Articles of Faith (5 page)
Authors: Russell Brand
DB:
One of those people who are wheeled out on Remembrance Day.
RB:
Yeah.
DB:
And we’d have to sing the song in our creepy old voices.
RB:
Oh, with tears in your eyes. And I’d like to think that by then you’d have somehow lost an arm and you’d have your sleeve pinned to your jacket.
DB:
(Laughter)
Somehow I’d been involved in the Great War.
RB:
(Laughter)
DB:
Yeah, and we’d be singing it like it was the
Last Post
.
RB:
(Laughter)
Because I feel that the paradigm of supporting West Ham is almost perfectly replicated by supporting England. You think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna be triumph, it’s going to be absorbed in a cup run or a signing,’ but ultimately it will inevitably lead to defeat and disappointment. Like Irvine Welsh feeling that in their hearts everyone secretly would prefer to support Hibs, he really believes that, and that there’s something about Hibs that everyone secretly, no matter what they say, thinks Hibs is much cooler.
DB:
There’s something magical about Hibs? I think Irvine Welsh is wrong about that. I certainly never wanted to support Hibs or indeed watch Scottish football in any way, even as a kid, when they used to have the Scottish results I used to think why, why do we have to have this? In England, no one is interested in what Queen of the South did.
RB:
No. I remember as a child thinking what a bizarre litany of words Kilmarnock, Partick Thistle…
DB:
One of our greatest jokes in
The Mary Whitehouse Experience
, you probably don’t remember, involved that. Because we had a sketch where the bloke who used to read out the football results was at home and of course he speaks in a reading-out-the-results way all the time…
RB:
Oh yeah?
DB:
I really like this joke which is, he is asked ‘What do you think of John Inman?’ And he says, ‘He’s not just Queen of the North, he’s Queen of the South too.’
RB:
(Laughter)
DB:
And I remember thinking, ‘I’m very pleased with that.’
RB:
(Laughter)
DB:
But er…what was I saying? Yes…
RB:
I can’t remember anything after that spectacular joke. It was a condemnation of Scottish football there which people will have to tiptoe around and take bits out of.
DB:
Yeah.
RB:
And then…
DB:
It’s all right, you can condemn Scottish football because the Scots hate us, they hate me and Frank because of that strange thing. It’s a bit like what you’re talking about, the tribalism which football inspires. Which is why I think there is the club vs country thing, you know, more self-consciously hardcore fans prefer clubs because it allows them to be more tribal. There’s more a kind of hate, there’s more sense of local ownership and all that stuff. That’s why Man United fans are sneered at for not being from Manchester you know, it harks back to an older idea of community where people actually supported their local stuff and their local area, which don’t really exist anymore but people wish it would. People wish life was like it is in
The Royle Family
, not the real Royal Family, the one that Caroline Aherne wrote. Anyway, what am I talking about…?
RB:
Tribalism and Scottish pride over the…
DB:
The thing about Scotland that is really a remnant of that, is that Scottish fans hate England and England fans. Since we wrote
Three Lions
, whenever I have gone to Scotland some cunt will shout ‘Cunt’ at me, or Frank if I’m with him, for writing that. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes it’s a bit more aggressive in the manner of Scottish people. And it’s interesting that there is no hatred back really. When we were children I was taught to support Scotland in 1974 and 1978 because England weren’t in the World Cup. And it never occurred to me to think, well I can’t because I hate Scotland.
RB:
(Laughter)
DB:
But of course, the Scots would never have supported England in all the times that Scotland haven’t got to the World Cup and England have, and therefore it’s a very interesting example of football tribalism because I always want to say to those Scottish fans, ‘Well, you make yourself look stupid by hating a country and a football team that doesn’t hate you back, you know.’
RB:
Yes, one-sided hate is almost as tragic as unrequited love because it’s an equally onanistic relationship. But I think, David, that the point you’ve made there is again the point where football becomes a reflection of culture at large. It’s just that football provided an outlet for their anti-English sentiments and the geographical, historical and military reasons for that and
just provided a template, whereas England don’t have any of those grievances because of the oppression that we’ve applied to them. Stuart Lee did a very good joke when Jimmy Hill tried to defend Ron Atkinson’s racist remarks by saying that the things Ron Atkinson said about, um, Marcel Desailly, ‘Oh, it’s the same as when I get called Chinny.’ And Stuart Lee continued that, well, it’s not really, because there’s not a long history of big-chinned people being oppressed and abused by the white man, and he continued that analogy for as long as he could.
DB:
…and the comedy being about breaking a butterfly upon a wheel as it so often is with Stuart Lee, but yes he is correct about that.
RB:
And isn’t that similar to what you’re saying about Scotland in that hatred is actually a reflection of something cultural and football has really become the canvas on which that is played out?
DB:
Football is very interesting in the way that it can reflect culture in that way. That the reason Scottish fans hate England, it’s a way of creating their own identity through that hate. If you’re a small country with a bigger country nearby that you feel oppressed by, one way of creating your identity is to hate that country. In the list of what makes a Scottish person Scottish, hating England is probably up there after kilts and haggis. And so it must be because England doesn’t quite have that. That hating another country makes us what we are thing. Although it does have it a bit because I think a lot of English people now hate America, don’t they?
RB:
Right.
DB:
Not all of them but you’ll see a lot of anti-Americanism, especially from the British Left. I think that is partly the same thing. It’s about, right ok, we don’t have an empire anymore, how can we create a British identity for ourselves, let’s hate all together and communally this country which is now much bigger and more important than us. I think we’re moving slightly away from football but I think football shows it in a different way. It’s important to Arsenal fans that they hate Tottenham, that’s part of what makes an Arsenal fan isn’t it? It’s not just where you come from or liking Arsène Wenger or remembering Herbert Chapman.
RB:
Yeah, if you were to say, I am an Arsenal fan but also I quite like Tottenham, it would undermine you as an Arsenal fan.
DB:
I don’t know what it is with West Ham, but Chelsea don’t really have an object point of hatred. There is a strong anti-Semitic section of Chelsea, who will shout ‘Yiddo’ at Tottenham fans and will
start shouting ‘We hate Tottenham and we hate Tottenham’, but I always feel that they have a slight inferiority complex about it, because they don’t hate Tottenham as much as Arsenal do.
RB:
It’s strange, isn’t it, because West Ham fans ‘Hate Tottenham, we hate Tottenham, we are Tottenham haters’. But when it comes to hating Tottenham, you can’t beat Arsenal.
DB:
Arsenal have the advantage of being geographically closer to Tottenham than either West Ham or Chelsea so they could even manage to do it. The people that we have to hate locally are QPR and Fulham who are not up to scratch for hating because they’re too small.
RB:
It’d be no fun hating QPR or Fulham. Of course West Ham fans ‘Hate Millwall, hate Millwall’. I know to the ICS fraternity that would be like hugely relevant and I think there’s been deaths involved it’s been taken so seriously. But for a bog-standard football fan that sort of hatred becomes kind of spurious and irrelevant, because other than the occasional cup tie, there is no chance to play out that confrontation. I’m not gonna ever go to New Cross to express my hatred to Millwall.
DB:
It’s a very interesting thing though, particularly for me and you as football fans because I never could do that. I was never very bothered with hating anyone, actually I used to vaguely hate Arsenal when George Graham was their manager ‘cos they played really dull football and beat us and that was annoying, but when they started playing really brilliant football I thought, ‘Well I don’t hate them anymore because there isn’t anything to hate,’ any more than any other team that played Chelsea. And actually I sort of appreciated the fact that Vieira and Henry are brilliant players and I quite respect them, and I can’t bring myself to hate them just to confirm my identity as a Chelsea fan. And similarly you, the part of you that is a bit hippy and a bit karmic and who hates Mourinho.
RB:
And is attracted to him.
DB:
Yeah.
RB:
This is not a sanctioned emotion of a West Ham fan.
DB:
…about José Mourinho, I believe I texted you to say something about you and your issues with stepfathers.
RB:
Yeah.
DB:
With Avram Grant I think that was a general mass psychosis. Although clearly Avram Grant wasn’t as good a manager as José Mourinho – the absolute hatred of him both from Chelsea fans and generally, he was thought of as useless
by everybody despite getting us to the European Cup Final. I think the mass psychosis was about how we had this really cool, really dynamic high-status but somehow charming and lovable perfect kind of modern father figure, but paternal but actually quite modern and cool and handsome and all the rest of it, and then this sort of silly old frog-like bloke took over.
RB:
(Laughter)
DB:
And it was a terrible revulsion – who is this man supposedly looking after us now and even you felt it from West Ham, even though I think you had deeper psychological issues.
RB:
Yeah.
DB:
You have father issues which we won’t go into.
RB:
Yeah, let’s psychoanalyse that particular problem. A whole nation did say, ‘You’re not my real dad.’
DB:
Yeah, they said ‘You’re not my real dad,’ exactly.
(Laughter)
RB:
You can’t tell us what to do, you can’t take us to the European Champions League Final.
DB:
Exactly, especially with that face. I’m going to have to go, Russell.
RB:
All right then.
DB:
Because I have to go and see a play, so I would love to talk to you more but I can’t really.
RB:
All right.
DB:
So um…
RB:
That’s fantastic, thank you David. Thanks for ending it, leaving me with that chilling image of my problems around patriarchy.
My cathode carnival with Sir Alex turning green
I’m still in Tuscany writing my autobiography. Who would’ve thought that writing a book that covers the expanse of your entire life would be so time consuming? It’s nearly finished now and it’s jolly good. A cursory glance, not that I’m suggesting that’s the manner in which it ought be read, reveals that football has been little more than a pain-in-the-arse recruitment officer for disappointment and despair ever since it sauntered into my life in the early 80s.
I was old enough to understand the concept of football for the World Cup in Spain ’82 but it wasn’t till Mexico ’86 that I became fully able to contend with the hopelessness and vindictive failure that our nation is expected to tolerate during international competition. England seem to do better when I either harshly criticise them or stay out of the country and ignore them.
‘Michael Owen seems to be responding to the English press like the child of an unreliable, alcoholic parent’
The only portals to information accessible to me here are day-old newspapers – I now pretend that the days are synchronised and ignore calendars to avoid feeling out of touch. The internet simply will not work here, our lying ‘butler’ Sam, who I mentioned last week in his capacity as a goon likely to get me bumped off by Tuscan mafiosi, claims that Italy does not have the internet while maintaining eye contact and chuckling.
The TV, when operable, is about as reliable as the butler and last week we watched the world-famous greens of Manchester United finally hit their stride against Wigan. We’ve got an expressionistic telly that gives you its own bonkers interpretation of colour and in its bonkers cathode carnival red equals green. All the colours are subverted and shuffled, a lot of them randomly – the Wigan players turned out in a strip that would please only
Benetton – but it is quite consistent in its red to green ideal. On our TV the United shirts and Sir Alex Ferguson’s face are both the same hue of shimmering jade, like the scales of a marlin. I’m starved of reliable media, the papers are late, the internet doesn’t exist and the television is increasingly Dadaist.
This means that I am an ideal case study for Chomsky’s ideas on the manufacture of consent. My emotions are tossed around on a tabloid sea of vituperation and rumour. One paper announces that Frank Lampard will soon be leaving Chelsea, another that Kaká will be arriving. Is that an example of how a Premiership club’s PR operations are run? If one paper
has a story of a departing hero another must be fed one of an imminent superstar arrival?
Poor bloody Michael Owen; he seems to be responding to the English press like the child of an unreliable, alcoholic parent; nothing he does is good enough and it’s impossible for him to pre-empt how his actions will be received. I’m glad he’s back from injury and so keen to play, and that recent international results have meant that he’s been reinstated as our football Jesus.
The last two positive results ought to have been taken as evidence that England perform well when adhering to a team ideal rather than facilitating individuals. Perhaps it’s because we still live in a monarchic culture that we crave a talismanic figure to praise and condemn and struggle to appreciate the importance of a balanced team. I hope this pervasive tendency doesn’t diminish the likelihood of Gareth Barry’s inclusion; judging from what I’ve read, he is the very kind of player that could help England evolve.
Of course, all of my opinions are gleaned from day-old news, for all I know I could’ve overslept or been drugged and missed another few days or even weeks, and England might already have beaten Estonia and Russia. Perhaps Sam the Butler savant has been printing all these papers himself and has created for me an insular wonderland. I did read that Sven-Goran Eriksson is having sex with a dustbin man – that seems unlikely – and that Britain is in the thrall of an alleged terrorist called ‘Osama Bin London’. Absurd. These things can’t be true.
Well, whatever the hell it is that’s going on over there, good luck England and Michael and Gareth. And if Sven is tucking into a bit of rough while a punning fundamentalist causes havoc I might stay here another couple of weeks and watch the games on TV. Come on you greens.