Welcome to extract 6 from Micky Gibbons' book. Due to a few "technical" issues, I am prevented from posting further extracts from the Micky Gibbons book but please be patient - there is a lot more to come and as soon as a few things are ironed out you can find out all about Micky's exploits in the 1980's and 1990's.
Until then, enjoy,
Jimmy Ranin
2: Favourite Shirts
By the 1978-79 season we had just about done it all. We had taken every end of every team we had played. We had defended our end from every attempt to take it. We had been in the papers, on the news and quite a lot of our rucks were on Match of the Day and The Big Match. We were so notorious that our notoriety was becoming a problem for us. Our first away game of the season was at Chelsea and once again we were in the pub planning our tactics. By now Rita was a major Mad Cunt and she was involved in all planning decisions. Once again it was a case of deciding on a meeting place and a kick off time for the row along with how we would get to the ground and how many numbers would be going once we had worked out who was in hospital, who was in prison, who was ill and who was working that day. Most of the lads at this planning meeting were happy to go along with the usual plans but I could see that Rita was looked frustrated and bored. My suspicions were confirmed when she tipped up the table, punched Posh Pete, bashed Beer Belly Brian and elbowed Elderly Eddie who was not a Mad Cunt but just some old bloke who used to drink in the pub. She stormed off shaking her head and calling us the biggest bunch of narrow minded, unimaginative, hackneyed, uninspired, vapid, worn out, tedious, mundane, characterless, banal, tired, lacklustre, washed up shower of fucking wankers she had ever come across. I could tell that she was annoyed because she had never tipped up the table before.
I managed to calm her down after about twenty minutes and Rita told us something that would have one of the most dramatic effects on the whole football fighting world. Ever since I had been involved in football hooliganism there was an unofficial dress code. It was the Doc Martins, rolled up jeans, donkey jackets, silk scarf tied round your wrist, skin head hair cut it was the stereotypical image of the bovver boy. The football hooligan may have looked hard and tough and ready for a fight and for the most part we were all of these things but we were also making ourselves an easy target for Old Bill. Old Bill and rival firms were always on the look out for us and it was getting harder and harder to get away with it. Rita made it clear that we had to change our style and quick. The bovver boy image had to go. She had this idea of getting us to dress in a completely different style to all the other hooligan firms and to make us look as unlikely to be the type of people to get into a fight as possible. She wanted us to look smart and respectable. To look as if we were not even going to a football match. This way Old Bill and our rivals would not be able to spot us so easily and we could get into a massive fight without anyone realising it until the fighting started.
It was a good idea but it took a while for some of the firm to accept it. Daft Darren was completely opposed to it because he had just bought a new pair of ten hole steel toe Southerners. Smiffy and Beano had just paid out to have spider webs tattooed on their heads and they did not want to grow their hair. Ronnie Farrow only ever wore his lucky bleached jeans to the football and had never got his face smashed in if he was wearing them. Terry Salazar had spent years restoring an original dustmans donkey jacket and it was his pride and joy and could not wait to kick someones teeth in while wearing it. But for the good of the firm it was decided that we would have to accept Ritas suggestions. The only thing we had to do was decide on a look. Being the leader of the firm the ultimate responsibility fell on my head and I had to put my thinking cap on. I finished my beer and went home to give it some serious thought.
I tried everything to get some inspiration. I looked through the Freemans catalogue. I got copies of every magazine from Vogue to Smash Hits but nothing really caught my eye. I toyed with the idea of getting everyone to dress up as Mods or punks but that had already been done by the mods and punks and besides none of us liked the mods and punks and we would often be found kicking the shit out of them on a Friday night when we needed some violence practice. Then one night I was watching pro celebrity golf with Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsythe and I thought they looked really smart in their sports slacks and knitted jumpers. They seemed so relaxed and confident what with their comic banter and devil may care approach to the game, yet I knew that underlying their apparent friendly demeanour was the ever present threat of a stinging one liner or fierce mother-in-law gag. They were tough, edgy comedians underneath but on the surface they looked as nice as pie. It slowly dawned on me that this was exactly the same thing that I was looking for a kind of football hooligan disguise that would make us look like nice young men while masking the hideous violence that was only a moment away. I knew I was on to something but it was when I happened to be watching the Two Ronnies and the little one was sitting in his big armchair telling one of his rambling jokes that my mind was finally made up. Ill never forget it. He was wearing this diamond patterned Pringle jumper with a white roll neck underneath and he looked like your favourite uncle at Christmas but the joke he was telling was quite a rude one. I cant remember how it went but it ended and I said wash your hands and give me a pound of bananas. The audience fell about laughing but I just sat there mesmerised. Here was a guy getting away with murder and all because he looked like a very nice man. It hit me right in the face like a bolt out of the blue. It was so obvious. We would start to wear sports casual clothes just like Brucie and Tarby and little Ronnie Corbett. The gear was smart, easy to move about in which was essential for hitting people and running away, it was not being worn by any other firms and it looked normal enough to make us not look like football hooligans. And if Brucy and Tarby and little Ronnie Corbett, wearing this clobber, got the respect of comedy giants like Russ Abbot and Dustin Gee then the Mad Cunts wearing it would certainly get the respect of other hooligan firms when we smashed their heads in. The only problem was how to get it because the stuff cost a fortune.
We hit on the idea of stealing the gear once we realised we could not afford to buy it. But instead of the typical shoplifting approach we adopted a new method which I called Steaming where we would all run into a shop, grab anything and everything, threaten and frighten the shop staff and then run out with all the gear. Like the infiltration method we had to practice it first so we would steam sweet shops and pinch all the Texan bars and cough candy. Then we moved on to bakers. I remember getting a months supply of split tins and bloomers and quite a few iced fingers when we steamed a branch of Lyons. Lumpy Len did get serious burns to his hands when he tried to lift up the sausage roll cabinet but on the whole we were very successful. It was time to do it for real. We hit shops selling Pringle jumpers, Farrah trousers, Lacoste roll necks, Lyle and Scott knitwear, Fred Perry polo shirts, Sergio Tachinni tracksuits, Fila, Burberry, Aquascutum the lot. It took a while to sort out all the gear into the right sizes for everyone and there were lots of rows about who would wear what but in the end it all came out in the wash.
So, dressed in our new, and what I came to call Casual gear, we came out of Fulham Broadway station with the typical boot boy mobs and found it so easy to slip away from the police escort in was unreal. No one paid any attention to us, least of all the Chelsea who were busy looking out for Crombies, Sta press and DMs. When it all went off it took them by surprise. Can you imagine what it must have looked like when hundreds of geezers dressed like Lennie Bennet came charging down the street screaming blue murder? We hit five of their pubs with no losses, we ran a mob of two hundred and fifty of them down the Kings Road and we took the Shed. It was the best day out we had ever had and it was all down to me letting Rita make her suggestions. Once again my leadership qualities had seen us through.
That season we rucked every single club in every single competition and always came out on top. The only problem was that because we looked so smart in our casual clobber a lot of the other hooligan firms began to follow suit. It would not be unusual to see Scousers sporting a bright pink Lyle and Scot sweater, Mancs wearing Ellessee cagoules, Geordies dressed up in Kappa roll necks or Brummies leggin it from the Bull Ring in a pair of Stan Smiths. Of course there were some firms who completely missed the point. Arsenal for instance could often be seen wearing deerstalker hats, gold belcher chains over a Paul and Shark v-neck, a pair of Dax strides and black Sambas - amateurs! They had no idea how silly they looked compared to me in my favourite Gabicci shirt, Lois jeans with legwarmers, and a pair of Dunlop Green Flash.
Once again we had led from the front and set the scene for a new breed of hooligan to carry us into the 1980s the Casual. I do not care what anyone says about it being Liverpools escapades in Europe and all those little Scouse scallys robbing designer shops that gave birth to the casual scene. It was me, Little Erics mum Rita and the upper echelons of the Mad Cunts who really started it off. The rest of them copied us, just like they did with everything. But while it was all well and good creating new terrace fashions, we knew that we had to do something to move the violence into the next decade as well.
I hope you have enjoyed what you have read so far and both Micky and myself would like to thank everyone for their comments. As soon as it is possible to do so, we will be back.
