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?
(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.
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.
Jukebox Jury
But this book was published in July 93. Your Arsenal was summer 1992.
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?
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?
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
allmusic said:Morrissey had recently finished reading the best selling Among The Thugs, a documentary of American author Bill Buford's absorption into a gang of English soccer hooligans that was both hard-hitting in its depiction of violence, but strangely sympathetic as well. In everyday life, these men were bank clerks, shop keepers, accountants and lawyers. It was only at the weekend, decked out in their team's colors and packed like sardines onto the terraces of the nation's sports stadia, that they were transformed into the animals of popular tabloid terror tales. Again, "it's the turnstiles that make us hostile," and the band strikes up a sequence of passages that swirl between a near-psychedelic miasma, and the full-throated roar of a real-life football stadium.