Fulham Road Lights
Ill-adjusted
Been thinking about this song a bit recently. Does anyone know where Morrissey got the idea for the lyrics from? Is it from personal experience? Anyone think it's an accurate portrayal of football fans?
Inspiration behind We'll Let You Know?
- Thread starter Fulham Road Lights
- Start date
Patrick!
And I watch Home Alone...
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Jukebox Jury
Retired
But this book was published in July 93. Your Arsenal was summer 1992.
In terms of the question about a portrayal of football fans.....
I'm sure it is a good portrayal of a good number of fans.... but also not so.
There were hooligans who were NF and others that were not (Man City had a mainly black gang called ''The Cool Cats''.
Some fans / crews did see themselves as representing the English cause (especially following the nation team) whilst others just did it for the buzz or as an excuse to go abraod and rob shops and bring back the latest sports wear to be top of the fashion parade or to sell to fund the next away trip abraod.
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Raphael Lambach
Well-Known Member
(almost) Everything in Your Arsenal was taken from skinhead or underground culture. Let's face it: Nation Front Disco is obvious, a reference to nation front party, for example. The inner shot shows a gangster and his son up. You're the one for me fatty cites Battersea, a place (in London) where you can easily find skinheads and gangs. well..and so on.
Have you ever been to the UK / London?
I've been to Battersea many times, but haven't seen any skinheads or gangs in there.
Raphael Lambach
Well-Known Member
I've been in there last year and every night I saw gangs hangin' 'round.
Fulham Road Lights
Ill-adjusted
Fair play. What got me about WLYK was the lines 'we will descend on anyone unable to defend themselves' and 'the songs we sing aren't supposed to mean a thing'. I follow a team, my local non-league side Southport. We should be going up to the Conference National this season, but that's by the by. Anyway, the lyrics made me realise that even some supposedly decent upstanding members of society who would never dream of starting any violence will still shout horrible things at opposing fans, players, managers, under the pretense of it just being 'football banter'. What is it about football that makes people think it is all right to say these things about other people, that they wouldn't dream of saying in any other context? Why does football attract this kind of malevolence?
Sim Tappertit
New Member
The hardback first edition of Among The Thugs was published in late 1991 while Morrissey was still writing and recording Your Arsenal. National Front Disco is a direct quote from the book and it is likely WLYK was also inspired by it.
See - http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/"Among-the-"F...ItemQQimsxq20100222?IMSfp=TL100222121001r5418
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'Honest, I swear it's the turnstiles that make us hostile'.
Football is almost entirely unique as a Sport in terms of the passion it evokes in people. It is unexplainable and almost irrational, but that's the effect that it has - to evoke raw emotion.
For many people, it is a release from the stresses and banality of everyday life.
And long may it continue!
Love United, Hate Glazer
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Jukebox Jury
Retired
Well before football, mobs of lads would hang around at public hangings! The 'crowd' allows individual people to hide behind the safety of a crowd and do shout out / sing other things they would never dream of doing elsewhere. Of course, now fans are curtailed by CCTV and a much better stewarding and policing. In the 70's / 80's fans were pretty much left to their own devices and ran amok everywhere. All seated stadiums have split up the ''terrace wag'' and mixed them with fans who do not display their passion in the same way and seats have meant rabble rousers are more easily identifiable and more easy to deal with.
Our lives are more and more put under control..... with what we can say and do..... football is one of the few avenues left where you can (if you are careful
) shout out ''John Terry, is a wanker, is a wanker'' and get away with it. I certainly wouldn't call him that to his face, yet can stand 20 yards from him and shout that
Apologies and happy to be corrected. I hadn't heard of the book before this thread and just went off the link provided in saying it was printed in 1993.
Jukebox Jury
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One of the enjoyable and most humorous aspects of Morrissey's first-person narratives is the question of his own presence in the song - the slightly camp, knowing wink he gives, revealing the absurdity of Morrissey pretending to be a murderer or an invalid or whatever. The song is actually far too ironic to be a good portrayal of football hooligans - who you would assume do not generally have the high level of self-awareness required to say things like 'how sad are we, and how sad have we been?' or 'honest, I SWEAR, it's the turnstiles that make us hostile'. However, this way of approaching songwriting, with three or more points of view usually presented(The real Morrissey, Morrissey the persona, and the character in question) is, as far as I'm aware, fairly unique to his work. The song does strongly evoke what one would imagine to be the 'bloated masculinity' and faux-nationalism of football crowds. It would have been interesting to see Morrissey write a sequel which actually included the working-class morality of football(No, "Roy's Keen" doesn't count).
Whether it had any influence over that song or not, after reading the synopses for the book mentioned above*, the phrase 'we are the last truly British people you will ever know' suddenly makes sense to me. Perhaps it is, like the rest of the song, expressing the irony of a dead working class culture desperately trying to rediscover an identity that has been eroded? The line is both farcial and tragic, being a parody of the kind of Britishness that they crave, similar perhaps to the way that white gangsters from the late '80s onwards speak and behave as if they were The Kray Twins.
*"He concludes that the English working class is dead, and what remains is a culture so vapid that ' . . . it pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that is has smell.' "
Whether it had any influence over that song or not, after reading the synopses for the book mentioned above*, the phrase 'we are the last truly British people you will ever know' suddenly makes sense to me. Perhaps it is, like the rest of the song, expressing the irony of a dead working class culture desperately trying to rediscover an identity that has been eroded? The line is both farcial and tragic, being a parody of the kind of Britishness that they crave, similar perhaps to the way that white gangsters from the late '80s onwards speak and behave as if they were The Kray Twins.
*"He concludes that the English working class is dead, and what remains is a culture so vapid that ' . . . it pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that is has smell.' "
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