in the Seventies we often had crowds in excess of 20,000 at our home games and these days, I’m happy to say, we always do – long may it continue. But they often declined into four figures during the last days of the Goldstone era, and the Gillingham era was definitely the lowest point in our history: the combination of a truly appalling team and ‘home’ games played 70 miles away in a different county meant that only two or three thousand made the trip on average.

That first time, to make the experience more bearable, I’d got to Gillingham early and sunk a few pints in the Roseneath pub. (This would become a regular pre-match haunt for me and many other real ale-loving Albion fans: it sadly closed in 2008.) I made my way to the Priestfield Stadium a few minutes before kick off just in time to hear the Gillingham stadium announcer declaim, with all the enthusiasm of a rather sleepy sloth who had just taken a whole bottle of Valium, ‘And now please welcome Brighton & Hove Albion…’ The game was awful. It finished 1-1: a lot more beer was needed afterwards to take the taste away!

But the next ‘home’ game brought a new development in my life as a Brighton fan - one that would last about fourteen years.

Like me, our new chairman, Dick Knight, watched the game from the terrace in the Gillingham ‘home’ end, where our more vociferous element would gather to give what support we could. I’d got to know him well through all the battles against Archer and was standing next to him as the stadium announcer repeated his sloth imitation. ‘Bloody hell, Dick, that was pathetic!’ I said. ‘I could do better than that! And I’d play better music too. Some punk and ska would liven this place up a bit!’

‘Great idea. A friendly voice from home. Ok, John, you’re on!’ he said.

Simple as that. We got clearance from the Gillingham authorities, the stadium announcer was happy to be supplanted (his name’s Doug, he’s a fine folk musician and a nice bloke: I don’t blame him for being unenthusiastic, we’re not his club!) and I turned up for the next home game armed with a bunch of CDs. It meant altering my pre-match routine though. Instead of getting to Gillingham at about 1pm, having about 6 pints in the Roseneath and then heading to the ground about 2.45, I put everything back an hour so that the six pints were consumed between 12 and 1.45 and I got to the ground about 2 to do the P.A. On that first occasion, Doug was there to point everything out to me, and then I was on my own, with a load of punk, ska and reggae CDs and 6 pints inside me - the new stadium announcer for Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club.

For those unfamiliar with football, my ‘job’ (I did it for free, it was an honour, the club was skint and given my inebriated state I couldn’t have asked for payment with a straight face) was to play music to entertain the crowd before the game, read out the teams, announce substitutions during play and do birthday dedications and such at half-time. I was obviously used to performing in public and once I’d worked out what buttons to push and when, I think I did OK despite the six pints before the match: the only problem was timing the odd dash to the toilet, and as the weeks passed I managed to work that out pretty well without compromising my beer intake.

But I knew I needed a hand: not just because of the beer aspect, but because a few times a season overseas tours or faraway gigs meant I’d have to miss a game. So I gave my BISA colleague Paul Samrah a ring, he agreed readily, and for the next fourteen years, at Gillingham and then Withdean, our temporary stadium in Brighton, we did the PA as a double act: the accountant and the punk poet, which sums up the diversity of our fanbase. He’s a lovely bloke, is Paul, and he has done more for BHAFC than people will ever know.

I didn’t just play punk stuff, but obvious references to our ‘exile’ status too, tracks like ‘We’ve Got To Get Out Of This Place’. ‘We Shall Come Home’ by the Oysterband became our theme tune. Every week, I tried to come up with a couple of musical jokes or comments to cheer up and encourage our faithful fanbase. And then came the fateful game. Boxing Day 1997, at home to Colchester.

The tunes I’d been playing pre-match had been going down well with the Albion fans I’d talked to, and the whole idea of playing music that was as energetic as possible to try and create some sort of pre-match atmosphere in a ‘home’ ground 70 miles away was a hit with Dick Knight and the club. It was an early kick-off on Boxing Day: we were bumping around second from bottom of the whole Football League, with a team perhaps even worse than the one we’d had the previous season. We’d obviously had to set off really early to get to Gillingham in time for the game and everyone was a bit bleary-eyed. So, for the first time, I decided to play ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols. It had been on for about a minute when a policeman burst into the box.

‘Take that off! Take that off! NOW!’

‘Why?’ I asked. But I could see that he was REALLY ANGRY. So I did, and put the Clash on instead.

‘You can’t play that record at a football match. It’s banned. It’s on the LIST!’

‘What list?’ I asked. ‘No-one has ever told me there was a list of records I couldn’t play!’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it!’ he shouted. ‘It’s OBVIOUS!’ I stood there, the Clash playing in the background, perplexed. It evidently wasn’t ‘obvious’ to me; the fact that he needed to explain further made him even more angry.

‘IT INCITES VIOLENCE IN THE CROWD!’

I thought for a few seconds.

‘Well, Officer’ I said. ‘I bought two copies of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in the black sleeve on EMI Records on the day that it came out in 1976. I have played it and heard it many, many times since and not once has doing so given me violent thoughts of any kind whatsoever. I have also been to all 92 Football League grounds and every time I have heard ‘In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins I have had to restrain myself from committing serious acts of criminal damage!’

He didn’t get the joke, and a couple of days later Brighton & Hove Albion FC received a formal letter from Kent Police banning me from doing the P.A. at Gillingham any longer. Dick Knight phoned me up. ‘I’m not having that, John!’ He spoke to them, and the ban was rescinded, on condition that I didn’t play ‘Anarchy in the UK’ again. So I didn’t.

I did play ‘Smash it Up’ by the Damned and ‘I Fought The Law’ and ‘White Riot’ by the Clash in the next couple of weeks though. No policeman appeared in the box. Obviously those three weren’t on the LIST.

Over the years we had some moments in the PA box at Gillingham and then Withdean: some of the ‘themed’ pre-match musical selections we came up with were a right laugh. My favourite is probably 2000-2001. Chesterfield were our main promotion rivals, but as the season progressed it became obvious that their then chairman Darren Brown was involved in some seriously dodgy financial dealings (he ended up going to prison for four years). When we played them at home we started with ‘Taxman’, followed by ‘Take The Money & Run’ and ‘Money Money Money’ and were just heading into ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’ when there was a message from then manager Micky Adams to stop the money theme – it was winding up the Chesterfield players. There would be many more such incidents…

 

The campaign to get the club back to Brighton from Gillingham began more or less straight after the Hereford game. Once the one obvious site had been identified – Withdean Stadium, a rather dilapidated athletics track in a leafy, suburban area of Brighton – the main task was to persuade local residents that we should be granted permission to play football in our home city again, even though it would be near their expensive properties. Every conceivable stereotype related to football fans was unearthed in their campaign to stop us, but the relentlessly polite, often be-suited and totally unprovokable ‘Bring Home The Albion’ campaign, led with aplomb by Adrian Newnham, made them look frankly ridiculous and we made slow but steady progress. We’re a good bunch of fans at BHAFC. We even promised litter patrols around the stadium - and once we’d moved there, we did them.

As for the council: many members were supportive of the move back to start with, and once we started talking about a Seagulls’ Party intervention at the local election with candidates standing against any councillors who opposed it, that was that, really. We have a lot of passive support in the area alongside our active fanbase, and it was obvious to the councillors that opposing our return would be electoral suicide. So we got a vote in favour, the athletics stadium was equipped for league football as much as a rickety old stadium of its nature could be, and having survived two seasons at Gillingham we moved back to Withdean for the start of the 1999-2000 season, and in our first League match beat Mansfield Town 6-0. Needless to say, Paul and I carried on doing the PA. In the 2000-2001 season I added another string to my bow by becoming the Albion’s Poet in Residence, sponsored (for one year) by the Arts Council and enthusiastically supported (for his entire tenure up until 2009) by chairman Dick Knight.

 

So in our second season back at Withdean I wasn’t just playing punk rock before the games, but performing Albion-related poems on the pitch before the game to 7,000 or so fans as well. I got a mixed response, from enthusiastic support to pissed abuse: my favourite example of the latter was the bloke who shouted at me in Brighton town centre one day. ‘You’re the c**t who does the fucking poetry at the football aren’t you? We’ve already got a fucking reputation as a poofy club, and now we’ve got a fucking poet as well.’ (I gave him short shrift, needless to say, as would 99% of our fanbase!) There’s a great song by Magazine called ‘Shot By Both Sides’ which reflected my feelings as I got occasional stick for being a poet at the football and, when my long involvement in the Albion campaign started to creep into my live shows, would get occasional stick from my fans for talking about football at my gigs.

But the reaction of the majority of Albion fans - or at least of the majority who cared either way - was illustrated by the fact that when I published ‘Goldstone Ghosts’, a book of the poems I had written and performed during that 2000-2001 season, as a fundraiser for the club and put 500 copies in the club shop, they sold out quite quickly. It helped that we won the championship (albeit the championship of the bottom division) that year, so the poems were pretty upbeat! As part of my year as Poet in Residence I also held writing workshops with fellow fans and edited an excellent book of supporters’ work - and when my official Arts Council-sponsored role ended, Dick Knight asked me to carry on (unpaid of course) and put me in the front of the programme as Poet in Residence alongside the names of the chairman, board members and so on. I was honoured. I carried on performing the pre-match poems for a while, and did an occasional one on the pitch or from the PA box right up until our long-awaited move to our new home in 2011.

That, of course, was the next and final stage in our campaign, and it had begun even before our return to Brighton. Withdean Stadium only held 7,000 people, far fewer than our fanbase, the club was running at a big loss and we needed to find a location for a permanent home as soon as possible. All kinds of sites were looked at and soon the only suitable one was identified: a patch of land on the edge of Brighton, next to Falmer station and the main A27 trunk road, adjacent to the two Sussex universities and partly covered by some shabby old university buildings. Opponents (local NIMBYs and adjacent Lewes Council Liberal Democrats) claimed it was an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. We said ‘Bollocks! It’s a patch of land next to Falmer station and the main A27 trunk road, adjacent to the two Sussex universities, partly covered by some shabby old university buildings!!’

We set up the Falmer For All Campaign Team, a group of dedicated activists who had mostly been involved since the very beginning of the fight to save the club, headed by the indefatigable Paul Samrah. Planning permission for our permanent new stadium there was applied for in October 2001: in a 1999 referendum, 68% of local people who voted had supported our move there, but the Falmer residents succeeded in getting it called in for a public inquiry. The battle had begun. Little did we know then, but it would take TEN YEARS from the time planning permission was submitted until our new stadium would finally open…

In the meantime, although things were getting a lot better on the pitch (club hero Bobby Zamora’s goals had won us the championship of the bottom division and the next season did the same in the one above) the club was still running at a massive loss, simply because Withdean was so small and loads of people who would have loved to come and watch us just couldn’t get in. Fans were coming up with loads of initiatives to raise money to keep us going, under the banner ‘Keep the Albion Alive and Kicking’. I had an idea.

By 2004 I’d been doing my stuff for nearly 25 years and had an awful lot of material. I decided to do a non-stop sponsored gig in aid of the club at my local in Brighton, the Evening Star, on Sunday 28 November, starting at opening time (12 noon) and finishing at closing time (10.30pm) performing everything I’d ever written, with a special ‘agony half hour’ where I’d do unspeakable versions of awful songs for large donations, backed by Robina on piano.

The idea got loads of local media coverage and was a tremendous success. I performed my entire back catalogue plus some covers of my favourite songs: in the ‘agony half hour’, fellow fans sponsored me and Robina large amounts to do some covers of my LEAST favourite songs. Fellow PA announcer Paul Samrah, who would take advantage of my occasional absences at gigs to play Supertramp (yuk!) over the PA at Withdean, sponsored me to do ‘The Logical Song’: we also covered ‘Mistletoe and Wine’, ‘D.I.S.C.O’ and ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’ among others. And then there was ‘My Favourite Things’ with a special new verse…

‘Archer immersed in puke, rancid and grotty

Thousands of red ants all eating Bellotti

Their knobs in a wasp’s nest all covered with stings

These are a few of my favourite things…’

The pub was packed all day, we raised over £2000 and I literally performed non stop, apart from three visits to the toilet. But by then I had an even bigger campaign project – or musical prank - under way…

 

In February 2004 there had been a real setback in our campaign for our new stadium at Falmer: up until that point we’d basically concentrated on letter writing to support our case, but all that was about to change. A government planning inspector, having heard the evidence at the public inquiry, had submitted a report recommending the stadium plans be rejected! He obviously thought a patch of land on the edge of Brighton, next to Falmer station and the main A27 trunk road, adjacent to the two Sussex universities and partly covered by some shabby old university buildings, was an area of outstanding natural beauty. We were gutted.

Fortunately for us, however, we had had intimations that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was very much on our side. We launched a charm offensive on him: on Valentine’s Day 2004 we sent him over 100 bunches of flowers and got loads of national publicity for doing so. Sure enough, he didn’t rule against the stadium, but declared that the public inquiry would be re-opened early in 2005 with seven other sites to be considered. We knew that none of them were suitable and stepped up the pressure, all very much aware that keeping the issue in the public eye was essential. We were constantly trying to come up with new media stunts as the year progressed. Party conferences in Brighton were targeted with demonstrations, and these and all sorts of other cleverly targeted actions would continue for the next couple of years.

Legendary Brighton punk band The Piranhas, whom I had first seen back in the old Vault days of 1977, had had a 1980 hit with ‘Tom Hark’, their adaptation of an old South African kwela song. It had been picked up big time by football clubs across the country, many of them using the jaunty opening bars as celebration music when the home team scored a goal: hearing a Brighton band used against us by opposing clubs at away games in this way always pissed me off no end! And one day I had an idea to redress the balance and get us into the headlines, big time…

The rickety old PA box at Withdean was always full of banter. Paul Samrah, myself and local radio personality Richard Lindfield shared PA duties, Robina was there with me most of the time as well, safety officer Richard Hebberd was often around and various club officials and the occasional injured player would pop in to say hello. Paul and I would always be talking about new initiatives for the campaign.

One Saturday in early November 2004 during a lull in play I was moaning about yet another away defeat where ‘Tom Hark’ had been blared at us in unwelcome fashion. That song had become really popular in football circles: just about every fan knew it, and many chants were based around it. Suddenly I thought: let’s rewrite it with new words about the battle for Falmer and try and get it into the Top 40 - that would get us loads of publicity. My old mate John Otway’s devoted fans had got him to Number 9 in 2002 with ‘Bunsen Burner’ after a very organised internet campaign. The Albion have a massive fanbase, why couldn’t we do the same? But I knew it had to be done quickly – in a minute, I’ll explain why.

Everyone thought it was a great idea, so I got on the case straight away. My task was made a lot easier by the fact that well known DJ and Brighton fan Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook’s record label, Skint, were our club sponsors at the time and easily approachable: I had a meeting with Damian Harris and Andy Mac from the label and they liked the idea too. I turned Piranhas’ singer ‘Boring’ Bob Grover’s original lyric (about fear of a nuclear holocaust!) into a brief summation of our plight, coupled with a plea to John Prescott…

I then approached Piranhas main man and original lyricist Bob Grover, asking him if he’d like to get involved: he gave us his blessing but said no. So in the next few days I came up with a name for the band – Seagulls Ska – and recruited Dan, David and McGhee from my band Barnstormer to play guitar, bass and drums, local actor and Albion fan Ralph “Withnail & I’ Brown to do the sax solo and Marlon, Tony and Alan from excellent Brighton ska band Too Many Crooks as the brass section. Crooks singer Dave and ‘The Falmer For All Campaign Team Choir’ provided backing vocals, and we recorded the song in 811, a local studio, in late November 2004. There were B sides as well: two ska versions of the old First World War marching song and Albion anthem ‘Sussex By The Sea’ and a new version of ‘Roll Up For The Donkey Derby’, my tongue in cheek ‘celebration’ of rivals Crystal Palace’s FA Cup Final appearance in 1990. Ros South took some photos, my mate Alan Wares did the sleeve design, Skint got the copies pressed up and the internet downloads online, and, very quickly, we were all set to go.

As I mentioned above, the timing was all-important. Every year the major record companies compete for the Xmas Number One single, and then, for a couple of weeks, everything goes quiet in the music business over Christmas and New Year. That means that in the first few weeks of January it’s possible to get a higher chart placing with fewer sales, and so it is obviously the best time to bring out a single such as ours. That’s exactly what we did: it was released on January 3rd 2005, about six weeks after the idea had been first conceived, after a presale campaign orchestrated via the excellent Albion internet forum North Stand Chat which centred on getting as many pre-orders as possible. It was a two pronged effort: physical CDs available in the major record stores and independents in Brighton (a lot) and elsewhere in Sussex (to a degree) and internet downloads, which could be purchased anywhere in the country and indeed the world. Obviously we were up against national chart acts with big promotional budgets – but we were going to give it our best shot.

The local press got behind us, Seagulls Ska launched the record with a live performance and signing session at the Brighton HMV store, loads of Albion fans spread the word to supporters of other clubs over the internet, FC St Pauli fans in Germany got stuck in big time spreading the word over there and quite a few Attila fans who don’t like football downloaded it too. (Cheers to you all!) Word came through after a couple of days that we were Number One on the Amazon download chart – beating Elvis – and the message from Skint was that we were going to do very well.

On Sunday 15 January 2005, Robina and I listened to the chart rundown for the first time since Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman days. Number 30 came and went, no ‘Tom Hark’. Number 20 did too! Bloody hell! We made Number 17 in the Top 40, and we would have been on Top Of The Pops if Busted hadn’t split up that week. That Sunday night we celebrated with a live performance and party at the Engine Room in Brighton, and Albion manager Mark McGhee and, of course, chairman Dick Knight were there too.

The single was played in full on the Radio 1 Top 40 Chart Show, we had major national press coverage in The Times, Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sun (!) among others, national TV including a short appearance on Football Focus, features on Radios 4 and 5 and loads of local and regional media coverage of all kinds. ‘Tom Hark’ sold out of its first pressing of 5,000 in two weeks, ended up selling about 6,500 copies and, as well as a massive publicity boost in our battle for the stadium, it raised over £6000 for the Albion’s ‘Alive and Kicking’ campaign.

Result.

 

The planning inquiry re-opened in February 2005 and the Falmer residents and Lewes Council members opposed to the new stadium were still claiming that it was going to despoil an area of outstanding natural beauty. There was talk of exotic wildlife under threat, of the possibility of ‘vehicle-bat collisions!’ Part of our opponents’ media campaign was centred on pictures of ‘idyllic’ Falmer village centre, complete with pond – though how this was relevant was beyond us really, since the stadium would be situated half a mile away.

And as for Falmer pond being ‘idyllic’ - the previous summer I’d read a report in the local paper that it had become infested with rats. Since Robina and I love ponds and are actually very fond of rats (I had a pet one called Strummer for years) we had decided to go and see for ourselves. It was a calm, hot day, half the pond was dry, the water level in the rest was very low and discoloured by algae and a group of bored and bedraggled-looking ducks were huddled disconsolately on an island in the middle. Next to them was a home made sign.

‘DON’T FEED THE DUCKS, IT ENCOURAGES THE RATS!’

Funny people, these NIMBYS, I thought. Not only do they think that a patch of land on the edge of Brighton, next to Falmer station and the main A27 trunk road, adjacent to the two Sussex universities and partly covered by some shabby old university buildings, is an area of outstanding natural beauty, but they reckon a rat-infested pond is too. (No disrespect to the rats of course.) I decided to write a horror poem…

The Falmer residents HATED that poem. Quite a lot of Brighton fans thought it was very funny though…

 

Planning disputes are not interesting subjects, so I am going to wrap this up quickly now. There were loads more demonstrations and stunts cooked up by clever, resourceful Albion fans as the pressure on Prescott mounted. On 28 October 2005 he gave permission for the new stadium – but there was a mistake in his ruling (an absolutely stupid factual error, shame on his department!) Lewes Council mounted a new challenge and permission was withdrawn. Hazel Blears re-affirmed the approval on 24 July 2007 and on 4 September 2007 the deadline for appeals expired and the club received full permission to proceed. Work began in December 2008.

On Saturday, 30th July 2011 our new stadium finally opened with a friendly match against Spurs – fourteen years after we left the Goldstone Ground. Our club was saved and the beautiful and award-winning new stadium built thanks to a monumental effort by thousands of Seagulls fans: the future is secure, and every time I cycle the ten miles to Falmer and see the first curve of the stand with the Seagull crest as I push up the hill I think, in the words of the penultimate verse of ‘Goldstone Ghosts’ which can be read in the North Stand:

And one day, when our new home’s built, and we are storming back

A bunch of happy fans without a care

We’ll look back on our darkest hour and raise our glasses high

and say with satisfaction: we were there.

Yes, it’s called the American Express Community Stadium and it was built with money provided by local businessman and lifelong Albion fan Tony Bloom, who is now chairman. Yes, it’s all rather corporate these days, and I have retired from my 14 year stint as DJ and P.A. announcer and taken my place in the North Stand again. But if we hadn’t stood up and said ‘NO!’ in the Nineties, there wouldn’t have been a club to build a stadium for, and a future to look forward to. Our historian Tim Carder has enshrined the history of the Albion and the long campaign in our recently-opened museum next to Dick’s Bar, our supporters’ bar in the North Stand, named for former chairman Dick Knight. In that part of the stadium the spirit of the old Albion lives on for sure: personally, I actually think that under the glossy trappings it lives on everywhere.

We’ve got proper beer too. ‘Football fans don’t drink real ale, John!’ I was told by director and lager drinker Derek Chapman as I and my dear old departed friend and co-campaigner Roy Chuter pushed for the products of local brewers Harveys and Dark Star to be an essential part of the matchday offering in the stadium. ‘Football fans don’t drink real ale, John!’ echoed managing director Ken Brown, ‘but OK, we’ll give it a go…’

Steve Layfield, CAMRA member, cellarman of renown and Glastonwick stalwart, tells me that our stadium is now the biggest single real ale outlet in the country. Certainly Harvey’s would do well to build a pipe under the Downs to the stadium from their Lewes brewery, such is the volume consumed at every home game. There is a guest beer from their home town for the away fans too. And, yes, I got a public apology from two former Albion managing directors. Football fans DO drink real ale – we’ve proved that, and it’s time for loads more clubs to follow our lead. They’ll certainly sell more beer!

 

Sorry if you don’t like football. But I hope that you’ll agree that this chapter was about a lot more than just football. It’s certainly about a big part of my life. And it’s dedicated to Roy. We miss you mate.

 

SEAGULLS!