‘All I found was cigarettes and alcohol’
Basically, when all’s said and done, I’m just drawn to sluts with big tits.
Frank Skinner (1994)
The higher up the tree the women climb, the easier it is for the men to see up our skirts.
Reg Gadney, Just When We Are Safest (1995)
GORDON BRITTAS: In a divided and troubled world such as this, it seems to me that sport is the one thing that can bring people together.
Richard Fegen & Andrew Norris, The Brittas Empire (1991)
In 1990 the comedian David Baddiel went to a screening of John McNaughton’s harrowing, low-budget film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which had been made in 1986 but still hadn’t been passed for general release. During a panel discussion that followed the showing, an audience member began railing against the extreme violence in the movie, about which, she said, she had received no warning. At which point another member of the audience interrupted her: ‘For fuck’s sake, what did you expect?’ he called out. ‘It’s not called Henry the Elephant, is it?’ Baddiel was convulsed with fits of laughter, and later reflected: ‘I think it was at that point that the eighties fell away for me, or at least that seriousness fell away for me, seriousness as in that adolescent, or post-adolescent, concern about everything. I was never going to be intense again.’
Seriousness had indeed been the keynote of the 1980s counterculture. The era may have seen the rise of yuppies, power-dressing and the creed of ‘greed is good’, as articulated by Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street, but for many the experience was very different. It was a decade that started and ended with devastating recessions, and which seemed to lurch from one apocalyptic fear to another: the Cold War rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher and American president Ronald Reagan was matched by dire warnings about environmental destruction – whether centred on acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer or global warming – while the arrival of AIDS threatened a health crisis of proportions not seen for decades.
For those who came of age in the early Thatcher years, those born in or around 1960, these were not reassuring times. As they emerged from school and college – part of the most numerous generation in British history – into a society scarred by record levels of unemployment and beset by uncertainty, the world felt like an inhospitable place, on both a political and a personal level. Much of this was experienced most keenly in the deindustrialised wastelands, far beyond the prosperous enclaves of the South-East, but there was also a tranche of the population who, in another time, might have expected to be among society’s success stories, the should-be middle class who now found themselves, as Jon Savage wrote of the original punks, ‘people whose intelligence is surplus to requirements’. Many of these latter drifted to London.
It was, unsurprisingly, a generation that was inclined to the left, defining itself by its opposition to nuclear weapons, apartheid, Israel, racism, sexism, vivisection, hunting with hounds: the list was extensive. To an extent, of course, this was true of almost all post-war youth; there had long been fashionable causes calling on the allegiance of the school-leaver and the student. What was different this time was the additional factor of the early 1980s recession, the absence of a rising tide of prosperity to soak up the protest. The social optimism of the 1950s and 1960s had faded to nothing, and even the more recent rebellion of punk was looking quite positive in retrospect.
On an early punk single, the group Chelsea had demanded the ‘Right to Work’, but the Clash’s better known ‘Career Opportunities’ had a slightly different take: ‘They offered me the office, offered me the shop,’ sang Joe Strummer. ‘Do you wanna make tea at the BBC? Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?’ Five years on, unemployment had tripled, and that kind of choice sounded little more than a pipe-dream. By the time the economy recovered in the middle of the 1980s, there were a couple of million more young adults entering the job market, and many who had struggled to find work during the recession found themselves leapfrogged or left behind.
Amongst those left behind were substantial numbers eking out an existence on the fringes of the cultural industries. With success having passed by on the other side, and with regular employment in short supply, there developed a celebration of underachievement, as though there were virtue in spurning mass popularity. The concept of not ‘selling out’, of refusing to compromise artistic vision for commercial gain, was derived from the beatniks and hippies of previous generations, and had been one of the legacies of punk. What had seemed a temporary pose of credibility, a staging-post on the road to success, became in the 1980s a semi-permanent way of life. The mainstream culture of the time was shiny, apolitical and unashamedly driven by money, but running parallel to the booming good times was a fertile alternative that continued to maintain its independence. It was capable of occasional, sporadic eruption into the mainstream of music, as with groups like the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Smiths in the mid-1980s or the Madchester bands at the end of the decade; it could even produce a major commercial success like Viz comic; and it channelled a great deal of energy into creating a new incarnation of stand-up comedy. But mostly this end of youth culture was characterised by its defiant refusal to seek a mass market.
It was also known for its right-on attitudes, and in particular its embrace of sexual politics. This was, remarked the comedy writer John O’Farrell, ‘the world of the new puritans’, where the campaign to drive sexism out of society seemed sometimes to shade into a suspicion of heterosexuality and of sex itself. David Baddiel’s account of the discussion about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was in part a riposte to this dour current, and was certainly seen as such in some quarters.
Baddiel was far from alone, as the new decade dawned, in seeking a lighter tone to life. Billy Bragg’s protest songs and one-man benefit gigs had epitomised the alternative culture of the 1980s. Now, in 1991 – the year he left the Labour Party – he turned up with a cheerfully positive single, ‘Sexuality’, that came complete with a full band and a happy video, the former featuring guitarist Johnny Marr, and the latter directed by comedian Phill Jupitus. The serious intent was there, with a robust defence of gay equality, but the record became his biggest and best-known hit because it was a feelgood pop song in the great English tradition of the Kinks, Madness and Squeeze, celebrating the joys of physical intimacy in a way that simply wouldn’t have seemed appropriate on the left a few years earlier. The opening line – ‘I’ve had relations with girls from many nations’ – managed not only to rejoice in multiculturalism, but also to legitimise promiscuity. Coming hard on the heels of a self-emasculating era, when Ben Elton had made his name with a comedy of male humiliation, this was heady stuff.
It was difficult, of course, to see Bragg as any kind of sex symbol, and no one was likely to mistake his music for the erotically charged work of Prince or Madonna, but that seemed part of the point. It was his ordinariness, along with his impeccable political credentials, that made ‘Sexuality’ a song of liberation. It was a world away from comedian Nigel Planer’s novel The Right Man (1998), in which the hero, Guy Mullin, estranged from his wife, visits a prostitute and is informed: ‘You have to tell me what you like.’ He’s confused by the comment: ‘I have no idea what I like. That never comes into it. I aim to please, I suppose.’
Mullin was to be seen as a product of his time. The impact of feminism had left men, some argued, uncertain of their role, and there was said to be a crisis of masculinity. ‘Men are struggling for an identity,’ remarked Mick Cooper, editor of the magazine Achilles Heel, which was aimed at pro-feminist men, in 1991. ‘They want to call themselves something.’ The same year, a six-part documentary series on BBC Television, titled From Wimps to Warriors, purported to be a study of the modern man, though its chosen subjects – amongst them a nightclub bouncer on trial for GBH and a masochist who liked being dressed in a dog suit and walked on all-fours in the park by his Mistress – did not appear to have been chosen as typical representatives of their gender.
They did, however, have the advantage of reality, unlike the contemporary advertising fantasy of the New Man, typified by a Rover commercial in which a man used the smooth driving capacity of his car to lull a baby to sleep. Around the same time, a flurry of greetings cards featured men showing off their gym-honed torsos as they cradled babies in their arms. The New Man was said to be caring, sharing and emotional, as devoted to home-making as an American housewife of the 1950s. This unattainable, and as far as anyone could tell undesired, vision of masculinity had a very brief shelf life. Against such absurdity, Billy Bragg’s larking about on the video of ‘Sexuality’, kicking a football around with his mates, offered a plausible alternative vision of what it meant to be a man.
But the most enduring contribution to the debate came from the journalist Sean O’Hagan, who – also in 1991 – coined the expression ‘new lad’ in an article for Arena magazine. This construct was intended, he explained, as ‘a tentatively positive reaction to three decades of feminism’. While recognising that men’s interests in sex, beer and football were unlikely to disappear simply by wishing them away, the new lad was said to blend these traditional pursuits with a more recently acquired sensitivity: boozing and bonding did not have to preclude mature relationships with women.
It took a while for the phrase to catch on beyond the opinion pages of the broadsheets, but in 1992 the new lad found cultural expression in an ITV sitcom and he never looked back. Adapted by Simon Nye from his 1989 novel, Men Behaving Badly was sold on the strength of its star Harry Enfield, then riding high with his BBC sketch series and teamed here with the much less well-known Martin Clunes. Respectively they played Dermot and Gary, a pair of socially and sexually inept flatmates whose misbehaviour lay more in their bark than their bite. ‘Twenty years ago, when men had no respect for women, they just used to say: You’re chucked,’ mused Dermot. ‘But now we do respect them, we have to lie to them sensitively.’ Behind the bravado, however, the truth was that they lost out to women in almost every encounter.
That first series of Men Behaving Badly had a slightly different tone from its better known successors, one that suggested a much more middle-class milieu. Gary and Dermot had met as students and were to be seen reminiscing about their time at college, drinking wine with their dinner, and playing chess and squash together. It was, in other words, more faithful to the tone of the original novel, in which Gary doesn’t have a television, goes jogging and enjoys Bach organ recitals on Radio 3. He also has a beard. Both men spend much of their time, and all of their energy, trying to get their upstairs neighbour, Deborah, into bed but, in truth, they don’t really behave very badly at all – they are merely social underachievers.
If Simon Nye was one writer helping to shape the new lad, the other was Martin Amis, whose appeal lay in the combination of his own celebrity and the amoral depravity of his 1980s novels Money and London Fields. As the new decade dawned, Amis’s depictions of the corrupting power of affluence, and of the hedonism that follows in its wake, began to seem less satire than blueprint. His influence on men a dozen or so years his junior, well beyond the rarefied realms of literary fiction, was not hard to discern. The racing driver Damon Hill cited Money as the funniest book he’d ever read, and when his female interviewer ventured to disagree, he had the perfect riposte: ‘Well, that’s because you’re not a man. Amis is a boys’ writer.’ Indeed he was, and the casual glamour of the slumming intellectual was, for some men, hard to resist. ‘He did not invent that combination of blokeishness and cerebrality,’ the writer Nick Hornby observed, ‘but his emergence seems to have validated it.’ Or, as Alex James, bassist in the group Blur, was later to put it: ‘We’re aspiring yobbos and aspiring thinkers.’
Inevitably, however, the cerebral half of Hornby’s formulation proved less durable than did the blokeish. A shift was signalled with the departure of Harry Enfield from the cast of Men Behaving Badly and his replacement by Neil Morrissey as the non-student Tony. With his addition, and then with a subsequent transfer to a later timeslot on BBC One, the series became more classless; the references to college, wine and squash faded away in favour of farting, boozing and fantasising about women (though oddly the pair remained completely uninterested in football) – Gary now boasted of having received his education in ‘the university of life’.
‘The characters are conducting their lives in a way that no child should admire,’ huffed the Conservative MP Patrick Cormack, unaware that he was missing the point: these were children. The programme became one of the defining shows of its era partly because it was seen as a retort to the years of right-on comedy and partly because it portrayed young men as gleefully arrested adolescents. From the outset, the reference points were to the popular culture of the characters’ teenage years – Showaddywaddy, Linda Lusardi, Barry White – as the boys fled the modern world for the security of their happy place. They were in their early thirties and represented a generation beginning to worry that it had missed out on the fun of youth, tempted onto the path of righteousness by David Baddiel’s ‘seriousness’ and John O’Farrell’s ‘new puritanism’. It was a reversal of the progress in 1960s youth culture, when a fast-maturing Eric Burdon, formerly of the Animals, had sung about ‘all the good time that I wasted having good times’, and regretted that ‘When I was drinking, I should’ve been thinking.’
As he evolved, the new lad increasingly wore his emotional immaturity as a badge of honour. ‘Like most blokes,’ explained Neil Morrissey, ‘we resolve all our problems by having a lager in front of the TV and not talking about anything.’ Or, in the case of Baddiel himself, having a lager in front of a TV camera and talking about football with his real-life flatmate Frank Skinner in Fantasy Football League from 1994.
And there was always the option of invoking the spirit of irony as justification for naughty behaviour. ‘I feel we’ve let ourselves down,’ smirked Skinner, after an entirely gratuitous screening of Erica Roe’s 1982 streak at Twickenham. When Tony is told in Men Behaving Badly that having a topless picture of a woman on his bedroom wall is sexist, he cites the same defence: ‘It’s ironic,’ he argues. It became a common cry, satirised in Drop the Dead Donkey, where the veteran newsreader Henry Davenport finds a job as the sidekick to a late-night youth presenter, adjudicating in events like Breast Fight, in which ‘women pummel each other with their breasts’. He tries to explain that he knows what he’s doing (‘That item was ironic’), but his closest friend, Dave, points to the elephant in the studio: ‘Knowing it’s crap does not stop it being crap.’
The fact that the portraits in Men Behaving Badly were drawn from life was demonstrated in 1994 with the launch of Loaded magazine, which promoted itself with the slogan: ‘For men who should know better.’ Its founding editor was James Brown, a veteran of 1980s alternative culture (‘Radio 1’s Steve Lamacq and I used to run fanzine stalls at all Ken Livingstone’s GLC free festivals,’ he remembered), and a former features editor at the New Musical Express. The editorial in the first issue proclaimed that the magazine was ‘dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters’. A desire to change the world was not immediately apparent. ‘Post-feminism has forced men to try out many impossible roles,’ sighed the television presenter Paul Ross, but ‘the idea of being a good bloke is such a low target that you can actually achieve it.’
There was a level of energy, wit and style about Loaded in those early days. The deadpan Biscuit of the Month review, for example, was not far removed from the humour of Viz comic, and the double-page poster spreads of bikini-clad babes were backed with images of, say, a bacon sandwich. But at root it gained its popularity by revelling in laddish behaviour. This was typified by a 1995 interview with Robbie Fowler, in which the Liverpool footballer revealed that he fancied women ‘as long as they’ve got a fanny and breathe’, and that his favourite chat-up line was: ‘Do you like jewellery? Well, suck my cock, it’s a gem.’ Fowler was a fine instinctive striker, and his prowess in the opposition’s penalty box was beyond question, but no one ever accused him of being cerebral.
Loaded’s cheerful mix of birds, booze and football was instantly and spectacularly successful, inspiring several less stylish imitations, most notably in the shape of Maxim and the reinvention of the already established FHM. The monthly magazine had previously been seen as primarily a female medium, but in August 1997 the circulation of FHM broke through the half-million mark, overtaking Cosmopolitan, the leading women’s title, for the first time, with Loaded lagging not far behind. A year later and FHM had added another quarter-million to its circulation and was selling twice as many copies as Vogue, Tatler and Harpers & Queen combined.
So big had this market become that it impacted adversely on more venerable titles. In 1997 the retailers W.H. Smith announced that they were no longer going to stock the pornographic Penthouse because its sales had fallen so markedly; the British edition of the magazine toned down its content and attempted to rebrand itself as PH.UK (‘the adult magazine for grown-ups’), but closed within months, unable to hold its own in this new world. Meanwhile the tabloid newspapers responded to a potential threat by allying themselves as closely as possible; the Sun celebrated the fiftieth edition of Loaded with a five-day series featuring shots of women from the magazine, and the Daily Mirror ran a week-long feature on FHM’s ‘100 Women’ issue.
Attempts were also made to hitch the new lad bandwagon to other cultural trends, so that in 1996 Eat Soup, a cookery magazine aimed at young men, was launched; given that its first issue included a photograph of a naked woman on all fours, marked up to show cuts of meat, few tears were shed when it closed after a handful of editions. It did, however, last longer than The Larder Lads, a series commissioned by the BBC and again aimed at teaching young men to cook, which was to be hosted by Neil Morrissey; that venture failed to get off the ground. The times were not yet right for laddish cuisine.
But the sales of the lads’ mags continued to rise. ‘There has to be a finite number of readers,’ marvelled FHM editor Ed Needham, ‘but no one knows how big the market is.’ In fact, the high point had been reached before the end of the decade, and the figures started to fall away in 1999, though the influence lasted far longer.
The relationship between the magazines and Men Behaving Badly was made explicit with the arrival on the news-stands in 1996 of Stuff, which billed itself as ‘Which? behaving badly’, a compliment reciprocated in the programme itself, with Tony seen reading a copy of the fictitious publication Bloke. By this stage, the new lad phenomenon had mutated somewhat. It was less knowing now, and it was significantly younger.
The likes of Simon Nye, David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and James Brown were all born a few years either side of 1960, and the culture of that generation was evident in the choice of cover stars for the first issue of Loaded: a picture of the actor Gary Oldman was joined by the names of the footballer Eric Cantona and the musician Paul Weller under the headline SUPERLADS. Loaded’s core market, however, was younger: ‘Most of our readers are in their early twenties,’ admitted Brown in 1994 and, though he insisted that this wasn’t relevant, arguing that the magazine was ‘about a devil-may-care attitude, not demographics’, the disparity in age and outlook became ever more apparent as the decade wore on. In the hands of a new generation, untouched by the gender wars and sexual politics of the 1980s, the subtle nuances of irony melted away.
With that fig-leaf gone, there seemed to be less newness and more laddishness on display, so that the new FHM was separated from the old Penthouse only by an attitude of irreverence and a thong. That thong, however, was a hugely important dividing line, on the other side of which lay pornography. The fact that the lads’ mags didn’t stray across it was a significant reversal of what had once appeared to be an inexorable trend towards ever more explicit material in high-street newsagents.
Still, it wasn’t to the taste of many of the begetters of the new lad themselves. ‘I do feel I’ve created a monster,’ admitted Simon Nye in 1996. ‘I despise yob culture.’ Sean O’Hagan, who had come up with the phrase in the first place, was also having doubts: ‘Loaded has become a little too laddish, even for an ironic, knowing media type like me.’ There was something symbolic about the moment in 1997 when James Brown got married and left Loaded to become the editor of the upmarket GQ, saying, ‘if I didn’t move on, there was a danger of me becoming a drug addict and an alcoholic’. A year into his new job, at the age of thirty-three, he seemed anxious to distance himself from the world he had helped create, dismissing his old title and FHM with a withering putdown: ‘I don’t read magazines for teenagers.’ The baton had clearly been passed, suggesting that even the most protracted of adolescences had to end sometime.
Many insisted that there was nothing new about any of it. ‘I can’t help feeling that the re-emergence of the Lads reflects our power politics,’ wrote Jon Savage, a cultural commentator who was a significant ten years older than the actors in Men Behaving Badly; ‘pretending novelty, aspiring, as they might say, to hipness, they ruthlessly reinforce the status quo.’ There was a clear risk of releasing a genie that the cultural left had spent several years trying to force into his bottle.
But despite the doubts, the early incarnation of the new lad represented an undoubted cultural change that helped to transform the nation’s self-image. He had emerged from the middle-class left, wearied by what was seen as a decade of being lectured, as James Brown made clear at the launch of Loaded; the magazine was, he said, for men who ‘have accepted what we are and have given up trying to improve ourselves’. There was a rejection of the consciousness-raising feminism of the 1980s, but laddism didn’t exactly resemble a triumphalist vision of masculinity. ‘It was about self-esteem,’ reflected Martin Deeson, a staff writer on Loaded, ‘for a generation of men who had grown up skint during the recession, stoned during the boom, slagged off by feminists but egalitarian by inclination, and horny as goats.’
That claim to egalitarianism was never going to win much applause on what remained of the left, but there was an element of inclusion that hadn’t always been apparent in the 1980s. Even if it hardly constituted a revolution, laddism didn’t leave society unchanged. It lent a new middle-class legitimacy to a lifestyle that would once have been considered slovenly and irresponsible, while adding a degree of tolerance; even if there lurked a suspicion that this was all a bit patronising, that the adoption of the term ‘lad’ implied that working-class men weren’t really adults, but merely adolescent minds trapped in grown-up bodies. Within a few years the word ‘chav’ would gain currency, to describe those who behaved like lads without the income or education to justify their conduct.
Meanwhile, there was less talk by the middle of the decade of sexual politics, though the changes wrought by feminism became ever more entrenched. In 1997 the number of women in the national workforce exceeded that of men for the first time in the country’s history, a revolutionary moment that largely passed without notice. This was a relatively recent trend and one that had a profound impact on the male half of the population; in the 1960s there were 15 million men in employment in Britain, thirty years later there were just 11 million. Part of the explanation was the move away from manufacturing to services: a survey in 1999 showed that 77 per cent of those entering service industries were female, as were 67 per cent of those taking up clerical and secretarial jobs. Many of these jobs were, of course, low-paid but they were jobs nonetheless, at a time when male unemployment rates were higher than female in all social classes, particularly amongst the young.
At the other end of the social spectrum, high-profile stories appeared in the media about women taking posts previously considered to be resolutely male. In 1992 Betty Boothroyd became Speaker of the House of Commons, Barbara Mills the Director of Public Prosecutions and Stella Rimington the director general of MI5, while the Church of England voted in favour of the ordination of women. There might still be inequality in society and in the workplace, but the direction of travel was clear.
Yet while there was often resistance from a predominantly male establishment to changes in law or in custom, there was virtually no political pressure for a reversal of those gains that were achieved. The one exception was the recurrence of campaigns to reduce the time limit on abortions, and even here the argument in Britain was always couched in terms of scientific progress, rather than in the talk of fundamental moral principles so familiar from reports of the American culture wars. There were no mass movements calling for the restoration of male supremacy, no riots on the streets, no targeting of businesses that employed disproportionately large numbers of women. Instead, what was arguably the biggest change in British society since the Industrial Revolution proceeded on its way quite peacefully, with no modern equivalent of the Luddites, save perhaps the British National Party, whose election manifestos railed against feminism, alongside comprehensive education, homosexual liberation and free love. Undoubtedly there were many men in politics who shared that perspective and some who articulated it in private, but very few would publicly endorse the BNP’s 1992 commitment to ‘encourage our womenfolk to regard home- and family-making as the highest vocation for their sex’. Nor did that message have any great resonance with the wider public. Judged by the standards that had governed society for generations, individual men in every social class stood to lose from this revolution, yet it continued to roll forward with a sense of historical inevitability.
Many argued that the emergence of laddish culture at a time of women’s advances in the workplace was no coincidence. ‘Men will be men,’ was the scathing summary of the phenomenon by Independent columnist Suzanne Moore, ‘which means in other words it is the women’s job “to get their tits out”. Yet at a time when women are encroaching on male power in several vital areas it is hardly surprising that there is a move to keep them in their properly decorative and passive place.’
Mostly, though, it was the decorative, rather than the passive, element that rang true for the new lads: the women who increasingly adorned the covers of Loaded and its rivals were even more unobtainable than those who had graced the pornography of earlier eras. For all its attempted swaggering and show, laddism could be seen – despite its apparently reactionary character – as a slightly muddled, slightly disappointing compromise, a way of helping to negotiate a transitional period, as though the evolution in gender roles was easier to accept for men now that some of the more comforting features of traditional behaviour were back on the agenda. The signalling of an end to 1980s seriousness, the retreat to adolescence, was based in part on the inevitability of a reduction in power. In exchange for a loss of social status, the new lad sought the palliative of being allowed to behave badly on occasion, satisfied when permission was given for drinking to excess with his mates or eating pizza in front of Match of the Day, after a hard day lusting after images of semi-naked women.
The fact that such things were permissible was attested by the media’s enthusiastic discovery that young women also wished to join the fun. Embodied in media personalities like Zoë Ball, Denise Van Outen and Ulrika Jonsson, a new stereotype emerged, briefly touted as the ‘new lass’ until the term ‘ladette’ became the favoured cliché. Her defining characteristics were again a predilection for getting drunk and for promiscuous sex. ‘Complete with purple lipstick, pierced lips and a litany of bawdy jokes,’ explained The Times, ‘she parties hard, drinks a lot and dares her partner to wax his chest hair.’
At the beginning of the 1990s there had been a vogue for jokes about Essex girls, which associated their supposedly typical behaviour with vulgar stupidity. The term became part of the cultural lexicon (the Essex girl was defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary in 1998 as being ‘unintelligent, promiscuous and materialistic’), so that when Sally Gunnell won a gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the 1992 Olympic Games, her victory was hailed in the Daily Mirror with the chortling headline: ESSEX GIRLS DO COME FIRST. By the middle of the decade, however, talking publicly about casual sex was becoming the norm for socialite heiresses and Radio 1 DJs alike.
‘Women are choosing to have one-night stands, to have sex with whoever they want,’ explained television presenter Sara Cox. ‘Women can now talk about shagging and not feel obliged to bring in the romance or the commitment or what he actually thinks or whether there’s any love there.’ Or, as Anna put it in the television drama This Life: ‘I don’t want a boyfriend. I want a fuck.’ Anxious not to be left out, Janet Anderson, Labour’s shadow spokesperson for women, announced in a 1996 interview: ‘Under Labour, women will become more promiscuous. That’s an election promise.’ She was later obliged, for the benefit of po-faced commentators, to explain that this was a joke.
Equally keen on a lifestyle of shagging and drinking was the eponymous heroine of Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), a contemporary of the original new lads. Unlike her male equivalents, however, she was not so much looking back to the wild oats she wished she’d sown, as yearning for the time when she could become a Smug Married. Inadvertently, she gave birth to a new genre, swiftly named chick lit.
The conventions were spelt out in the first chapter of Jane Green’s typical example Straight Talking (1997). The narrator is a thirty-year-old single woman, working in the media, worried about her public persona and frustrated by the lack of ‘commitment’ shown by men. (‘Bastards. All of them.’) Whilst pursuing her perfect match, she finds comfort in the women’s magazines’ recipe for happiness: ‘forget about men, crack open a bottle of wine and sit around with your girlfriends cackling about sex.’ Because there is, apparently, a sisterhood of women in a similar position, bound together by white wine and chocolate, clothes and romantic comedies. Addressing the reader directly, she makes clear who the target audience is for these books: ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m assuming you’re a member of the sisterhood, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking.’
Again, as with the creators of laddism and the new lads, there was a generational step to be made to the ladettes, reflected in the alcohol they consumed. Bridget Jones drank New World chardonnay (sales of Australian wine in Britain had grown by 4,000 per cent in the seven years to 1992), while the ladettes were on the less respectable, and more rock and roll, vodka and bourbon.
For the even younger, there was a new range of drinks. Having emerged in the late 1980s in the form of ready-mixed bottles containing a double gin-and-tonic (thereby evading the level of duty normally charged on spirits), these had rapidly evolved into what were now known as alcopops. Intensely sweet products, they looked and tasted like soft drinks, but contained alcohol of unspecified provenance at around 5 per cent proof. There was a strong suspicion that they were being launched by a drinks industry fearful that the next generation of drinkers might be lost to the allure of ecstasy and other party drugs. The brand leader in the field was Hooper’s Hooch, an alcoholic lemonade, but there were other entrants, including Two Dogs and Cola Lips, while Whitbread’s chocolate-flavoured beer, Fuggles, was a not-too-distant cousin of the phenomenon.
In 1996 the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint that alcopops were being sold with packaging likely to appeal to underage drinkers, and Kenneth Clarke increased the duty payable to ‘help meet public concern’, though none of this stopped new varieties of Hooch being introduced that year in orange and blackcurrant flavours. The fad for such products fizzled out soon enough, but they were replaced by a more sustainable incarnation of the ready-mixed drink – small bottles of Moscow Mule and Bacardi Breezer – that became the favoured tipple of the young women who wished to drink to excess on a Saturday night.
Beyond the drinks industry, the commercial exploitation of the ladette trend was a little stuttering in the first instance, but that didn’t stop the media from trying to cash in. As early as February 1995 Sky magazine was featuring Zoë Ball on the cover of what it called ‘The Women Behaving Badly Issue’ with the headline: ‘Shagging in burger bars, boozing with Oasis and loads more hair-raising tales.’ In 1996, Emap, the publishers of FHM, launched a new magazine, Minx, ‘for girls with a lust for life’, while television schedulers made space for a brace of shows with self-explanatory titles: The Girlie Show (in the Friday-night Channel 4 slot formerly occupied by The Word) and Pyjama Party.
All were hoping to cash in on a perceived new market and although none was as commercially successful as those aimed at lads, the future potential was evident in the sales of magazines such as Bliss, Mizz and Sugar. These were aimed at teenage girls, and frequently read by those younger than the suggested age range so that Just Seventeen, for example, was regarded by most girls of that age as being a bit on the childish side. Such publications came in for increasing criticism for their unapologetic coverage of sexual issues: ‘Fwoarrrgh! 50 Cute Boys Inside!’ promised a typical Just Seventeen cover, while More! attracted criticism for its ‘position of the month’ feature. They contributed, it was said, to what Edwina Currie called a ‘generation’s heedless flirtation with rampant sexuality’, though their defence was that they were merely reflecting the concerns and interests of their readers. Whatever the chain of cause-and-effect, it was in the 1990s that it became clear how great had been the change in the behaviour of teenage girls. Surveys in the 1960s showed that just 2 per cent of fifteen-year-old girls were sexually active; by the 1990s more than a quarter said that they had had sex by that age.
Meanwhile one in ten youngsters aged between nine and fifteen were said to be regular drinkers, consuming on average nearly seven units of alcohol a week, the equivalent of a bottle of brandy a month, and though girls were still in the minority, the numbers were growing. The report Living in Britain 1996 showed a rise in alcohol consumption, for the first time since this was studied in 1984, and in the percentage of those smoking, for the first time in the survey’s history. In both instances it was the young, both male and female, who seemed to be driving up the figures.
Other statistics warned of the dangers faced by young women who followed the example set by the opposite sex. Figures published in 1997 suggested that the most likely person to commit suicide was aged between twenty-five and thirty-four, with men outnumbering women four to one. Suicide rates overall had fallen, but had risen amongst men under the age of forty-five. Meanwhile girls were outperforming boys at school, and a spokesperson for the Department of Education argued that cultural factors were the cause of the discrepancy: ‘The most worrying thing is this men behaving badly culture where learning is out and mucking about is in.’
The ladette was a genuinely new phenomenon. Perhaps she was a consequence of the rise of young women in employment, ready to take advantage of the psychological and financial freedoms that resulted from that development, but perhaps there was also a simple recognition that misbehaviour was hugely enjoyable and ought to be indulged in while youth still afforded the opportunity to do so. Despite the dangers of pleasure-seeking, the allure of fun remained.
Simultaneous with the arrival of the ladette was a rise in the profile of women in areas of culture that had previously been seen as predominantly male. The alternative comedy clubs of the 1980s had seen the emergence of a wave of female stand-up comedians, including Helen Lederer, Jenny Eclair and Jo Brand. Most successful of all were Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, whose television series aired on BBC Two from 1987 onwards, featuring inspired cross-dressing sketches in which the duo appeared as wolf-whistling workmen and as the grotesquely lascivious, beer-swilling characters, the Two Fat Men.
In 1987 the performers Morwenna Banks and Amanda Swift had published The Joke’s On Us, reclaiming the often neglected legacy of British women comics in the twentieth century. ‘We hope we have gone a little way to putting the notion that “women aren’t funny” to rest,’ they wrote. A decade later – when shows like Absolutely Fabulous, The Vicar of Dibley, Dinnerladies and The Royle Family were amongst the most popular offerings on mainstream television – such an aspiration scarcely needed articulating.
In a parallel development there emerged a new generation of female pop stars, initially evident in embryonic form in the short-lived Riot Grrrl movement, which grew out of American punk and found a British voice in the mixed-gender band Huggy Bear. In 1993 the group appeared on The Word to perform their new single ‘Her Jazz’, and then stayed on to heckle the presenter Terry Christian for what they perceived to be his, and the programme’s, ‘trite, casual sexism’. They were briefly lionised in the weekly music press, though their raucous awkwardness was never likely to make much of a wider impact.
More enduring were the Britpop guitar bands that came out of the indie scene and whose members included female singers and musicians, the likes of Elastica, Echobelly, Sleeper and Linoleum. ‘These girls want sex on their terms, and they want it now,’ wrote Elizabeth Coldwell in Forum magazine in 1995; ‘and if you don’t cut the mustard, you’ll probably end up as the derogatory subject of their next single.’ Louise Wener, singer with Sleeper, explained that the image of these women derived from a wish to be taken seriously as musicians rather than seen merely as sex symbols, hence a tendency to adopt established male style: ‘We talk just like them, look just like them, behave exactly like them,’ she wrote. ‘We are boy-boot, androgyny central. Denim and leather and loud: rough and tough enough to kick the indie boys’ heads in. We barely own a skirt between us.’ Running counter to this tendency was PJ Harvey, initially a critical favourite as the Dr Martens-wearing guitarist and singer in a trio bearing her name, but who had, by the time of Britpop, mutated into a hard-riffing femme fatale, touring the world with her album To Bring You My Love (1995) in scarlet dress, high heels and vampish make-up.
The question of women’s relationship to rock became a topic of intense debate, with a spate of books on the subject, including Women, Sex and Rock ’n’Roll, Hymn to Her, She Bop and Never Mind the Bollocks. In particular, the idea of substantial numbers of women playing instruments in bands was sufficiently novel to require some redefinition of rock and roll clichés. ‘My guitar’s not a penis extension,’ explained Oli, guitarist with the Brighton-based band Tampasm, ‘but it makes a damn good vibrator.’
These various acts were, it became clear in retrospect, paving the way for the arrival in mid-1996 of the Spice Girls, whose debut release, ‘Wannabe’, became the biggest-selling single ever in Britain by a female band. For two and a half years the group enjoyed an extraordinary level of success, dominating British popular culture and exporting successfully to Europe and even to America, where their first album sold ten million copies.
The commercial triumph was based not only on their radio-friendly dance-pop but also on the personalities of the five band members themselves, who turned out to be genuinely funny and intelligent in a manner not always associated with pop stars, capable of holding their own whether being interviewed by Clive James or by Smash Hits magazine. Each was given a nickname (Scary Spice, Baby Spice, etc.) to convey their personae as directly as possible, but they came together to articulate what they called ‘girl power’, a concept derived from Riot Grrrl but stripped of any overtly political content to make it accessible to a mass audience. A political dimension did surface in interviews – as when Geri ‘Ginger Spice’ Halliwell cited Margaret Thatcher as ‘the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology’ – but in essence the message was not far removed from that of Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 hit ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. There was, though, a crucial generational difference: whereas Lauper had sung ‘we’re not the fortunate ones’, the Spice Girls were very clear that they were indeed fortunate in being born female, and that girl power did not require the approval of boys. (‘This is happening without your permission,’ in the words of Huggy Bear’s best line.)
‘Girl power’ was an easy slogan to mock, and many did so, while others pointed to the manufactured origins of the group as evidence that girl power was ultimately dependent on a male-dominated industry, ‘corporate girlypop’ in the words of critic Lucy O’Brien. But for the legions of fans, the message carried real weight. Unlike the women in Britpop, the Spice Girls didn’t strive for indie androgyny, but flaunted femininity as a positive force. And it was a surprisingly everyday femininity, a pop shorn of glamour. ‘They’re the sort of girls who you’d see working in Tesco and think, “Hmm, not bad for someone who’s working in Tesco”,’ observed David Baddiel. ‘Men like that, because they can look at their favourite Spice Girl and think, “She’s not out of my league. I could have her”.’ More significantly, of course, the girl who was actually working in Tesco could aspire to being her.
Unlike more conventional female pop stars, the Spice Girls weren’t afraid to talk about feminism, even if it wasn’t a brand that would have been recognised a decade earlier. ‘You can look like a babe and make as much of a point as if you burnt your bra,’ insisted Melanie ‘Sporty Spice’ Chisholm, before adding in horror, as the thought struck her: ‘There’s no way I’m ever burning my Wonderbra. I couldn’t. I’m nothing without it.’
The Wonderbra had stamped its mark on the decade with a 1994 poster campaign showing a picture of the model Eva Herzigova in black underwear, looking down at her breasts with the caption: HELLO BOYS. After it received several complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the posters, together with others that bore the line ‘or are you just pleased to see me’, were decent. A spokeswoman for the ASA pointed out that the posters had initially proved uncontroversial: ‘It was only after the media started asking if they represented a new post-feminist aggressive female image or were simply exploiting women that the complaints started flooding in.’ That debate about empowerment versus exploitation was heard a great deal during the 1990s.
The rise of the Spice Girls coincided with the arrival of various fantasy characters who provided a new, tougher face of young women in screen fiction. From America came the television series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), while Tank Girl, who had made her debut the previous decade in British comics, became the subject of a Hollywood movie in 1995. All three had been created by male writers.
The same was true of Britain’s most successful entrant in this field, Lara Croft, the heroine of the computer game Tomb Raider, which was released in October 1996 while ‘Wannabe’ was still in the charts. The character had originally been conceived of as male, a figure in the mould of Indiana Jones, before being recast as an athletic young woman. Clad in shorts, hiking boots and backpack and with a pistol-holster strapped to each thigh, she was intended to convey a cool strength. ‘She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the-lads type of character,’ explained creator Toby Gard. ‘She was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.’
Despite the influence of Indiana Jones, Croft could also be seen in the context of an older British tradition of the aristocratic amateur hero, going back to the Scarlet Pimpernel and to the novels of John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and Sapper. According to the back-story, she was the public school-educated daughter of Lord Richard Croft, and had opted for a life of adventure following a plane crash that left her stranded for two weeks in the Himalayas. There were elements here of 1960s television series such as The Saint and The Champions, even of Tarzan, reinvented for a new generation.
Even so, Croft represented a major break with the conventions of computer gaming. ‘The rules at the time were: if you’re going to make a game, make sure the main character is male and make sure he’s American, otherwise it won’t sell in America,’ remembered Gard. Tomb Raider happily broke both of those rules and went on to become a huge international hit, selling six million copies and helping to establish Sony’s new console, the PlayStation, as the market leader. So successful was the figure of Croft that, as each sequel to the original game was released, she spilled over into comics, movies and amusement park rides, as well as being used to advertise products as diverse as Lucozade and Fiat cars.
It was not only in fiction that women were ringing the changes. ‘This seems like a demented extension of equal opportunities,’ exclaimed the British Medical Association’s science and research adviser in 1997, as the first licensed female boxing match was announced. The fact that the scheduled bout was between two thirteen-year-old girls caused such an outcry that the fight was cancelled, but a few weeks later the Whitland Amateur Boxing Club near Carmarthen did put on a licensed fight between Marie Davies and Marie Leefe, both aged sixteen. ‘This is a small local event between two local girls and we are not looking for any publicity,’ said a club spokesperson, but there was little hope of that. The media were fascinated, including Bliss magazine, which provided sponsorship for the event: ‘If there’s a meaning to girl power,’ enthused the editor, ‘this is it.’ As the bout of three one-minute rounds finished (with a points victory to Leefe), the press closed in for photographs and the ring collapsed beneath their weight.
By this stage Britain already had two professional world champions – Jane Couch at welterweight and Cheryl Robertson at bantamweight – but they were obliged to fight abroad, just as Barbara Buttrick, Britain’s first professional, had gone to America in the 1950s, winning titles at bantam and flyweight. The British Boxing Board of Control refused to grant licences to female boxers, and their stand was supported by most of the sport’s establishment, including the leading promoters Mickey Duff, Frank Warren and Barry Hearn. ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned,’ said Hearn, ‘but I can’t come to terms with the idea of women beating seven kettles of shit out of each other.’
In 1998 Jane Couch took the BBBC to an industrial tribunal, alleging that she was facing discrimination on grounds of her sex. The Board defended their policy of rejecting all licence applications from women on the grounds that women were too frail, bruised too easily and became emotionally unstable and accident-prone during menstruation. There was also the suspicion that their inclusion might damage the men’s sport: ‘Boxing is a high-risk sport which can cause injury and death,’ explained the Board’s medical adviser. ‘Should such a tragedy occur when a woman is boxing, I believe the public adversity would put the whole sport at risk.’ Couch won her case, and became the first woman to be given a licence to box professionally in Britain. In November that year she took just 184 seconds to knock out her German opponent in a fight staged at Caesar’s nightclub in Streatham, South London.
A further break with convention could be seen in a mini-boom in pornographic magazines aimed at a female market. For Women started the ball rolling in 1992, followed swiftly by Women Only, Women on Top, Ludus and a British edition of Playgirl, twenty years after its American debut. This was merely aping the worst of men’s behaviour, some argued, while others saw it as cynical exploitation, pointing to the fact that Ludus (‘Women and Sex Today’) was published by Galaxy, in which stable were also to be found the thoroughly disreputable Knave and Fiesta.
More pertinent was a problem with the regulations, developing from the case law in obscenity trials, that governed British pornography. The issue was particularly evident in its relation to the depiction of an erect penis. Such imagery was partially governed by what was known in the world of censorship as the Mull of Kintyre Test. ‘It used to be,’ explained a Channel 4 executive in 2001, ‘that if the angle of the dangle is more than the elevation of the Mull of Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland, then the penis is deemed erect.’ With such constraints, the pictorial appeal of women’s pornography was somewhat hampered, there clearly being a limit to the hardcore fantasy potential of page after page of limp men.
Also leaving rather too much to the imagination were the Chippendales, a male dance troupe founded in Los Angeles in 1979, who arrived on the West End stage in 1991 and went on to tour the country. The Chippendales were routinely described as male strippers, but that was to promise slightly more than was ever delivered, for even after the last strip of Velcro had been torn away, removing what appeared to be the last piece of flimsy clothing, there remained, below the waxed, gym-honed chests and the six-pack stomachs, a posing pouch to preserve the modesty of the pelvic-thrusting musclemen. Such fig-leaves notwithstanding, it was still too much for some local authorities, including West Lothian Council, who banned scheduled performances in Livingston.
The act was designed for hen parties, for the hordes of, in the words of Lynne Truss, ‘mini-skirted women who were willingly pulled up on to the stage in order to take part in the show’. Everyone agreed that it was the audience who made the evening memorable; the performance itself was routinely described as flaccid. For a few short years the Chippendales – and a succession of other such troupes – sold a lot of tickets and a great many calendars, but their appeal faltered when they ventured beyond posing. A single, ‘Give Me Your Body’, reached only number twenty-eight in the charts, and they didn’t enhance their image when they opened their mouths. ‘They say the Chippendales is for the lower class. They say it’s very crass. They say it’s not very tasteful,’ explained one of the boys, Mark Smith. ‘Well – hey! – Shakespeare in his time, the same thing was said about him by the established critics!’
The success of such ventures suggested a growing commercial awareness of female sexuality outside the media playground of the ladettes, a trend confirmed by the huge success of French writer Alina Reyes’s erotic novella The Butcher (published in Britain in 1991), which sold half a million copies worldwide. Indeed, it was to be in fiction that a more sustainable cultural expression would be found, when Virgin Books launched their Black Lace imprint in 1993, to provide ‘erotic fiction written by women, for women’. Since these books dealt in words alone, they were able to go much further than the magazines or the stage shows.
The underlying story in many of the titles was familiar enough to readers of the romantic fiction that stretched from the Brontë sisters to the mass-produced novels of Mills & Boon and their imitators: an innocent, sometimes wilful, young woman is drawn into a relationship with a powerful, sometimes mysterious, older man, and finds fulfilment and her true self. The key difference was that in a conventional Mills & Boon title, the sex either happened after the book ended or was only vaguely described, through a gauze of circumlocution, towards the end. In a Black Lace story, on the other hand, it all got going round about page three and didn’t let up much for the next eighty thousand words; the guidelines issued to authors suggested there should be a sex scene every ten pages. ‘Any normal woman would have died of exhaustion by the end of chapter three,’ exclaimed a 27-year-old doctor, recruited by a national newspaper to read and review a Black Lace title.
Not only was it all much more explicit, but the activities described were racier. The most popular Mills & Boon writer, Charlotte Lamb, included sex scenes in her work, but insisted on keeping the focus firmly on romance: ‘It’s straight sex with the hero and heroine in love,’ she said firmly. Black Lace tales, on the other hand, while following the publisher’s stipulations of ‘no children, no animals, no bloodshed’, tended to veer towards sadomasochism. Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a total surprise. Back in the mid-1960s, when Gillian Freeman was researching her classic book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), she reported a conversation overheard in a Soho bookshop. ‘Got any straight sex, then?’ asked a customer, and the proprietor had to apologise: ‘Sorry mate, it’s all got a bit of fladge in it.’ That British fondness for flagellation, bondage and domination seemed to have survived quite happily into a new era and across gender lines, so that as Virgin prepared its new imprint, ‘market research suggested spanking and subjugation would go down well’.
Black Lace was soon nicknamed Mills & Bondage, and was joined in the market by other erotic lists, including a relaunch of Virgin’s own Nexus, Little Brown’s X-Libris and the independent Silver Moon, all of which upped the ante in the level of fetish described and the severity of the treatment endured by their heroines. ‘If you like one of our books, you will probably like them all!’ boasted Silver Moon, which perhaps suggested that innovation and originality were not the primary assets of these titles. Rather they were sold as genre fiction, with the authorial identity of little interest to readers, though there were exceptions that stood out from the crowd, notably Stephen Rawlings’s Jane and Her Master (1996), which retold the story of Jane Eyre as a particularly brutal sadomasochistic epic.
Retaining the respectable façade of fiction, Black Lace and its ilk brought pornographic material that had previously been found only in specialist shops onto the high street and even, in some areas, into public libraries. The ‘Adults Only’ warning on the cover might keep them segregated from more decent novels, but it wasn’t long before entire top shelves at W.H. Smith were full of such volumes. In fact the problem of where such material should be stocked was one that exercised the minds of retailers and publishers alike. In the early days, when there weren’t enough titles to warrant their own section, they tended to be grouped together just before the A–Z of fiction, on the grounds that pornography was assumed to have been written by anonymous authors, regardless of what it said on the cover. As the volume of material increased, special sections were created for erotica, though as a result of their elevated position publishers received plaintive letters from women complaining that, being unable to reach, they had had to ask a man to get a volume down for them from the top shelf. There were many readers too who preferred not to reveal their taste to local shopkeepers and instead bought their copies in the anonymity of motorway service stations and railway bookstalls, which were consequently very well stocked.
The initial assumption of a sceptical media had been that most of these books were actually written by men under female pseudonyms, which turned out to be true of some imprints (though not of Black Lace), and that they would sell to a predominantly male market, which turned out not to be true at all. When Delta – an erotic imprint of Hodder Headline – surveyed its readers in 1997, it discovered that a quarter were women aged between twenty and forty, while the largest demographic group were women in their forties. Black Lace’s own surveys came to much the same conclusion: 83 per cent of readers were women, ‘the bulk of them in their twenties and thirties with above-average educations and income’. Quite how many readers there were, however, could not be so easily ascertained. Black Lace claimed total sales of two million in its first four years, with each title averaging 15,000 to 18,000, and between them the various imprints were said to be publishing around 400 titles annually.
The figures suggested a popular genre, and a substantial, hitherto untapped market, but one with a still limited appeal, outshone by its older sister, romantic fiction. When John Boon, the head of Mills & Boon, died in 1996, the obituaries paid tribute not merely to his distinguished war record – he was mentioned in despatches for his service on D-Day – but to the success of the company co-founded by his father; sales were then standing at 15 million books a year in Britain and 200 million worldwide. (Boon believed that the key to his stewardship of the firm was that he had never read a single one of the titles; in many ways Mills & Boon was a very conventional publishing house.)
It was never quite clear what any of this meant in sociological terms. Was it a continuation of the romantic subjugation of women by other, more explicit, means? Or a reflection of the growing social status of women, so that the old cliché of the high court judge who visits a dominatrix was being joined by a new one of the businesswoman who fantasises about being beaten? Or perhaps a new phase of feminism in which, public battles having been won, a division between fantasy and reality could be acknowledged in the personal sphere? The Delta survey found that the newspaper most likely to be taken by its readers was the Sun, followed in popularity by the Daily Telegraph, a discovery that failed to provide conclusive evidence one way or the other.
It was striking, however, how easily what had once been considered a rigid gender divide was being breached by ladettes, by girl power and by female erotica. Public drinking, recreational drug use, fantasies about promiscuous and anonymous sex – these had previously been thought of as behavioural traits of young men, and the fact that increasing numbers of young women were taking to them with some enthusiasm caused moral distress to traditionalists on both the left and the right. Hedonism for the masses, rather than for the bohemian few, was now firmly on the agenda, as was an awareness that the common ground between the genders was not always particularly elevated. ‘A man is still a farting, belching, grunting pig, picking his feet when he’s alone,’ commented the rock singer Chrissie Hynde, in a GQ interview in 1996. Her co-interviewee, the Canadian country singer kd lang, retorted: ‘Sounds like me.’
There was even a growing female interest in the hitherto male preserve of football, so that by the end of the decade around 15 per cent of the crowds at club matches (and many more for televised national matches) were women. And partly because of this, football emerged as one of the most significant cultural forces of the decade as the game, following the tragedies at Bradford, Hillsborough and Heysel in the 1980s, began to build a new identity, seeking to disown two decades of stories about hooliganism.
The process of rehabilitation began in 1990, when the ban on English clubs playing in European competition – imposed after Heysel – was lifted, and the England team reached the semi-finals of the World Cup with a side that included some of the most gifted players in the game. In particular, the charismatic Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne – who shed tears when he received a yellow card during the semi-final and realised that he would be banned for the next match – became a star such as England had not enjoyed since the 1960s, feted and celebrated well beyond the confines of football itself. Gazzamania swept the country, carrying with it the hopes of an entire industry, desperately praying that he could change the image of the game. He was, as writer Harry Pearson pointed out, one of the very few players who could induce an ‘all-consuming, irrational and totally childlike happiness’ in those watching.
Not everyone was quite swept up in the fever, however. Gascoigne was born in Gateshead and had made his name playing for Newcastle; in rival parts of the North-East, his cult struggled to catch on, and in 1991 a Gazza lookalike contest in South Shields ‘was won by a black teenage girl dressed as a fairy’. Nor was the legal establishment convinced. In October 1990 Gascoigne’s lawyer went to court in an attempt to prevent the publication of an unauthorised biography under the title Gazza. This name, he argued, was so established as to have become virtually a trademark; to use it on a book jacket would imply that Gascoigne had approved the volume. Mr Justice Harman was unimpressed. On being told that Gascoigne was a footballer, he sought further clarification: ‘Rugby or association football?’ He also made mention of Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra, and suggested that the Duke of Wellington’s dictum – ‘publish and be damned’ – might have some bearing on the current case. Gascoigne’s lawyer pointed out that times had moved on since 1815, society had changed, but the judge had the last word: ‘The law, fortunately, doesn’t change,’ he pronounced, as he refused to grant an injunction. He was wrong, of course; the law does and did change, and twenty years later judges would be happily issuing super-injunctions to professional footballers, seeking to protect their privacy from prying tabloid eyes.
Even more important than Gazza, it turned out, was the launch in 1992 of the FA Premier League, replacing what had been the First Division of the Football League. Initially this looked much the same as the institution it had supplanted. It comprised twenty-two clubs, including such humble names as Oldham Athletic, Notts County and Luton Town, and it still had a relationship with the old League structure, with clubs being relegated and promoted. But there was one critical difference: the new organisation had established the right to negotiate its own television deal, and had promptly signed a five-year contract, worth a then-astonishing £305 million, with the satellite broadcaster BSkyB. From that change flowed the vast sums of money that subsequently poured into the domestic game at the highest level. As the economy entered its long boom, so too did football; the number of Sky subscriptions increased rapidly, aided by the importation from the Far East of ever more affordable televisions with ever bigger screens, and by 2001 the rights to broadcast the Premier League were being sold for £1.6 billion.
Having paid the piper, television was quick to call the tune, and the traditional three o’clock kick-off on a Saturday afternoon soon began to seem the exception rather than the norm; an agreement not to screen live matches at that time meant that the most attractive games were simply moved to accommodate the broadcasters. Chief amongst those eye-catching encounters were the ones featuring Manchester United, whose holding company had recently been floated on the stock market.
Despite its status as one of the most glamorous of English clubs, United had not won a League title since 1967, a failing that their detractors were not shy of pointing out. When Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy, was finally released in 1991 from his long years of captivity at the hands of the Islamic Jihad Organisation in the Lebanon, Liverpool fans were seen wearing T-shirts with Waite’s face on them and the slogan: ‘What, Man Utd still haven’t won the League?’ But the Premiership’s debut season saw the club triumphant for the first time in twenty-six years, and the global success of the new format was assured.
The player who caught the public imagination in that victorious Manchester United team was the Frenchman, and Loaded cover star, Eric Cantona. In the days before the Champions League (another rebranding exercise that started in 1992), less attention was paid in the British press to foreign players, but even so Cantona arrived in England bearing a reputation both as a player approaching genius and as a wayward and difficult character.
This was the man, nicknamed Le Brat, who’d been fined for punching his own goalkeeper in the face, who’d been suspended from the French national team for calling its coach ‘un sac de merde’ (quoting, as he explained, Hollywood rebel Mickey Rourke) and who, having been banned for three matches after throwing the ball in the referee’s face, managed to get the ban extended to two months by going up to each member of the disciplinary committee individually and telling them they were idiots. He was irresistible. And he was successful; having won the League title with Leeds United, he moved to Manchester and promptly did the same again. As Howard Wilkinson, the manager of Leeds who brought Cantona to the English game, observed: ‘Eric likes to do what he likes, when he likes, because he likes it, and then fuck off. We’d all like a bit of that.’
Part of Cantona’s appeal was simply that he displayed the preening arrogance of a 1970s rock star. He wore his collar upturned, he didn’t celebrate goals by rushing around looking for hugs and kisses, but by puffing his chest out and soaking up the crowd’s adulation, and his body language exuded ultimate self-confidence. Even the cultural critic Paul Morley, a lifelong Manchester City fan, admitted to buying a pair of Nike trainers because Cantona endorsed them. But there was also the unpredictable play that enabled him to transform a game with a moment of breathtaking imagination, or alternatively add to his list of misdemeanours; he set a club record by being sent off in two consecutive matches, and on another occasion received a red card after the final whistle in a Champions League match.
His most controversial moment, however, came in January 1995 after he was sent off in a match at Crystal Palace. As he left the field, he reacted to a torrent of racist abuse coming from a home fan, 21-year-old Matthew Simmons, by leaping with both feet at the man’s chest. He then began punching his tormentor until he was physically restrained from continuing. Simmons was subsequently charged and found guilty of using threatening words and behaviour (and got a seven-day sentence for contempt of court, having tried to attack the prosecuting counsel), but it was for Cantona that the true opprobrium was reserved. He was fined and suspended for four months by Manchester United, but that wasn’t enough to preclude a disciplinary hearing at the Football Association, where he appeared contrite enough, apologising to everyone involved, until he could contain his contempt no longer and concluded: ‘And I want to apologise to the prostitute who shared my bed last evening.’
The FA doubled his club ban to eight months. He was then tried in the criminal courts, found guilty of assault and given a two-week jail sentence (OOH AHH PRISONA, as the Sun put it, in parody of a popular terrace chant), though this was reduced on appeal to two weeks of community service. To cap it all, he held one of the briefest ever press conferences, where he delivered a single sentence before getting up and leaving: ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.’
This wasn’t the behaviour expected of a footballer, and it seemed to puzzle even his fellow countrymen. ‘The British have succeeded in eliminating football violence to the point where the hideous metal fences supposed to protect the players have disappeared from their grounds,’ commented Le Monde. ‘Now they have to acknowledge that the hooligans are on the pitch, threatening the public.’ Which seemed a little unfair, given that Cantona was a French hooligan.
Cantona was the first foreigner to become Britain’s favourite sporting bad boy, a role normally reserved for working-class drinkers and womanisers, not for French existentialists. Arguably, his rapid elevation to this status reflected the dearth of home-grown rebels, as sport became ever more professional and media-aware. The likes of Paul Gascoigne and Stan Collymore looked the part initially, but it soon became clear that their errant behaviour was born not of maverick trouble-making but of serious psychological problems, even if football itself was yet to recognise this possibility. When Collymore spoke publicly of his clinical depression, his manager at Aston Villa, John Gregory, was not exactly sympathetic: ‘I’m gobsmacked by the whole issue,’ he said. ‘I find it difficult to understand how anyone in Stan’s position, with the talent and money he has, is stressed.’
Moreover, the great sporting lads of the past were starting to look tarnished in retrospect. The alcoholism of George Best and Alex Higgins seemed merely sad as their lives petered out, along with the career of Brian Clough, while the most controversial characters in recent cricket history found themselves in court: Ian Botham sued Imran Khan over allegations of racism, ball-tampering and loutishness and lost; Geoffrey Boycott was found guilty of assaulting a former lover. When reports about Paul Gascoigne beating his wife made his place in the England squad a controversial issue, Best didn’t distinguish himself with his response: ‘I think we all give the wife a smack once in a while.’
In their place came a wave of domestic sporting heroes who were the dullest of conformists: Formula One driver Nigel Mansell, triple jumper Jonathan Edwards, rower Steve Redgrave, footballer Alan Shearer. Similarly, some of the most impressive performances by national teams were purely defensive: England’s 0–0 draw with Italy in Rome that secured qualification for the 1998 World Cup, or Michael Atherton’s extraordinary innings in the second Test against South Africa in Johannesburg in December 1995, when he spent nearly eleven hours at the crease, scoring 185 runs to save the match. There were plenty of great sporting achievements, but it took a nonconformist Frenchman to spark the rebel imagination.
Cantona’s other achievement, in apparent contradiction to the first, was that he was the harbinger of the revolution that would sweep through much of English football. His greatest virtue, as far as his manager Alex Ferguson was concerned, was his professionalism, his obsession with practising longer and harder than anyone, inspiring the younger Manchester United players – Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham – to follow his example. He received less credit for this attitude than was perhaps his due, however, the plaudits going instead to his fellow countryman Arsène Wenger, who arrived in Islington as manager of Arsenal in 1996.
The North London club was then still living in the shadow of former manager George Graham, who had guided the team to six major trophies but had been sacked in 1995 for taking a payment of £425,000 (a ‘bung’, as the sporting press liked to say) from an agent representing two players that he had signed; he was also banned from management for a year by the FA. The contrast between Graham and Wenger could not have been more acute. The former was the son of a Glasgow steelworker who believed that the best form of attack was defence, the latter had a master’s degree in economics from Strasbourg University and was as articulate – though seldom as witty – as Cantona. ‘I like real, modern football,’ he explained at his first press conference in North London. ‘Football made of compact lines, of zones, of pressure. And football of quick coordinated movements with a good technical basis.’
Wenger’s appointment was not greeted with unreserved enthusiasm by his new charges. ‘Bloody hell,’ exclaimed the club captain, Tony Adams. ‘I’ve got to play for a Frenchman? You must be joking.’ Traditional English suspicion of the French was only exacerbated when Wenger revealed his disapproval of excessive alcohol consumption. This was always going to be a little difficult at Arsenal, where the changing room was noted for its drinking culture; the players Paul Merson and Kevin Campbell had been found guilty of drink-driving in recent years, while Adams had spent fifty-six days in jail over the Christmas of 1990 for the same offence. (To the chagrin of the other inmates, he was unable to play for HM Prison Chelmsford whilst inside, because of Arsenal’s insurance policy.)
Wenger’s pursuit of proper nutrition also raised eyebrows. ‘He’s put me on grilled fish, grilled broccoli, grilled everything,’ protested the club’s top scorer, Ian Wright. ‘Yuk!’ This sort of diet might be standard fare for athletes on the Continent, but such an ethos was alien to English football. The French goalkeeper Lionel Pérez signed for Sunderland in 1996 and couldn’t believe what he found: ‘It’s truly a different world over here. The players will eat sausages, fried eggs and beans before a game. After an away trip, the club will lay on beers for the coach trip home.’
The success of Wenger at Arsenal, as the club mounted a challenge to Manchester United’s dominance, converted many in the domestic game to this new code of behaviour, and by the end of the decade English football had become a more professional, more effective and slightly less interesting sport than it had been before his arrival. The widening gap between players and supporters was generally measured in terms of income, with professional footballers at the highest level now being paid more in a week than an average fan could earn in a year. But there was another factor, too. The extraordinary levels of fitness and of physical pampering that were needed to be a successful athlete made the players seem something other than human, at least while they were on the pitch. It was increasingly difficult to imagine that one could achieve anything remotely comparable, so great were the sacrifices required to compete. As a character in the television series A Touch of Frost pointed out of a game: ‘It was a football match, it’s not real life.’
Domestic football in Britain also became much more international, and on Boxing Day 1999, in a moment charged with great symbolism, Chelsea, under the management of the Italian Gianluca Vialli, became the first English club to field a team that had no British players in it at all. These were momentous developments in the nation’s favourite game and seemed to point to a new incarnation of Britain, one that was converging culturally with Europe, even if politicians were reluctant to make a similar leap. The ramifications, some felt, might be enormous and long-lasting. ‘If all football players appear to come from abroad,’ mused journalist Lynne Truss, ‘will the young conclude that abroad is a phenomenally great place?’
Running alongside these changes in the nature of English professional football was abroadening of the support base. The new all-seater stadia at the top of the game – following the implementation of the Taylor Report, the outcome of an inquiry into the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough – had reduced capacity and increased ticket prices, and complaints began to be heard that ordinary working-class fans were being priced out of the game, supplanted by middle-class, fair-weather supporters, as the Premier League confirmed the social cleansing of a reviled and beleaguered pastime. Again Arsenal were seen to be leading the way, so that when the comedy series The Fast Show created the character Roger Nouveau (played by John Thomson), an archetypal middle-class fan who sips chilled white wine from his picnic hamper at half time, he was inevitably portrayed as a supporter of the Islington club.
With this influx of wealthier fans, football clubs became supremely inventive in finding new ways to extract money from their followers. ‘The secret of our success is to treat the fans with respect,’ announced Edward Freedman, managing director of Manchester United Merchandising Ltd, adding, with no apparent trace of humour: ‘We have over eight hundred products available.’ Cantona discovered that part of his deal with the club required him to put his name to a book and a video, and ultimately he found the whole experience distasteful: ‘At that time they thought that merchandising was more important than the team and players. When the business is more important than the football I just give up, rather than be treated like a pair of socks, a shirt or a shit.’ In 1998 the chairman of Newcastle United, Freddy Shepherd, and one of his board members, Doug Hall, were reported to have boasted to an undercover reporter about the stupidity of fans paying £50 for a shirt that cost just £5 to make. The response of the secretary of the club’s supporters’ association was plaintive: ‘We all know we’re being exploited over club merchandise but we don’t need to have our noses rubbed in it by the people who are raking in the money.’
Even Tony Blair, a man not noticeably averse to business opportunities, professed himself disturbed by the commercial strategies of Manchester United, the nation’s biggest club: ‘Loyalty doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Rather it is exploited to make us pay more.’ He didn’t dwell on the theme, however, and his sentiments weren’t reciprocated. ‘He’s done a brilliant job,’ enthused United’s manager, Alex Ferguson, of Blair in 1996. ‘The result is that the Labour Party is actually speaking for the people again.’
Paul Whitehouse’s character Ron Manager in The Fast Show may have been a parody of the old pre-Wenger school of English management, drenched in sentimentality, but there were times when he came close to articulating a truth, despite himself. ‘I wonder what Jesus makes of it all,’ he ruminated, during a typically wayward studio discussion. ‘He’s gutted, isn’t he, you know? He’s thrown those money-lenders out of the temple, he looks down and sees them take up residence in the Premiership. Far cry from small boys in the park with jumpers for goalposts.’
If there was one defining moment in football’s move from the public bar to the dinner party, it was the publication in September 1992 of Nick Hornby’s memoir Fever Pitch, recounting his love of Arsenal and how it had shaped his life. It had long been possible to appreciate the aesthetics of the beautiful game, and recently even hooliganism had acquired an edgy allure in some quarters, as seen in books like Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs (1990). But Hornby went much further and made fashionable the idea of embracing football culture in its entirety. He articulated the wit, warmth and absurdity of being a supporter in a way that Match of the Day had never even considered. The only place on the BBC where a comparable cultural embrace could be found was Radio 5 Live’s phone-in show 606 with Danny Baker, the very embodiment of laddism, who was named Radio Personality of the Year in 1992; so alien was the world presented here that The Times described the show as ‘quintessentially postmodern’.
In Hornby’s wake, it was no longer sufficient in public life simply to enjoy football as a sport; a tribal identity had also to be adopted, or feigned, if one wished to hold one’s own in polite society. And those who chased votes were keen to be seen as part of this world, so that by the end of the decade it was difficult to avoid knowing which football club a politician had allegedly supported since early youth. Tony Blair, for example, boasted that he used to watch ‘Wor’ Jackie Milburn playing for his beloved Newcastle United; as Milburn had left the club in June 1957, a month after Blair celebrated his fourth birthday, the future prime minister was clearly a very precocious child of the terraces. Perhaps more plausibly, John Major was a Chelsea fan, once passing a note to Chris Patten during a cabinet meeting, asking if he’d like to go to Stamford Bridge the following Saturday. When Patten queried who was playing, Major wrote back tartly: ‘If you don’t know, you can’t come.’
Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, were proud to call themselves Arsenal fans, and had their first social meeting at Highbury stadium in 1991, when the home team were beaten 6–2 by Manchester United. ‘It was a catastrophe,’ Sacks told the press. ‘We were trying to work out the theological implications. Does it mean that our prayers were not heard, that the players were relying on us or that God is a Manchester United fan?’
This permeation of football through the British class structure was unprecedented in the modern era, and it seemed to many to be symptomatic of a wider cultural colonisation. ‘As if to take the piss, aspects of traditional working-class behaviour became chic,’ wrote Mark Steel. ‘Broadsheet critics effused over the hidden genius of Carry On films and 1970s ITV sitcoms. The most popular names for boys born into middle-class families were Fred, Harry and Jack. Football became a compulsory middle-class topic.’ On the other hand, it appeared that football was also capable of popularising art forms previously considered remote and elitist. After a recording of Luciano Pavarotti singing Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ was used as the theme tune for the BBC coverage of the 1990 World Cup, the single went to number two in the charts and the song became a firm favourite on the karaoke circuit. By the following year rock promoter Harvey Goldsmith was staging a Pavarotti concert in Hyde Park in front of 125,000 people, as well as a populist production of Tosca at Earls Court.
What was actually happening, it appeared, was that a convergence of culture was taking place. The leaking of football into the broadsheet world was merely the most visible symptom of that development, the distinction between white and blue collars concealed by the wearing of replica shirts on a Saturday afternoon (or a Sunday lunchtime, or Monday evening, or whenever Sky felt a particular match should be staged).
In the process, football grounds became safer, less violent places to visit – more family-friendly, to use an expression that was gaining currency at the time – and those who lived in their vicinity generally felt less as if they were under siege on match days. Further positive signs could be found in the grassroots campaigns that led to the creation in 1993 of the organisation Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football (later renamed Kick It Out), a development that was mostly welcomed at a time when a fifth of professional players were black.
But there was, many felt, a danger that something was being lost along the way, a cultural vitality that had always thrived on impolite emotions. Football was not as other sports. It consumed supporters’ lives with its passions and rivalries, and though these were mostly expressed in banter and humour, there was an undercurrent of offence and sometimes outright hatred that didn’t sit well with the gentrification of the game. Up against this century-old culture, however, there now came the full weight of capitalism and commercialisation; not just Sky Television and the Premier League, but also UEFA and the Champions League and what by the end of the decade was known as the FIFA World Cup, the international administrative body having decided to lay claim to the world’s most popular sporting tournament. There could be only one winner from such a conflict.
‘The game’s identity, its fan base, its whole image, has been cleaned up beyond all recognition,’ wrote Mark Jolly in The Times in 1992, the year that Danny Baker moved on from 606, replaced as host by the much less laddish David Mellor, a sitting Conservative MP. In due course Baker returned to the station with a new Wednesday evening phone-in show to demonstrate that another version of football still existed, but it wasn’t an unmitigated success. In 1997 a particularly contentious penalty award, made by referee Mike Reed in an FA Cup match between Chelsea and Leicester City, sparked an entire programme of ranting by presenter and callers alike. ‘There’s a cancer at the heart of the golden core of football, and it is referees,’ Baker declared; ‘most of them need a good slap around the face.’ He also suggested that listeners should target Reed personally and ‘make his life hell’.
After the customary period of dithering by the BBC, Baker was sacked from the show, with Radio 5 Live announcing: ‘He crossed the dividing line between being lively, humorous or controversial to being insulting. This is something we cannot tolerate.’ Baker professed himself unrepentant and made clear where he felt the interests of the BBC lay: ‘I don’t think you can represent the true feelings of rank-and-file football fans as well as keeping your contacts with the hierarchy in the FA.’ Despite the bluster, his subsequent broadcasting style was less abrasive and, as the massive commercial dominance of the Premier League grew increasingly evident in the media, he came to seem ever more nostalgic, a curator of a dying culture.
There was an element of that too in Fantasy Football League, which had started on Radio 5 Live with Dominik Diamond before making the leap to BBC Two with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. The two comedians were joined by the nerdish figure of Angus Loughran, known here simply as Statto, who dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, drank milk and was teased relentlessly throughout the show. The affection evident in that mockery of ‘boring, boring Statto’, as well as the weekly appearances of former West Bromwich Albion striker Jeff Astle singing dreadful karaoke, indicated that, despite some critical interpretations, the world of the new lad was not quite as harsh or exclusive as it might be. The humour was still that of the terraces, but it was softened, gentler in tone. It revealed the sentimentality that lay in the make-up of laddism, reflecting its origins in dreams of an adolescent golden age. ‘You don’t even have to grow up,’ was one of the reasons given by GQ magazine in an article titled WHY IT’S GREAT TO BE A BLOKE. Amongst the others was: ‘You don’t cry. Unless, that is, your team gets promoted or wins something.’
Certainly Fantasy Football League was a milder place than Channel 4’s The Word, which had similarly enjoyed a post-pub broadcast slot (licensing hours were still restricted at this stage, and closing time was at 11 p.m.). The Word featured live music alongside more notorious segments, most famously ‘The Hopefuls’, in which members of the public were given the opportunity to appear on television, so long as they performed a distasteful stunt, such as immersing themselves in a bath of maggots, drinking vomit or French kissing an old woman.
Among the non-musical highlights were presenter Mark Lamarr taking reggae star Shabba Ranks to task for his views on homosexuality, and a memorable encounter between rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg and the anarchic comedy act of Rod Hull and Emu. But mostly The Word was distinguished by its extreme amateurishness, the last great example of a 1980s fancy that chaotic presentation and production values equated to edgy, exciting television. By the time the programme was cancelled in 1995, it had been overtaken by the newer style of Fantasy Football League, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush or The Big Breakfast, which were much more heavily scripted and were, in essence, a reinvention of light entertainment. Frank Skinner once claimed that he was ‘the new vaudeville’, and he wasn’t far from the truth.
The assumption was still that many of those watching Fantasy Football League would have had a few drinks, but there was no aggression on display in this version of new laddism and there was room for ladettes as well. The comedy critic Ben Thompson, writing more than a decade after the incident, suggested that there had been a strong vein of misogyny about Baddiel’s reaction to that discussion of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, that ‘something about the spectacle of a man humiliating a woman in public must have been especially gratifying to him’. It was a not uncommon accusation, but it felt as though it was still rooted in the 1980s world of the ‘new puritans’ at a time when things were changing. In a popular culture that now included girl power and ladettes, male strippers and female pornography, women who embraced football and computer gaming, some of the certainties associated with the identity politics of the previous decade had blurred.
Not all of this was to the taste of more venerable feminist thinkers. In 1999 Germaine Greer published The Whole Woman, a sequel of sorts to her groundbreaking 1970 book, The Female Eunuch, arguing that the concept of liberation had been forgotten in the drive for equality, and insisting that global politics was in danger of being abandoned. ‘If you believe, as I do, that to be feminist is to understand that before you are of any race, nationality, religion, party or family, you are a woman,’ she wrote, ‘then the collapse of the prestige and economic power of the majority of women in the world as a direct result of western hegemony must concern you.’ Inevitably the book made much less of an impact than had its predecessor, that note of seriousness again seeming to belong to another time.
Debates about gender roles would inevitably continue; on the right there were still concerns over young women’s behaviour in public, on the left there were further battles for equality to be fought. But a substantial section of the country had reached some sort of compromise during the 1990s, in a spirit if not of liberation then at least of relaxation; responsibility had been abandoned in pursuit of simple pleasures and gratification. In 1997 David Baddiel took a solo stand-up show on tour, much of his set concerned with discussing his attachment to pornography, and it was noted that his audience included more women than men. From a Marxist feminist perspective, that could be seen as a simple case of false consciousness, but then for most of Britain – even for many who had been on the left in the 1980s – Marxist feminism came quite a long way down the list of priorities in the last decade of the century.