The climate of fear surrounding football was established a long time before Heysel. Violent disorder had flared up around matches for as long as the sport had been played. The game had always been a working-class pursuit. When young men from this background were placed in confrontational situations – often with alcohol as a combustible catalyst – there was potential for trouble.
Mass away travel began in the 1950s as Britain experienced a post-war boom. Harold Macmillan declared, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good.’ The perk of the prosperity hailed by the Conservative Prime Minister was that there was more disposable income to spend on leisure pursuits like football.
Everton and Liverpool were at the forefront of the new age and their away fans soon earned the nickname of ‘Mersey Maniacs’ for their behaviour. The newly invented ‘football excursion trains’ were often the focus for disorder, and train-wrecking became a regular feature of British life. The ‘football specials’ – often dilapidated rolling stock with minimal facilities – were frequently vandalized.
As early as 1956, Everton fans made the pages of The Times after a Saturday match away to Manchester City. ‘Nearly every train coming into Liverpool after 8.15 [p.m.] had some damage. It will take several weeks to repair the coaches,’ an official was quoted as saying. The last train from Manchester arrived at 11.20 p.m., according to the article. The game kicked off at 3 p.m., would have been over around 4.40 p.m. and the journey between the two cities could hardly have taken longer than an hour, even in the 1950s. The suspicion is simple: the later the train, the more drink its passengers would have taken.
There were also early indications that Scouse travelling supporters were less interested in violence than theft. ‘Shopkeepers lock up when Everton are in town,’ said a report in November 1964.
Increased television coverage brought disorder inside grounds into the public consciousness. One of the most significant moments in the history of football hooliganism occurred in May 1967 and did not involve the Merseyside teams.
Manchester United were chasing the title when they went to Upton Park to play West Ham United. Mancunians, who were rapidly developing a reputation for being disruptive at matches, arrived in massive numbers to see their team win the championship, and the police lost control. There was fighting all over the terraces. United had the upper hand on and off the pitch.
Four months later, West Ham hosted the champions early in the new season. This time, the East Enders approached their meeting with the Mancunians with a less hospitable attitude. Hooliganism in its modern form was born within the sound of Bow Bells. Another brutal afternoon on the terraces at the Boleyn Ground heralded the age of segregation in British football stadiums.
The 1970s were a period when Manchester United’s fans became the most notorious in the country. They arrived at away games in huge numbers and anarchy ensued. This was particularly true of the season the club spent in the second division. In 1974–75, United’s Red Army terrorized small-town England. Vivid television coverage of their antics and hysterical newspaper reporting turned football violence into a source of modern moral panic.
Back at West Ham, something else was happening. In the wake of the 1967 incidents, the disparate East End gangs had developed a degree of cooperation against outsiders on match days. Their reputation for toughness increased during the skinhead era. As the 1970s ended, a new phenomenon began.
Groups of supporters started going to away games on the normal scheduled trains rather than the ‘football specials’. They were able to afford it because of a marketing campaign by Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate. The company entered into a deal with British Rail to allow them to offer two-for-one prices on rail tickets as part of a promotion. Advertisements centred on Persil washing powder asked, ‘Did you know Persil are giving away millions of free train tickets to help you the next time you want to take a break or visit a friend?’ Customers could post three tokens taken from the packaging of a host of Unilever cleaning products to the company and receive a voucher in return. When a passenger purchased a train journey and presented the voucher, they were given two tickets for the price of one.
Special trains, put on for football fans, were cheap but comprised the oldest and nastiest rolling stock. They were slower than scheduled services and closely policed.
Travelling as a normal passenger was more expensive and unaffordable for many of the young, wilder supporters who were in thrall to hooliganism. Persil vouchers halved the price for a pair of troublemakers. Across the country, tough young delinquents began to take an interest in their mothers’ laundry habits.
Taking the timetabled trains rather than the excursions put on for football had another advantage. It allowed potential mischief-makers to make an earlier start to away games and arrive at their destination before the police had a chance to seal off the station and arrange an escort to the ground. Hooligan gangs prided themselves on being able to operate under the radar of the authorities. They would turn up four or five hours before kick-off, slip out of the station into town and enjoy some pre-match ‘entertainment’.
The idea of Manchester United fans being the ‘Red Army’ was a generic term, referring to the travelling fans as a whole. The West Ham boys who took the service trains – and similar groups across the country – saw themselves as distinct from the main body of their away support. They were the elite.
The hysterical tabloid coverage of hooliganism brought a perverse glamour to fans who liked a ruck or two. The East Enders recognized that and played up to the image. They christened themselves the Inter City Firm (ICF) and printed calling cards to leave with their victims that read ‘Congratulations, you’ve just met the ICF’.
The media lapped it up. The myth of ‘organized’ hooliganism was up and running.
Unlike the Red Army, the ICF and their ilk did not wear club colours. The age of the scarf-wearing bovver boy was over. The new delinquents dressed smartly and initially could have been mistaken for clean-living, respectable young men. Their unexpected arrival times and unremarkable clothing gave them an initial element of surprise and added to their notoriety.
Newspapers bought into the mythology. The Times claimed they ‘hold regular meetings to plan their campaigns’ and talked of ‘military-style precision’. The Sunday Express agreed, suggesting they ‘often meticulously plan the trouble and start it’. It was all nonsense. There was little planning, barely any organization beyond discussing what train they would get and the ‘meetings’ were generally a few pints in the pub. But the public lapped it up. The ICF embraced the publicity. The way they dressed even had a name: Casual. They would have liked to claim they invented it, but its genesis took place 200 miles north.
Something big was happening in 1976. In London, punk was developing. Its style of contrived shabbiness and deliberately mismatched clothing would soon become world famous. There was always an art-school, middle-class vibe to the scene and if it had its roots in the capital’s lower classes, it soon left them behind. What was happening on the streets of north Liverpool took longer for the fashion magazines to recognize but has had a much more enduring effect on British fashion.
Things were changing. As much as the punks down south were tired of the long-hair-and-flares look of the 1970s, the youth in the tenements around Scotland Road were groping for a different identity. They got it largely by accident.
Adidas Samba training shoes were already the footwear of choice among Liverpool’s teenagers. They are superb all-purpose trainers and were versatile in a district where games of street football were common and running from the police not unusual.
Like the East End of London, the area just north of Liverpool city centre was in flux. It was still dotted with bomb sites that had never been rebuilt after the Second World War. The slum clearances of the late 1960s and early 1970s left even more swathes of open land – the demolished houses had not been replaced. The building of the Kingsway Tunnel under the Mersey – it opened in 1971 – exacerbated this.
Arden House, a huge, gothic Salvation Army hostel, stood close to Scotland Road and the vast expanse of wasteland adjacent to the building made it an attractive stopping-off point for long-distance lorry drivers who could park their vehicles there and sleep in an inexpensive bed. The informal car park became the birthplace of a youth fashion. Local residents referred to this lorry parking area as ‘the Loadies’. They were more interested in unloading the goods, however. Break-ins were an occupational hazard for the sleeping drivers.
In the summer of 1976, one of the wagons was carrying adidas T-shirts. An enterprising thief broke in and stole the consignment. Within days, they were circulating around the Tate & Lyle sugar factory – the district’s biggest employer – and were snapped up eagerly.
Many of the young boys in the area were presented with the T-shirts, which had round necks, a trefoil on the chest and three stripes down the short sleeve. They were similar to the adidas jerseys Brugge had worn against Liverpool in the UEFA Cup final the previous spring. Everyone aged between ten and 16 in the Scotland Road area seemed to be wearing one of these shirts, even if the entire consignment appeared to come in a single colour: orange.
Hairstyles were changing, too. A much shorter cut with a side parting and ears exposed was becoming fashionable. Some have pointed to the influence of David Bowie’s Low on the haircuts of the era but the album was not released until 1977 and the real reason for the trend may be more prosaic.
In the summer of 1976, ITV’s counter-programming to the Montreal Olympics was the American mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. The haircuts of the main characters – especially the pugilist Tom Jordache played by Nick Nolte – sent the male adolescents of the Scotland Road area rushing to the barbers. In a district where being a hard man was most boys’ ambition, everyone wanted to look like this television tough guy. At the beginning, hairstyles were based more on the stylized TV interpretation of post-war America than Bowie’s Futurism, though the Thin White Duke’s influence would grow over the next couple of years.
By the first months of 1977, the move from flared jeans to straight-legged trousers was under way. The new look was starting to develop at a more rapid pace. Lois and Lee Riders jeans were popular. Kickers were an alternative to Samba – my first pair were bought for £16 in the summer of 1976. Clarks Nature Trek shoes, known as ‘pasties’ due to a design that looked like a Cornish pasty, were popular and suede chukka boots began to be seen around. Sheepskin jackets and snorkel parkas were the outerwear of choice for the freezing football season.
When the Scotland Roaders went to the match – either Liverpool or Everton – people from other areas began to copy the fashions.
It became known as ‘Scally’. The older generation liked to call young upstarts ‘scallywags’. It was a term of disdain uttered with contempt by the adults but it was soon appropriated by the new generation of young fans. It became the buzzword of the era on Merseyside. Looking ‘Scal’ was very desirable.
It was still driven by theft from the Loadies. In the summer of 1977, brown Fred Perry polo shirts fell off the back of a lorry. Their appearance had nothing to do with a Mod revival that was beginning to develop in the south, though the Scally style did have a similar element of dandyism.
That showed increasingly in the haircuts. The wedge – with its pageboy-style mushroom of hair on top, short sides and bountiful quiff – was a common sight across the city. It gave the youngsters a deceptive, almost feminine look. At away grounds, the locals stared on with mocking disbelief. It looked like these young Scousers were easy victims. The reality came as a shock to the old-school hooligans.
The fashion might have withered at this point, with punk in the ascendant and the mod revival on the horizon, if it hadn’t been for Liverpool’s football success.
In 1977, Bob Paisley’s team won the club’s first European Cup in Rome. It was a magnificent, trouble-free night and the young boys who made the trip to Italy enjoyed the experience so much that they were keen to do it again. When the team started their defence of the trophy for the new season, scores of young men were determined to follow their path across the Continent.
The big problem was money. How could the youth of a city where unemployment was rampant and school-leavers had little chance of work afford the trip? The more brazen bunked the trains and ferries to Europe. Most headed to a company called Transalpino, who offered cheap European travel for those under 26. The company expected most of their customers to be students, so the offices were in Myrtle Parade, near the university. They suddenly experienced an upsurge of business from young Liverpool fans who were looking for a different sort of education.
Persil vouchers and Transalpino would only get you so far, though. Trips abroad needed spending money, which many of the youthful tourists did not have. The answer was simple. The expeditions needed to be self-financing.
Once on the Continent, some of the travellers shoplifted. The wide and colourful range of adidas training shoes had obvious resale value. There were no Fred Perry tennis shirts but Lacoste polos were similar enough. When the crocodile-logoed shirts got back to Liverpool, they sold rapidly.
Later, talented forgers would take Transalpino inter-rail tickets and change them from the cheapest priced category to the more expensive versions, allowing longer and wider travel without the danger of being thrown off the train. The destinations – and the clothes these boys brought back – became ever more exotic. Bold, vibrant colours were in demand.
The movement could not stay underground for long. Robert Wade Smith, an enterprising controller of adidas’s concessions in Top Man stores in the UK, spotted that a revolution was under way. In 1979, he watched the sales of the Stan Smith tennis shoe go from six pairs a week to more than 20. Liverpool’s Top Man sold more than twenty thousand ST2 kagoules between 1979 and 1981. The city loved the adidas brand and Wade Smith grabbed his opportunity.
The shoe company believed it was a short-term fad and would pass quickly but Wade Smith talked his bosses into importing 500 pairs of the Wimbledon tennis shoe. These were top-of-the-range footwear and priced accordingly at £29.99 (more than £130 in today’s terms), a third more expensive than the Stan Smith series. They flew off the racks.
Wade Smith upped the ante. The new trend demanded rarer and more exclusive trainers. Adidas had imported 500 pairs of the gold-striped Forest Hills shoe. Their prohibitive price tag, £39.99, meant they sat in a warehouse for a year. Once Wade Smith got his hands on them, they sold out in three months. The 21-year-old realized it was time to open his own business.
He rented a store on Slater Street in Liverpool city centre but found that many of his potential customers were wearing more exotic training shoes than were on offer in the shop. When he asked where they had acquired their footwear, they invariably said Brussels. Wade Smith shut the store and set off for the Belgian capital.
It was an unsuccessful trip. He was unable to find the sort of styles he was looking for. The turning point came at Ostend, where the putative retail king bumped into a group of Scallies with their Head bags brimming with stolen goods. After a bargaining session, Wade Smith bought 25 pairs of shoes, mainly the popular and colourful Trimm Trab. He also learnt where the best place to find rare specimens was actually located.
Back in Liverpool he sold 23 of the 25 pairs in a single morning, hired a van, collected a wad of Deutsche Marks and headed for Aachen. Once there, he bought 475 pairs of shoes from the main adidas dealer in the German city. They sold like wildfire and the trip to West Germany became a regular run. Trimm Trabs became so popular that ‘trab’ is still used as a generic term for any training shoe around Merseyside.
Sportswear had already become streetwear but retailers like Wade Smith pushed the fashions further. Fila, Ellesse and Kappa clothing became popular, often in vivid primary colours. Match-going youths were the spearhead of the fashion. It took quite a while for the public to associate the style with hooliganism.
At away games, legions of young Scals would be subjected to abuse from the denim-wearing seventies Neanderthals that still dominated football crowds. Even the ICF held on to their post-skinhead flying jackets too long. Scousers were setting the agenda on the terraces and on the streets. The London-based media would not discover the new movement until well into 1983, when Kevin Sampson wrote about the groundswell of style for The Face.
Punk, for all its sound and fury, has become an historical sideshow. The anonymous thief who forced the lock on a truck outside Arden House in 1976 was opening the door on a youth culture that still defines streetwear in Britain and across the world.