90 minutes that shook the world.
November 1979.
A tear falls from the pallid, distraught face of the boy, onto the badge of his school blazer, the motto of which demands from us.
‘Christus Regnet’ Let Christ reign.
No thanks, I’m not ‘feeling’ that anymore.
He stands in the deserted playground, seconds earlier having been deposited there by a friend of the family who’d kindly driven him back to the red-brick institution, haunted by the ghosts of the past and beasts of today. School,130 miles from the safety of home, a home still echoing with the untrammelled sobbing of those who remained therein, a week after the sudden death of the hero of the house. He wasn’t just my hero, he was yours too, he’d been a pilot in the RAF during WW2, when not very much older than that kid standing, abject and defeated in the playground. Now he was gone, forever, which is a long time when you’re 11.
He walked as bravely as his daddy would have wanted him to, bag slung over shoulder, head up, back straight and no longer trembling, you can’t show emotions here, the beasts will destroy you. Through the red door, it’s quiet aside from muffled noises in the kitchens, a radio is discernible, DJ Simon Bates, it’s time for ‘our song’. Except of course it isn’t, is it?
IT’S NOT MINE.
He wipes his face, DO NOT CRY, DO NOT CRY, DO NOT CRY.
An older boy, a prefect suddenly barrels round the corner and clatters into the kid,
“Oh, you’re back Mason, where have you been you skiving bastard?”
He slaps me hard, on the back of the head.
DON’T CRY, DON’T CRY, DON’T CRY.
BBC Radio 1 is broadcasting to the nation, trying to make them do exactly that, with ‘our tune’. The saccharine, overly sentimental section of the program that concerns itself with long-lost love/romance and the memories of such, I hate it, it’s awful. That might sound really judgmental and perhaps you really shouldn’t be that cynical when you’re 11, maybe I wasn’t until my dad had died? Everything has changed now though.
Our tune?
It’s not mine is it? I’m 11, not old enough to have memories of a love affair faded but not forgotten, chased away by history. There is no song in existence that could adequately express the grief consuming me as I run away from the bully and up the stairs to the dormitory, and if there was, I hadn’t heard it on radio 1 that’s for sure, not yet anyway. As Simon Bates tries his best to make his listeners cry, I try my best to not let anyone see me do so.
My bed is in the corner against a wall covered in pictures of Liverpool players, King Kenny, majestic, Souness, hard as nails, Hansen, Kennedy et al, all conquering, but suddenly, meaningless, and unable to help. We might beat Spurs 75-0 this Saturday, but it won’t matter now, nothing means anything anymore.
I unpack my bag, clothes, trainers, crisps and this week’s edition of Shoot are scattered onto my bed as I perch on the end without the slightest clue as to what to do now. Will any of the teachers know what I’m supposed to do now? I doubt it, they all seem to hate being here as much as I do and seem so angry and desperate to hit us for the slightest reason, well, most of them do.
So, I cry, there’s another 40 minutes before end of school and the rest of the boys come back to the dorm, that’s 38 minutes of crying and then 2 minutes to somehow try and look like you’ve not been. My body stops shaking at 3.25, the rest of the occupants of dorm-room F16 enter a few minutes later.
“Hello, we’re really sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.”
Peter offers me a bag of crisps; Nick holds out a bag of sweets neither of which I want or need at that point, but I smile and say thanks.
What I need, is way beyond the capabilities of my friends, but they try their best.
“We’re all really sorry Simon.”
What else can uncomprehending 11-year-old boys say?
I cry myself to sleep as quietly as possible every night for the remainder of the week, re-reading the last letter my dad had written to me before he died.
I can still remember the last line he wrote as he attempted to comfort me, knowing that I was missing everyone back home.
“I’ll always be here, I’m not that far away, love you, Daddy.”
I wish I still had that letter; I wish….
The weekend arrives, an abyss that cannot be avoided any more than the compulsory church service on Sunday where we will be reminded how ‘great’ god is.
Fuck god, I believe in King Kenny Dalglish, he’s got more to offer me right now.
Liverpool beat Spurs 2-1, it doesn’t seem to matter though, although I pretended to be happy as it seems to make the bullies less likely to want to hit me, I don’t know why, but it did. McDermott scored twice for the reds, I was slapped in the face twice by a sixth former, why? Because he could I guess, just another week really, normal service had been resumed if you don’t include my daddy dying.
I needed Liverpool to win; there was nothing else on the horizon to look forward to each week.
Yeah, I’m a glory-hunter and you can fuck off now if you got a problem with that, I NEEDED something to look forward to each week.
Those 90 minutes on a Saturday when the red machine almost guaranteed me something to be happy about as we congregated in the common room to watch final score.
90 minutes that meant nothing and everything, it was only the result that mattered to me because I wasn’t able to watch it happen, as it happened? My daddy had promised to take me one day but now?
90 minutes?
An abstract event that occurred somewhere in England, 3pm every Saturday afternoon while I was pretending to be ok at boarding school. Tosh supported Liverpool too, nobody took the piss out of him though ‘cos he was from there and he’d been to see them play. Tosh and his mate, Adams were my heroes, they didn’t know it, but they were. They were in the 6th form and I looked up to them because they were nice to me and didn’t bully me or the other kids like many did. Like the people in charge of the school did.
Double-math’s lasted 90 minutes, as did the after-school study period. 90 minutes where nothing happened, nothing I was interested in. I sat at the back of the classroom for my entire education; I’d lost interest in anything the teachers had to say after being regularly sexually abused by the headmaster. The rest of ‘them’ all knew, they did nothing,
Bastards, the lot of them.
A few months after my dad died, Tosh gave me something that would change my life, I’d go as far as to say, possibly saved my life, by which, I mean it stopped me feeling so alone. A cassette, a TDK C90 cassette with the word ‘compilation’ written down the side.
90 minutes? A lot can happen in 90 minutes!
The Jam, The Clash, Joy Division, The Who, Buzzcocks, Echo and The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, The Specials, The Ruts and The Sex Pistols.
All taped off the radio, Radio 1 no less, but probably not during the ‘Our Tune’ bit.
A second-rate, shabby, brutal education was never going to help me in the slightest. That cassette, that 90 minutes of glorious revelation, put out into the world by the late John Peel, eagerly recorded by kids like Tosh each night, went some way to soothing my shattered existence. When I had no words to express my feelings, I had that cassette, then I had 7” singles and LP’s and when I was almost 14, I had The Jam, live in concert at Stafford Bingley Hall. I had posters to cover the institutional drabness of my room at school, I was inspired to read books they never told me about at school; I got an education, I had something that made sense.
My mum’s cousin took me to watch the reds for the first time a few months after my dad died, we lost 1-0 to Coventry City, 19th January 1980, the day I fell in love for the first time. Losing didn’t seem to matter, Liverpool were just paying hard to get! But I’d found my tribe and the soundtrack to accompany me on that journey.
“We had dreams and songs to sing”
We most certainly did, they were somebody else’s songs, The Fields of Anfield Road and You’ll Never Walk Alone, but for those of us who dreamt certain dreams, well, we might one day, also have our own to sing, because despite everything life throws at you, you have to keep believing. I had the start of a lifelong love-affair with a football club and I had that cassette, I had the music.
“If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, then the end won’t be long.”
The Libertines.