HOW TWITTER HAS TAKEN OVER MY FOOTBALLING LIFE

Liverpool have signed Kun Aguero, one of the most highly-rated talents in world football (and also Diego Maradona’s son-in-law).  You might have missed this news in your usual media outlets.  I only know because I saw a tweet from  @redman88.  It must be true, because he also tweeted that we had signed Luis Suarez, at least a week before this became public knowledge.

Kun Aguero: probably not going to Liverpool

In truth, as any Liverpool Twitter addict would know, @redman88 has also claimed we have signed Ashley Young, Aaron Lennon, Eden Hazard and dozens of other exciting European players over the last few months and at the time of writing, none of them have actually put pen to paper.  It is fair to say, even with the optimism generated by the new American owners and manager Kenny Dalglish, it is highly improbable they all will.  

For a whole generation of fans, Twitter has changed the way we follow soccer.  Like many other sports, Twitter has enabled fans to have a much closer relationship with their high-profile idols.  In England, soccer players with Twitter accounts can communicate their true feelings directly to their tens of thousands of followers, something that has often led to bizarre results.  Many players have landed themselves in hot water with their (quite literally) uncensored tweets.

In the last year alone at Liverpool, Glen Johnson had to remove a tweet that responded to criticism from Paul Merson by describing the pundit as an ‘alcoholic drug abuser’ who was ‘average at the best of times’.  Perhaps Ryan Babel’s most memorable contribution in a red shirt was to tweet a doctored photograph of Howard Webb refereeing in a Manchester United shirt in the aftermath of an FA Cup tie earlier this year.  The rookie Jonjo Shelvey was forced to apologise after a picture of someone’s genitals appeared on his twitter page.

But another, far more addictive way it has changed the way you follow your team is that it has provided a platform for a whole legion of people who claim to be ‘in the know’.   The problem, of course, lies in being able to distinguish between those who actually are in the know, and those who actually know almost nothing.  The vast majority of twitterers are like my friend @redman88 – they quite clearly have no inside information whatsoever.  These people adopt a scattergun approach: the more players they claim are about to sign for your club, the more chance they have of getting the odd one right.   Others, like those journalists with Twitter accounts, are able to communicate more reliable information by virtue of having formal lines of communication with the club.  But this is usually the less juicy stuff, like injury updates or interviews with players.  Tantalisingly, however, just occasionally you stumble upon people who fall into neither category, and genuinely appear to have some form of intimate access to club information. 

It is the search for tweets from this latter account that has begun to take over my life.  In the depths of the Roy Hodgson era, the highlight was finding an account that consistently and accurately predicted Liverpool’s starting eleven three hours before a match actually started.  Towards the end of Hodgson’s period in charge, with each bad result I obsessively checked Twitter for news of his sacking and had to endure numerous false dawns, until finally I found out the news from Twitter in bed on a Saturday morning.  In January my girlfriend despaired as I lay in bed every night checking for breaking news on Fernando Torres, Suarez and then Andy Carroll.  Each morning I have breakfast whilst looking for people who claim to know who our targets are for the summer, and whether any deals have already been agreed.

It is tempting to see this as a new phenomenon, the product of a digital age in which information – any information – is valued above all else.  Yet soccer fans have always been obsessive about finding out information about their clubs.  In my youth I was just as committed to thumbing through the sports sections of various newspapers.  It is not the obsessiveness of fans that has changed, but the medium.  In many ways, Twitter is like having the ultimate friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who claims they know someone from inside the club.  Alongside its minute-by-minute updates, what makes it so addictive for soccer fans is the knowledge that whilst the mast majority of tweets are going to be complete fabrication, out there somewhere is a tweet from someone who really is ‘in the know’. 

With regard to Aguero, I’m still looking for more information.  But in the off chance he does sign, remember where you heard it first.

The names of all tweeters have been changed to protect their embarrassment. 

ENGLAND, 2007: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF SIMON ROBERTS

In 1937, a group of researchers started work on a project with the intention of creating a comprehensive record of the nature of everyday life in Britain.  Members of ‘Mass Observation’, as the group called themselves, sat in pubs, churches and at sporting events and simply wrote down what they saw: how people behaved, interacted with each other and even the way they spoke, recorded in as much detail as possible.  The aim, the researchers said, was to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’.



Stanage Edge, Hathersage, Derbyshire, 3rd August 2008
 (©2008-2011 Simon Roberts. All rights reserved)



This tradition is maintained in the 21^st Century by the work of the photographer Simon Roberts, who last night gave a talk about his work at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham.  In August 2007, seventy years since Mass Observation began their own record of the British, Roberts began a year-long journey around England in a motorhome, photographing the scenes and people he came across.  Roberts had just returned from spending a year in Russia, where he was struck by what he saw as the Russian attachment to the ‘Motherland’ (shown in his collection of photography by the same name).  This encouraged Roberts to think about whether there was an equivalent sense of the English.  So in 2007 Roberts set out to see what he could find.

Roberts’ resulting photographs, taken using a 5x4 large-format camera and currently on display at the Midlands Arts Centre, represent a strikingly beautiful record of life in England.  They depict scenes that anyone who has spent any time in England will immediately recognise.  The photographs show, for example, holiday-makers sheltering from the wind and eating home-made sandwiches; a group of day-trippers eating ice-cream beside a car park; Ladies’ Day at Aintree Racing Course.  Many of the scenes Roberts depicts were also a feature of the work of Mass Observation decades earlier.  The images show, for example, a group of football fans on their way to the match, and they also reaffirm that the English love for the seaside is as strong as ever.  Yet these are most clearly contemporary images.  The fashions of the people in the photographs show this – such as the predominance of globally branded clothes like Adidas – but so do the people themselves.  Roberts’ photographs provide a clear illustration that, despite what the politicians may say, multiculturalism remains alive and well in England.

These images are a record of places as well as people.  Roberts, who has a background in social Geography, took many of the photographs from on top of his motorhome, thus providing a panoramic view of the scenes before him.  People often appear dwarfed by the landscapes around them, but they are also shown to be fundamentally a part of them.  In one image (pictured), Roberts captures an Asian couple in the distance walking along a rural path, and they later tell him that it is the English countryside in which they feel most at home.  In another image, we see an elderly couple admiring a view on fold-up chairs.  They have been admiring the same view, it later transpires, for fifty years, and the only things to change were the farmers’ tractor and the salt-box by the side of the road.

In the 1930s, Mass Observation recruited ordinary people to keep diaries of their everyday lives.  In 2007, Roberts also enlisted the help of the public, asking people to make suggestions of events for him to photograph and, for his recent project photographing the 2010 General Election, requesting that people send in their own photographs.  Taken together, what the photographs of Roberts and his own team of ‘mass observers’ allude to, is a modern-day ‘anthropology of ourselves’.  

Simon Roberts: We English is on at the MAC until the 17^th of July; his election photographs are on at the same venue until the 26 June.  For more information, please visit Simon’s website at  http://simoncroberts.com.

Men Cry Too: an interview with the reggae band Beshara



Beshara performing in 1979



A few weeks ago, I went to interview Errol Nanton and Tony Garfield, two of the core members of the Birmingham reggae band, Beshara.  Beshara were formed in the mid-1970s around the same time as bands such as Steel Pulse and UB40.  Unlike those bands, however, Beshara's story is very much one of what might have been.  In 1981 they had a hit with Men Cry Too and recorded an album with Stiff Records, only for it to be pulled at the last minute.  Like doezens of other bands who never quite made it but were seen by many, Beshara represent an equally important but under-acknowledged part of Birmingham's cultural heritage.  Below are some extracts from my interview.

Q: What made you decide to form a band?

Errol: I used to sing in a church – the Seventh Day Adventist church.  My mum used to send me to learn the piano, my brother was learning the guitar, and we teamed up and started playing in church.  When I started to work, a friend of mine found out that I used to sing in a church, and he said he was interested in forming a group.   We started out as the Kushites, and used to do mostly reggae covers.  Then Raymond [Watts] took over the singing, and we changed the name to Beshara, which means ‘surprise’ in Arabic. 

Tony: Our musical influences were the older artists – we used to listen to stuff that had vocal harmonies , things like the Abyssinians, Mighty Diamonds, John Holt, things like that – melodic things.  A lot of those were like roots bands, really and truly. 

Q: Did you feel like you were part of a wider reggae scene in Birmingham?

Tony: There was a scene, and most of the reggae musicians were friendly with each other.  But there was healthy competition.  There were some good bands around, especially in Birmingham.  We used to go down to London and scare the shit out of them.  Our vibe was like a stronger vibe – in London they used to do easy stuff, but the shit that used to come out of Birmingham – we had to fight twice as hard and we had to be twice as good.

Q: So what happened to the original Beshara album deal [with Stiff Records]?

Tony: Well we want down to London [in 1978], and we smashed this album, absolutely smashed it.  Spent a week in the studio.

Errol: We thought we were signing to Island Records, but they ended up signing us to Stiff, a different label.  We had a deal to supply us with all new instruments, we had about a two grand advance, and they would pay for the studio recordings.  So we went in and recorded it.  But when it was time for them to go for the release, that’s when they started giving us trouble, ignoring the calls.  In the end they said they had to cancel the contract...

Q: What was your reaction to that as a group?

Errol: We were gutted.  If they had released the album, we would have broke.

Tony: It was horrible.  We were disillusioned.  We ended up back on the road, taking any work we could get, supporting other acts.  We were just trying to get into as many places as we could, get as much stage time as we could.  It was hard.

Q: How do you look back on that period in the 1970s and 1980s?

Tony: It’s still the best time of my life.  The music thing, it was like a drug.  If you get bit by it, you try and get away but you keep coming back to it.  I just loved doing it.