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A TOPICAL TIMES

A TOPICAL TIMES FOR THESE TIMES

A BOOK OF

LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEN GRANT

A BOOK OF

LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEN GRANT

“SON, YOU’LL DO WELL HERE AS LONG AS YOU REMEMBER TWO THINGS, DON’T OVER-EAT AND DON’T LOSE YOUR ACCENT”

— Bill Shankly, May 2nd 1961, the day he signed Ian St. John from Motherwell.

“SON, YOU’LL DO WELL HERE AS LONG AS YOU REMEMBER TWO THINGS, DON’T OVER-EAT AND DON’T LOSE YOUR ACCENT”

— Bill Shankly, May 2nd 1961, the day he signed Ian St. John from Motherwell.

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THE WORKSHOP KEN GRANT IN AUGUST 2014, as the fallow days of the close father, he’d watch whoever was playing at home that season came to an end and thoughts began to turn week. Getting in would be slow and congested but, towards another football year, a short video began once inside, whether wedged against a metal to circulate on Liverpool news sites and across the stanchion or pushed and sucked by a stumbling social networks that now seem to proliferate human current, he was inevitably and excitedly part amongst us all. High above Anfield — and with its of something. Yeats, St John and Callaghan in red; motor buffeted by the summer sea winds — a drone, Vernon, Young and Labone in blue…he felt close to coupled to a video camera, had been released to them all. They played like he did. survey the emerging stadium In April 1964, a BBC Panorama developments. For a few shaky team made its way north to acknowledge minutes, it hovered above what was the influence that Liverpool’s sound “VERNON, YOUNG left of the streets that patterned the and spirit was having across the world. edges of the football grounds, taking There wasn’t time to dwell on the AND LABONE IN in Liverpool, Everton and the park in Cunard Yanks, the merchant seamen between, before circling the district who brought new music back on their BLUE…HE FELT CLOSE I’ve tried to photograph since the ships, before it was taken on by the 1980s. youth scene and grew to charge the TO THEM ALL.” Above quiet streets, the camera rhythm of the city itself. There was took in a church hall, now isolated on little sense of the patience Denis the gravel and weed prairie that was Mitchell had achieved when making once Donaldson Street. This was where my mother ‘Morning in the streets’ in 1959 — a beautiful and married my father in 1955 and from where he still tender account, by a man able to listen, of the start of serves soup to the passing cold and hungry on match the day for people at the spring or winter of their days. To a visitor, it might be difficult to convey the lives, in the northern cities of Liverpool and volume of terraced homes that stood here — even Manchester. Yet they did spend sometime at the though their outlines remain scored into the ground football, on a bright Saturday when Liverpool beat — and perhaps even harder to relate the intimacies Arsenal 5-0 ‘and, as the commentator said, “…it could and arguments, the celebrations and anniversaries have been more”. At the film’s heart, a swaying crowd played out so socially through the post war years and of tightly packed white faces sing ‘she loves you, yeah the city’s subsequent rebuilding. yeah yeah’ together as one — and they do it so well. My father used to do what you’re not supposed Some are old and look embarrassed for knowing each to do. On Saturday lunchtimes, after finishing his word, some are not quite sure when to really let go, work as a cabinetmaker in Bath Street, he’d jump the some are neat enough to be ready for church and 18C tram for the few miles home to Vienna Street and others seem just glad to belong, as they join in, then on to Liverpool or Everton close by. With his grabbing shoulders to avoid a fall. It’s a swell of

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‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY DO TO THE ENEMY’, THE DUKE HAD SAID, ‘BUT BY GOD THEY SCARE ME…’ working men in a city at the edge of the Irish Sea. Old men, apprentice boys and shop lads, they’re neat, clean cut — even nervous. They sing what the playwright Denis Potter once called the cheap songs, those simple songs we can’t help but know, the songs that pace our lives and stay with us, songs that — despite their ubiquity — mean something, just to us. The surge of bodies drop and roll like a turning tide, pushing those ready for eventful lives against their elders. As the presenter moves along the touchline at the foot of the Kop, he tries to describe what he sees. The rising hill of faces, held back by a low whitewashed wall, seems to throw him for a moment, before he steadies himself to recall Wellington, surveying his own troops at the battle of Waterloo: ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy’, the Duke had said, ‘but by God they scare me…’ His tone betrays a distance from the terrace before him…as if he could ever get close. Growing up in the Northwest in the1970s, it seemed that the beat music of the ‘60s had lost ground. In its place, the conscious, heart-on-a-sleeve Toxteth soul of The Real Thing proved a counterbalance to sharp recessions and the quiet exodus of so many to find work elsewhere. The port city was no longer a Gateway to any kind of Empire but, rather, a place where we dealt with more local concerns, making sense of what was left. By then, the work my father was involved in had moved from the craft of his youth to a more general kind of labour alongside cousins, uncles and our ever-changing colleagues. It was increasingly casual work that meant repairs and ‘making good’, hanging doors and changing locks, decorating to freshen up butchers

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shops in Kirkby or to hide the marks of violence that came with weekend break-ins. Making good — as if nothing had happened. But of course, if you look closely at the surface, you could see where things were pieced together, where things weren’t quite unblemished. You only had to look closely enough. As a boy, you tend to say little — it’s safer that way — but you listen a lot. I still do. The workshop was a simple place — a former holding shed for Irish cattle, cold in winter, cool in summer. Set on iron stilts, it bedded into a river that ran through a city that, generally speaking, had little time for the government of the day…or the government of any day for that matter. Around card tables in summer and the braziers in winter I was charged to keep alight, I’d learn the best ways to go over the wall on a Friday (a way of sneaking away early from work) and come to understand the Cammell Lairds shuffle ( — a time killing stagger known to friends who’d worked in the local shipyard) Talk would be about money, work, sex, families, drink and football, always football…the urgent things, the things that matter. Whilst weekdays were broken up by Radio City news reports, loading vans and trips out to timber yards, the football seemed to promise some kind of respite from the work shifts. Early on, I’d read Gerhard Vinnai’s 1973 study Football Mania, which soberly drew parallels between working lives and the game itself, its tactics and rhythms and the way we play our part. It might just be that work and football and money and are pieces of the same jigsaw, preoccupations that we’re beholden to, or contracts we’ll sign up to, never to be fully released from. Vinnai’s book didn’t set the world alight, but how my heart soared when, after scoring on March 20th 1997, Robbie Fowler lifted his shirt to reveal a slogan of solidarity with the sacked Liverpool Dockers. I’d photographed the Dockers throughout their dispute. They’d been met with indifference by the country’s press and dismissed as pariahs by their own Union. Fowler knew the bond between the game, the city

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and its working people and, with a simple and singular act of integrity, had moved to stand alongside them. The act of photography is a common act, so I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more photographs that really move me, as I pass through a world increasingly cluttered with what the photographer and teacher Lisette Model, once dismissed as “a kind of luke-warmness….the kind of photography that just doesn’t matter”. For all the urgency around us, it seems we’re still prone to our ‘long vision’ — to look at the moon whilst treading the ground. That kind of long vision isn’t something I suffer from or feel drawn towards and, over time, I came to realise, although it wasn’t a conscious plan, that most of the pictures were rarely made more than a few miles from the River Mersey. I began to photograph the districts around the football grounds in the mid1980s, balancing work and photography until the pictures became a trade. Football mediated most things. It was always a starting point but, in truth, it was a way of starting anything, an anchor and an explanation that meant I could be tolerated over the years around Walton Breck Road, Goodison Road and the parks and bars around the city. After the noise and tensions of Saturdays, I’d find respite photographing the parks and youth fields on Sundays. Most people seemed to understand what I was trying to do. If I was there long enough, I was probably keen enough, cold enough, mad enough to be ok enough not to matter and sometimes, in some small way, to even be part of something. In winter, I followed routes via bars. From the Mere Bank, the Granton, the little Salisbury, down to the Park and the Albert, where the Kirkby lads gathered. I would photograph in the Provy or the Derry Club, where the Ulstermen made for on weekend trips over the water and where wedding receptions, christenings and coming of age parties turned my afternoons into late nights. These were the places I’d keep dry on winter days or be

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drawn to when the light fell away. It was where I’d into the street between two terraced blocks and then photograph Marso, the Kop song-leader and his he’s gone again, hidden by the few remaining shops chorus of men over years. Eventually I’d follow the that border the football ground. I think I know him. football across the wider region. From the Eagle in Dressed in a dark drinking suit, he seems like a Huyton, to the Letters in New Ferry, from the deserter from that BBC football film made in the Armchair in Moreton to the A3 Dock in Seaforth, I spring of 1964, now walking through the silver light began to identify districts by the teams that were of a Liverpool summer long after the crowds have local to it. It was common to photograph in a café or gone. factory during the week and then brush past the On that April day, when Shankly’s Reds won the same men on match day outside the grounds, where league and made the people happy, my father was in we’d confuse each other in our new context. that crowd somewhere. I’ve often looked but never There was no formal plan other than a need to found him, though perhaps that would be an photograph and a compulsion to stay close and be at intrusion, as he enjoys another Saturday before touching distance over time. It might fatherhood brought its new bills, take a few seconds but it could take concerns and complications. years – to be close enough and make a I’ve often returned to the material. picture that’s good enough. Being close On just a few great seconds of poorly “WE LIVE IN HOPE enough to make good work is copied film- those faces never seem to OF THE NEXT WIN AND sometimes enough to make life work… perish. Men continue to sing together, and that might be why I’ve found caught, forever moved to be part of WE DARE TO DREAM myself in the same places so often. The something. They own their music and pictures would lead to other things and those shared devoted gestures. OF A REVELATION” give me a structure and sanctuary. Sometimes, even the simplest gestures Being there was sometimes enough. can become the most important. From Sometimes it works like that…days time to time, I’ve been called over to pass and then pictures come or photograph a team together, one more pictures come and then days pass. Nothing’s simple record of who was who and who we are. When straightforward, there’s always a chance of the day the Crooked Billet pub team called me over on the coming to nothing and occasionally, of a day Shaftesbury playing field on another Sunday becoming everything. We live in hope of the next win morning, I obliged but took little care — only to be and we dare to dream of a revelation. taught, days later from a newspaper discarded on a Like my father, I spent years moving between bus, that I’d photographed their team manager just a the usual places, with Saturdays at Liverpool or few hours before he’d died in an accident in the scrap Everton like you’re not supposed to do, and over time yard where he worked, near Cammell Lairds. I took a I stayed with the few acres that the survey drone print to the pub that the team belonged to the video — which I’m searching for again, as I write this following evening, attempted to explain why I’d — seems to have covered so effortlessly in a few brought it and left it with them. I’d hardly tried, overcast minutes. Whether describing a few seconds thinking it was another cheap picture of another or a few decades, these might only be small smiling team, a keepsake for them but of little use to fragments, but they could be ways to hold onto me. But even the cheap pictures matter, these slight, something of who we are and what defines us. As the imperfect pictures of laughter and belonging. drone descends almost to roof height, a man steps Sometimes belonging can be enough.

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“WE LIVE IN HOPE OF THE NEXT WIN AND WE DARE TO DREAM OF A REVELATION”

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“WE LIVE IN HOPE OF THE NEXT WIN AND WE DARE TO DREAM OF A REVELATION”

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ESSAY TITLE NIALL GRIFFITHS AT THE EDGE OF THE GREENLAND ICE-SHEET I sardined finger-men kicking or saving the invisible ball can be myself, with a small army of Inuits, into a smoke- eloquent enough, and communicative on a level choked corrugated iron shack to watch the game deeper — and thus, perhaps, purer — than the verbal. on a lap-top. Outside, the aurora whipped across The pain of defeat and the joy of victory are emotions the sky in giant green curtains. I came out of the familiar to every people, as are the movement, the Namib desert, parched, sun-baked, my head full of balletic/gladiatorial grace and instinctive cow-sized cats and birds taller than myself and understanding of one’s own eleven men, and the those bizarre stilted things called giraffes and the frustrations felt when those qualities are lacking. The first bar I came across had the game social problems of Cape Town – the on; my guide and I, who shared a kidnappings, the street violence, the team, bought several dew-sided destructive segregation – were “THE PAIN OF DEFEAT bottles of icy beer and sat down to massively mitigated following the 2010 watch. It was bliss. In Washington World Cup, which demonstrated a AND THE JOY OF DC, I breakfasted on whiskey coffee shared humanity; in the observable and watched the FA Cup Final. In fact that, say, a South Korean felt the VICTORY ARE Poland, I had a long conversation same highs and the same lows as a EMOTIONS FAMILIAR with a taxi driver; I had no Polish, and Dane or a Honduran, a better way was he no English, but we made little men potentiated. I witnessed this for myself TO EVERY PEOPLE” out of our fingers and re-enacted the when a Boer accosted me in a bar on 2005 Champions League final. In Long Street and, where once he Split, I cheered along with Hajduk might’ve had a go at me for my country’s fans in the stadium bar. In Dortmund, I chatted conduct during the Boer Wars (which have less than with Borussia fans about their ex, and my current, zero to do with me), insisted instead that I listen to manager. In Malta, I could only agree that the guy his opinions on why Sunday Olseh was such a great who’d been bending my ear for two hours was, player. He was a boor of a Boer, admittedly, but I know indeed, his local team’s biggest fan. And so on. which subject matter I preferred. Through the prism It is truly the global game; a point of reference of midfield playmaker, a connection of sorts was for every accessible culture. And a lingua franca, a formed. shared set of signifiers, trans-national and Strange, then – and inarguably wonderful – that recognisant of no boundary or tongue; the little the game should have, and determinedly cling on to,

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“EACH PERSON IN EACH CROWD WILL ALSO REMEMBER HOW EACH OF THOSE RESULTS MADE THEM FEEL” its local roots and flavour; should, in fact, remain resolutely of, and umbilically attached to, a small locality. The reach may be global but the history is personal and has in it an encyclopedia of sensory recall; the smells, the sounds, the sights. With that Arctic snow-storm howling outside that little tin hut, a part of my essence stayed pinned to Anfield, and the accents of it were in my head, the gassy lager of The Albert was in my throat, the grease of the post-match scouse pie was on my palms. All of the supporter’s groups across the planet have been spun from the terraced houses that spoke out from the stadia and the mortar that holds them together and the paving slabs underfoot and the tarmac and the straggly trees and the shops and pubs and cafes and, of course, the human flocks of match day and the colours and the songs and the generationally-transferable knowledge that make them who they are. And what knowledge that is; every one of the heads, scores of thousands of them, contains within it an Alexandrian library of statistic and opinion and viewpoint and idea, of tactics and combinations, of decisions both managerial and refereeing, of players and the songs dedicated to them. There is the eidetic recollection of results. And more than this; each individual, each person in each crowd will also remember how each of those results made them feel; instantly re-livable will be ecstasies and agonies. William Blake promised to show you eternity in a grain of sand: See the history of the world in a football fan. And look at these fans – take a look at the wild humanity, unified by common purpose; the baby in the buggy linked to the distant players by the feeding

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father; the players themselves, wraiths in mist, pushing their bodies to transcend the sheets of junkedmud on which they’ve carved out a pitch; the passing-on of knowledge to the young; Dr Fun and his eerie homunculus; the young, the old, the firm and the disabled, those who need their heads to be caged. And look at how they reach their goals, how they convey their obsessions; by bus, by Shanks’s mare, on crutches, by taxi, by cars which, in their boots, contain the wherewithal to perpetuate fixation which is to say, in this context, realise dream, encapsulated in the pitches themselves, the gimcrack arenas, areas of edgeland and neglected space that have, with great ingenuity, been promoted to playing field – the mud and tarmac and concrete beneath dwarfing tower blocks or at the feet of the titanic furniture of foundries and cooling towers. Such is the core of this collection; an illustration and praise of an unkillable spirit. I write this three days after Liverpool fans staged a mass walk-out in protest at a proposed hike in ticket prices (at a time when the Premier League is due a huge financial boost from exponentially increased TV revenue) and after the Hillsborough tribunal, in which the spineless and the criminally negligent might at last be introduced to the concept of accountability. The makeshift shrines caught in these pages, the street masses, the appalling roster of the dead with the eternal flickering flame – these are not historic pictures. What they embody will never expire. Additionally, yet again we are being forced to re-visit a punitive civic disregard imposed by the savage and

“SUCH IS THE CORE OF THIS COLLECTION; AN ILLUSTRATION AND PRAISE OF AN UNKILLABLE SPIRIT”

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“SUCH IS THE CORE OF THIS COLLECTION; AN ILLUSTRATION AND PRAISE OF AN UNKILLABLE SPIRIT”

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unnecessary cuts of an ideologically-propelled see no malaise of atomisation in these images, no plutocracy and I neither intend, or feel, any shred of unbreachable alone-ness. There are fights – only the sympathy with Cameron’s ‘muddling through’ aftermaths of which we see – and there is friction and platitudes when I say that, in defiance of all there are coppers searching pockets and pinning governmental strictures and conscious cruelties, young men across the bonnets of cars; in short, there people will find ways in which to feel vividly, intensely, is humanity in its glorious mess. But what there is, and excitedly alive; they will find ways to return to the over-ridingly, is a kind of shared purpose, a thrill of primeval dirt, to own injury and hurt, to seek commonality of need, even – and here the cliche is repair of the broken body and mind through rebellion entirely mine – a unity; the connective tissue of against limitation. The transfixed crowds that swirl familiar craving. And this, at a time of individualism, around the placard preacher know what he does not; of ‘no such thing as society’, of twisted neo-liberalism, that the end may be nigh, but it will not of the divide-and-rule impulse that lies come to crush you unless you allow it behind municipal neglect and enforced “THE GIGANTIC WALLS to. The can of lager and the bloodied and unrelieved penury, is incontestably, nose; yes, even these are props against a triumph. That guy, drunk on his OF THE STADIA ruination. haunches amongst the litter – see Football is a game – or a pursuit, this triumph in him. He has achieved AROUND WHICH THE or an obsession, or a life force – often an aim. He’s reached the place he SHRUNKEN HUMANS swallowed by cliche; the field of dreams, wanted to be, if only for a short time, the grassroots level, the hallowed turf and if you cannot see victory in that, MOVE LIKE PILGRIMS” etc., and all cliches are both easy and then you shouldn’t be here. That’s what difficult to eschew; easy because they match-day is; the unknowingness of are narrow, and difficult because of the how you’ll be feeling in ninety minutes’ fundamental truths they hold. But these images time. That’s the point of it. occupy a space outside such considerations; in the Half-way up the Great Pyramid of Giza a man purity of their witness, in their unsullied refusal to asked me if I’d take a photograph of him and his judge, they constitute a crucial kind of innocent family. I recognised his accent and we got talking and record. They work partly, of course, through visual then watched the highlights of the most recent game rhyme and motif yet such is their accomplishment on his phone. Halfway up the great pyramid, we were, that the artistry works to augment their clarity; in the with all Cairo, and much of Egypt, spread out nevermud-streaked boy with the brightly-lit eyes burns the endingly below. Just below the smog-bank, on this need to be doing what he’s doing inside the gigantic colossal monument built by slaves for wealthy and walls of the stadia around which the shrunken ruthless overlords. And what an awesome, humans move like pilgrims. We never get to see inside astonishing, dream-like thing it was to be doing. The those walls; what occurs in that place is score? I don’t remember. But I’ll always remember mirrored outside, in the close streets and the where I was when I heard it. quagmires, on any flat surface on which a ball can be controlled, on which some men can be coralled into a team and others can form a cohort of support. In fact, that concept – ‘team’ – is usefully employable, here; I

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KEN GRANT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967. Since the 1980’s he has photographed his contemporaries in the city and engaged in sustained projects both in the UK and wider Europe. A monograph of the Liverpool pictures, The Close Season, was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2002 and another, No Pain Whatsoever was recently published in Sweden by Gosta Flemming/ Journal. He continues to work on long-term projects and a recent outcome, the book Flock was published by APB Dublin in 2014. Ken Grant’s photographs are held in important collections of photography, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum Essen and other international public and private collections. He currently teaches Photography at Belfast School of Art. He is represented in the UK by James Hyman Gallery. www.ken-grant.info

With thanks to all who have offered support, friendship and tolerance during the making of the work over the years–not least Albert Peake, Leon Irwin, John and Linda Irwin and family, Billy, Arthur, Teddy Molyneux, Ronnie, Patto, Marso, Smoothie, Billy Dibbett, the Derry Club, the Provincial Club, the Hut, the local football leagues of Birkenhead and Liverpool including the Everton, Kirkdale, Scotland Road and Anfield Junior District Leagues, Poulton Victoria, the Plymyards teams, the Wallasey leagues, Stevie, Dave and Ian Hebden, Les Denman, Peter Boyle, Liz Sabatini, Pete Naylor, Ian Jackson, Jegsy Dodd, Nigel Blackwell, Charlie Galloway, Danny Giles, Jamie, Peter Hooton, Mick Potter, Roy Boulter, Dave Dooley, Phil and the ‘Hat, cap, Badge or a scarf’ men, Dave Collins (the Blue), Steve Heighway, the Archers Social, A3/ Waterloo, Ian Meehan (LFC Supporters Club Atlanta branch), the New York LFC Supporters Club (11th street), Niall Griffiths, Gary Thompson, Rob Jones (the Murenger), Kevin Sampson, Toxteth Vernon, Steve the ticket lad, Dave Gilbertson, Chris and Mary (LFC Supporters Club, Boston branch), Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie, Belfast School of Art, Craig Atkinson, Rudi Thoemmes and the people of Liverpool who have always stood firm, through the wind and rain. The first edition of The Topical Times for These Times is limited to 1000 copies RRB Publishing is a division of RRB Photobooks Ltd. www.rrbpublishing.com www.rrbphotobooks.com © Ken Grant for text, images, objects and photographs. © RRB Pubilshing for this edition Hiawatha by Laurie Anderson © Warner Bros. Inc. All Rights Reserved Design: Victoria Forrest designbyvictoria.com Printed by Longo AG, Bozen, Italia ISBN: 978-0-9932323-8-1

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Bristol, MMXVI