Oh, happier shirts

Here is an article I wrote for The Shrieking Violet fanzine.  You can find The Shrieking Violet blog on the link on the left, and pick up an actualy physical copy of the zine in Manchester when it comes out next month.

Something feels kind of wrong this August.  As I write the football season is in full swing, and, on the one hand, everything seems reassuringly familiar.  The crowds are full of bustling, stodgy middle-aged men.  The Match of the Day sofa is as pert as ever, Shearer’s chest hair as engagingly visible, Lawrenson’s collars as provocatively large.  But something feels wrong.  Or rather, it all feels too right.  There is too much familiarity, too much continuity.  Premiership football should normally be about constant renewal, the cut-and-thrust of a business at the extreme sharp end of the capitalist knife-point, where every draw is a sackable offense, where every missed penalty could ultimately spell out million pound losses, relegation, trips to Doncaster, away.

Yet this summer, it all felt too familiar.  The annual team slog to new or ‘emerging’ markets, desperate owners parading their team’s wares in front of potential American or Asian consumers like so many beauty queens, Rooney’s chops a main attraction on the Korean grass catwalk.  The same declarations of loyalty, from players previously minutes away from moves to a higher plain of remuneration.  The same blind statements of intent, gloriously shortsighted confidence, from managers weeks away from a new season, a clean slate.  Only for it all it instantly evaporate upon contact with sad reality, a 1-7 defeat at home to Colchester, for instance.

Still, where were the new players?  With the vainglorious exceptions of Manchester City and Real Madrid, there was a deathly silence across the summer plateau.  The transfer window was open, the pie was on the sill, but no one dared take a piece.  Not even a little sniff.  Men were bought on pay-per-play deals, the value of ‘continuity’ exhorted by players once, and soon to be, heard pleading with their manger to spend BIG, unpluck the silk purse strings, aim for the sky.  But still, no takers.  Money is tight.  The stock market has crashed.  More importantly, so has the price of oil – that which now, as with so much else, greases the axels of the Premier League’s slick, shady self-perpetuation.  The squads remained, more or less, the same.

And so, football fans had to turn their heads elsewhere for their shot of novelty; like drowning men, they trash around underwater, desperate for air, for sunlight.  And where better to look than the football kit?  The new strip, usually kept under wraps in a lead box until the moment of unveiling – the epitome of novelty, last season’s disappointments and frustrations forgotten at the first whiff of a polystyrene cuff.  But yet again, were we left wanting.  This seasons shirts are dismal – Chelsea’s a strange imitation of a breast plate, Everton’s sad little bib, Man Utd’s almost new-rave ‘Flying V’.  Where, I wondered, where the shirts of old?

The Everton bib

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that, as the decade draws to a close, that the last ten years have been a more or less relentless march of poorly conceived strips.  Looking back on my youth, it seemed that somehow the art of shirt design had been lost somewhere, somehow, around the turn of the millennia.  Though part of my nostalgia may be a sad fondness for the years of my boyhood, it still seemed to me that football strips peaked around 1996, and that everything since has been an approximation of decline.

The nineties were to football what the sixties were to pop music; a period of renewal, of hope rising from the ashes of despair.  For the bleakness of the war and post-war rationing, read Hillsborough and Heysel.  For Lennon and McCartney, read Gascoigne and Cantona.  The moment often touted as the turning point for English football (still in the wilderness of a ban on entering European competition) is Gascoigne’s tears in 1990, the defining image of which being that of him wiping his red, sodden face on his white shirt.  Perhaps at that moment the shirt became, more than ever, part of the iconography of the sport, something with which to carry a message and a spirit beyond the obligatory sponsor’s legend.

I look at the shirts of the nineties now, and I see nothing but greatness, a spirit of enterprise and optimism now lost in the dizzying money market of modern football.  Often, there would be patterns within patterns, strange arrangements of shapes and shades creating wider movements and lines.  Norwich’s famous home jersey from 1993 is a prime example.  Just what are those almost Tetris-like blocks?  Why are there so many of them?  Why are they layered in front of an almost abstract swathe of green brush-strokes?  In truth, there are no answers to these queries.  The Norwich shirt, like the Platonic ideal, merely is, without any further relation to reality.  It lives and breathes self-confidence and effortless charm, it dreams the impossible.  It can beat Bayern Munich.  It can do anything.  Similarly with Man Utd’s home shirt from 1994-1996, there is almost no regard for decency.  There is a picture of Old Trafford in the design. Or rather, the picture is the design.

This is a period secure in itself, in its history and prestige.  Can you imagine Arsenal now proudly emblazoning their kit with a picture of the Emirates?  Or see Joey Barton wear a shirt with a lace collar?  No, these days are past.  We now belong to a sporting period so in thrall to shares prices, to profit margins and bank loans, that risk is a luxury ill-afforded.  Clubs need shirt sales so they play it safe.  The same players – now little more than faceless thoroughbreds, elite, media-trained greyhounds – trot out in the same, non-descript kits.  To paraphrase The Wave Pictures, ‘nothing’s different, nothing got changed’.

Yet still, sometimes, late at night, I squint at pictures of Stuart Pearce, after taking that penalty against Spain at Euro 1996, look at the beautiful sky-blue of the trim, see the muscular contortions of his passionate, human face, and dream of happier times.

Dee Jay

Planet Earth can confirm that the rumours are true – we will be Djing at the Noah album launch party, alongside Daisy Lowe and Vampire Weekend. Expect to see pictures of us in the LondonLite the next day, with accompanying shot of a cheeky nipple-slip.

And yes, I will be playing this:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134633468160