Fergie Rises: How Britain's Greatest Football Manager Was Made At Aberdeen by Michael Grant (Aurum Press 2014)

 

Aberdeen made it back to the League Cup final, which was brought forward to December. The feeling in Scottish football was that they had done the hard part simply by reaching Hampden. They had won all four cup ties against Rangers and Celtic with an aggregate score of 9–3. Indeed, the quarter-final against Celtic at Pittodrie saw a demonstration of virtuoso finishing by Steve Archibald and evidence of how unpredictable and pragmatic Ferguson could be when wayward characters were useful to him. Archibald scored a hat-trick and defied Ferguson’s instructions by taking the match ball home as a souvenir. He was a strong character and a law unto himself, but he rubbed along with Ferguson even though the potential for conflict was never far from the surface. When Ferguson found out about the ball he called Archibald into his office and ordered him to return it. The following day he was sitting in the coaches’ room with Pat Stanton and Teddy Scott, drinking tea and chatting, when the door burst open. Archibald shouted: ‘There’s your fucking ball’ and booted it hard into the small room. The three of them ducked and spilled tea over the floor as it ricocheted around. Others would have been crucified, but no action was taken against Archibald. ‘That was Steve,’ said Ferguson.

Intelligent, strong-willed, capricious, and ambitious: the blond, tousle-haired Archibald shared many of the manager’s own characteristics. He turned up to moan about one thing or another so often that Ferguson said there was ‘an Archibald chair’ in his office. ‘Stevie liked to have his say and Fergie liked that about him,’ said Stanton. ‘He’d probably have done it himself when he was a player because he was volatile too. He recognised something of himself in Stevie. He didn’t want his players to be wee choirboys. Even when he was angry with Stevie he appreciated where he was coming from. They had respect for each other.’ Archibald also happened to be a dashing, reliable goalscorer with great instincts and reactions. He gave Aberdeen real menace.

Ten Men Won The League by Stephen Murray ( CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2014)

 

INTRODUCTION

This book details the events of one of the most incredible seasons in the history of Celtic Football Club, the 1978-79 Premier Division campaign. During the summer of 1978, Celtic appointed their fifth manager, Lisbon Lion captain, Billy McNeill. The winter of 1978-79 brought extreme arctic conditions, which prevented the team from playing a league game for ten long weeks. No one was to realise it at the time, but the enforced winter break would be a major factor in Celtic's quest to win the Scottish Premier Division title.

It was a season where the league title was decided in the final game, when Celtic faced their oldest and greatest rivals, Rangers. In a classic winner takes all scenario, the drama unfolded. A victory for either team would have given them the League Championship and these two great clubs have seldom met in such dramatic fashion.

On Monday 21st May 1979, the two teams met to decide the title. Against all the odds, with Celtic reduced to ten men, 0-1 down, and only twenty five minutes remaining, they stormed back to win 4-2. This victory gave Celtic the league title, in a game which will never be forgotten. Tales of that legendary game have been proudly passed from father to son, and it is reckoned by many to be the most incredible Old Firm game ever played.

One observer was moved to describe it as, ‘the closest I ever came to a religious experience’, but frustratingly, a strike by television cameramen ensured that no quality footage was recorded for posterity. All that remains is some grainy old black and white film, produced by the amateur volunteers of the Celtic Film Club, and Celtic fans remain ever grateful for their efforts.

In addition to that pivotal match, this book also covers the other dramatic events of the season.

Ruthless by Cath Staincliffe (Corgi 2014)

Closer to the blaze, the stench of the fire filled the air and she could see fire tenders at the scene, three of them, as she walked up the road. Uniformed officers were keeping the crowd away from the site. The Old Chapel, she realized, now belching clouds of acrid smoke into the air, the inferno roaring. Hoses were spraying water but bright flames were still visible through the holes in the roof and the windows where the shutters had burned away.

Fire always drew a crowd, a spectacle and free at that. It hadn’t been a chapel for ages. Probably closed back in the seventies and she remembered it was a carpet place for a while then that went bust. Rachel had no idea what it was  used for now, if anything. The state of the grounds, neglected and overgrown behind the wire fencing, and the holes in the roof suggested it was derelict. Just begging for some fire-starter to come along and set light to it.

She looked at the crowd. Whole families, mum with a pram and a bunch of kids around. Teenagers, some of them filming with their phones. A few older people too; one man had made it with his Zimmer, determined to be at the party. A lad on a BMX bike, stunt pegs on the rear wheel. Dom had wanted one of them, their dad had played along but they all knew the only way it would happen was if it was robbed. So it never happened. Rachel had found an old racing bike at the tip and dragged it home and Sean had begged new tyres off a cousin and they’d done it up for Dominic. Never had working brakes but Dom was made up.

All we need is an ice cream van, she thought, or toffee apples. A loud cracking sound and the crowd responded, oohing and aahing, as part of the roof collapsed and fell inside the building sending fresh flames and sparks heavenwards. Rachel shivered, damp from her run and not near enough to the heat from the fire.

The Last Days of Disco by David F. Ross (Orenda Books 2014)

2ND FEBRUARY 1982: 2:26PM

Fat Franny Duncan loved the Godfather movies, but he did not belong to this new band of theorists who reckoned II was better than I. For Fat Franny, original was most certainly best, although, given the success of the films and the timelessness of the story, he was staggered that there hadn’t been a III, like there had been with Rocky. He also couldn’t comprehend why there had been no book spin-off, although, even if there had, he would certainly not be wasting his time reading it. He knew the dialogue from both films pretty much by heart, and used their most famous quotes as a design for life. Particularly the lines of Don Corleone, who Fat Franny felt certain he would resemble later in his life. He was, after all, fat. There was no denying this. Bulk for Brando’s most famous character helped afford him gravitas and – as a consequence – respect; a level of respect that Fat Franny felt was within his grasp. Michael was a skinny Tally bastard and, although he undoubtedly commanded reverence, it was driven by fear.

The 10 Football Matches That Changed The World ... and the One That Didn't by Jim Murphy (Biteback Publishing 2014)

England’s victory over Germany in extra time didn’t win Wilson the 1966 election. But their extra-time defeat four years later to the same opponents is felt by many on the Labour side to have pushed the party towards its next defeat. As the 1970 teams kicked off in the Mexico quarter-final, Labour was 9 per cent ahead in the opinion polls. The reigning champions went into a 2-0 lead in a game played just five days before Britain chose its government. But Germany fought back to win 3-2 after extra time. England were out. So, later that week, was Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Former Labour minister and one of the party’s sharpest ever thinkers Tony Crosland blamed the defeat on ‘a mix of party complacency and the disgruntled Match of the Day millions’.

Complacency undoubtedly played its part. Politics seemed to take the Wolstenholme approach to the 1970 general election. The opinion polls, the pundits and the parties thought Labour were cruising to victory. But unfortunately for Harold Wilson, he didn’t have a Geoff Hurst in his team to put it beyond doubt.

So what went so badly wrong so late in Wilson’s campaign? This is the story of how a hat-trick of goalkeeping howlers in the Mexican sunshine 5,500 miles away from Downing Street, helped cause one of the biggest upsets in Britain’s electoral history. It’s the story of the unexpected humiliation of England’s football team and the part their defeat played in the humbling of Britain’s Prime Minister. After one of the research interviews, this chapter took an unexpected turn. It now includes the story of football and a second Prime Minister. During my discussions with Tony Blair, he told me the incredible true story of how football smoothed his path to Downing Street; but more of that later.

. . .

I don’t have much time to puzzle over it before Tony creaks his neck round his office door. He welcomes me with one of his broad gap-in-his-tooth smiles. As we sit down to talk, I ask him about a mix of football and politics. He stares off into the middle distance and thinks back more than thirty years. On 11 May 1983, five friends who were all Labour Party members gathered around a television in the north-east of England, to watch Aberdeen in their first ever European final. The team from Scotland’s North East were taking on the mighty Real Madrid. Those few hours in that living room helped change the UK pretty dramatically; and still do to this day. Alex Ferguson had guided the Scottish Cup holders and League runners-up into the final of the now defunct European Cup Winners Cup. As Aberdeen and their 14,000 fans celebrated in Sweden, something even more dramatic was beginning in the world of politics. That victory propelled the now Sir Alex onto the footballing world stage; it also helped launch the career of a little known 31-year-old lawyer and would-be politician by the name of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

‘That was the night I first went to Sedgefield for the Labour Party nomination,’ the now sixty-year-old former PM tells me. Sensibly, most readers won’t have any insights into Labour’s processes for picking an election candidate. More often than not, you need a strong group of local people talking to others and speaking up for you, if you’re to have any chance of being selected. It’s a tactic that seems to have evaded the young Blair. There’s no polite way of saying it. He had become one of the party’s most accomplished serial losers when it came to the business of Labour selections.

I tried for about twelve seats before Sedgefield all over the north-east. I lost out in many places because of my attitude on the Militant Tendency. Pre-1983, a lot of people didn’t want them expelled. In those days in Sedgefield there was a majority of Labour Party people who were in favour of expelling Militant from the Labour Party.

Tony picks up the story of what happened on that 11 May evening, when he set out to recruit influential Sedgefield Labour members to his cause.

I met the critical people that night. I knocked on the door in Front Street South, which was the house that belonged to John Burton, who later became my election agent. And as he opened the door the Aberdeen match had literally just begun. I needed to see him but he basically said, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ Which I quickly realised was very important, because if I’d blabbered away throughout the game then it was obvious I wouldn’t have been suitable.

Blair had arrived too late to see Aberdeen’s Eric Black put his side into a fifth-minute lead from a corner. But he was able to join in the general sense of annoyance that they conceded their lead so quickly, just seven minutes later to a Juanito penalty.

The match went into extra time before Aberdeen’s John Hewitt, a substitute for Black, the injured scorer of the first goal, netted the winner. It meant a late night for the five Sunderland fans and their Newcastle-supporting visitor. Despite having a crowded mind, Blair remembers it pretty clearly: ‘It was a stellar achievement for Aberdeen even at the time, but today it would be impossible. I had a beer and made sure that most of the conversation was about football. We got on to politics after the game.’ When the youthful Blair had walked into Burton’s home, they had most of the ninety minutes plus extra time ahead of them. By contrast, Blair was really up against the electoral clock. ‘The election was on 9 June. The selection of the Labour candidate didn’t start until 18 April. I was chosen right at the last.’ With the official deadline for candidates to be selected being 23 May, Blair was right up against the wire and he knew it.

I was the last candidate of any of the parties, anywhere in the country to be selected. It had been a new seat created by the boundary changes. It was a packed thing with lots of candidates and I squeezed through. The reason I got through was partly because of that night watching the Aberdeen game.

It seems clear what would have happened if that night he hadn’t hit it off with Burton and the others over a drink discussing football. There’s no way he would have become the MP for Sedgefield. More than that, this was the final candidate selection open to him. Without the support of his newly discovered footballing friends, he wouldn’t have become an MP at all in the 1983 election.

The Hour of the Innocents by Robert Paston (Forge Books 2014)

The Army gave him a last fuck-you haircut on the way out. It made him look out of place even in the American Legion.

The vets who returned that year were different. I witnessed the change from the bandstand, week after week, from midnight on Saturday until three on Sunday morning. Their predecessors had come home from Nam, drained their GI savings to buy a Chevy Super Sport or a Plymouth Barracuda, and plunged into doomed marriages with high school sweethearts. Those former soldiers and Marines kept their hair as short as their tempers, got union cards through family connections, and shrugged off their years in uniform. When they came out to get drunk, the music was just background noise.

The Tet Offensive divided the past from the future. The vets who came home after that were as apt to buy a Harley as an Olds 442. They grew their hair—not hippie long, but defiant. Drugs arrived. And the new returnees asked us to play different songs. Instead of “Louie Louie,” they wanted numbers from the Doors or the Stones or Cream. The fights that spilled outside onto the sidewalk continued, but these weren’t the old collisions of tomcat pride. These fights were sullen. As if the vets were following orders they hated.

Matty Tomczik looked like a barroom brawler when he walked in.

He was defensive-lineman big, and that last military scalping had cut so close to his skull, you couldn’t be sure of the color of his hair. With a wide Polish face and a fist-stopper nose, he came across as one more dumb-ass coalcracker unsure of what to do with his limbs in public. Later, I learned that what 1 read as oafishness was a shyness so deep, it crippled him around women.

Matty was surrounded by women that night. Angela, the wife of our bass player and front man, led Matty in with a pack of her giggling friends, beauticians and candv-stripe nurses who recently had discovered marijuana. Angela’s long blond hair shone. A year before, when 1 first joined the band, she had worn a beehive and toreador pants. Now she had a San Francisco look, copied from magazines and complete with purple-lensed glasses she didn’t need.

King Mob: A Critcal Hidden History by David Wise with Stuart Wise & Nick Brandt (Bread and Circuses 2014)

The late 1960s and King Mob.

The English Situationists and the Newcastle rebellion join forces. Similarities and differences. Reading Marx, Lefebvre and Hegel. Black Mask and the Gordon riots of 1980. English romanticism and the guerrilla/gorilla actions of King Mob. Intervention against theatre. King Mob potlatch. Subversive wall

slogans.

Initially what resulted was a series of euphoric get-togethers in London ardently discussing everything under the sun in flats, pubs and other venues. A meeting - if you like - between north and south - (to give a posthumous revision to Disraeli's book of the same name) between us, Chris Gray, Don N Smith, Tim Clark and Charles Radcliffe. In short, the English section of the Situationists. There was nothing formal at all about these passionate conversations and no thought of making groups, reconstituting ourselves etc and nothing about organisational forms / structures and what have you. Nor did we discuss much about our different survival situations - us on the dole, them with some money or other. Mainly it was all about what was unfolding in America - the student rebellion and the urban insurrections especially in Watts, Newark and Detroit, along with endless piecing together of radical theory coming together from the best of the old world of art and politics - usually emphasising their most destructive aspects. Marx smashing the street lamps in London's Kentish Town, Durutti smashing up chairs as bourgeois domesticated articles and inevitably the practical demolition of the world of art as conceived by the most aware artists, especially Lautreamont. We equally lauded anti-art measures deployed by people other than artists. Insurgent anarchists were praised like when Bakunin hauled masterpieces from art galleries, hanging them on the barricades of 1848 knowing full well the military top brass would balk at destroying priceless artefacts, thus giving some protection to the insurgents. The latter was communicated to Ben Morea in New York who, duly impressed, incorporated the same action during the barricaded sit-in around Columbia University in New York some time later. Of course a lot of this re-reading and re-interpretation of history was affected by what was taking place on the streets in the here and now, particularly the outbreaks of youth hooliganism in the western world of commodity domination which we saw as the potlatch festivity bringing about the contemporary destruction of capitalism. It was all, to be sure, rather too simplistic as others, much later, pointed out. Even at the time, though ready to virtually destroy anything in sight, nonetheless we felt such vandalism had to be improved upon and initially, at the very least, accompanied by a theoretical explanation saying why we should encourage others to do such things. Everybody was also reading voraciously at the same time anything from Hegel to Marx, to Lefebvre to histories of the Spanish revolution of 1936 etc. A rapid coming together of revolutionary knowledge and thought from all over was kind of quickly assembled and in haste. In retrospect, there was too much haste as the immanent pressure of the times wasn't allowing much space for good, reflective digesting. A few years later we sadly realized this was to prove a much more serious omission. 

Simply Thrilled: The Preposterous Story of Postcard Records by Simon Goddard (Ebury Press 2014)

In need of cheap soup and rich gossip, most lunch times Alan would wander to the Victoria Cafe, the social heart of the art school, open to students and casual interlopers, where the vain and resplendent gathered in conspicuous segregation according to their different artistic disciplines. Alan and Edwyn's catchpenny clothes stirred scornful laughs from the puffy new romantic posters of  the fashion school, but complemented the surrounding second-hand fixtures and fittings, plucked from an original site in Govanhill which had been due for demolition until rescued and reinstalled by the architecture students. The queen of the Vic was a big Irish woman called Mona, who specialised in assuring all patrons that the soup was vegetarian as she hauled the thigh bone of some poor slain unspecified beast from the same bubbling cauldron, and whose short-fuse hospitality blew at regular intervals in her cutlery-bending yell, 'Get outta ma cafe!'

The aloof fashion fops and their equilateral hair-dos aside, the art-school crowd and those who buzzed around its cafe and weekend discos were a sweet, oblivious antidote to the nice bores Alan had suffered at university. They were funny, nutty, fascinating and, to Steven's barely concealed annoyance, invariably 'greeeeeeat!'

The roll call of human specimens read as follows:

A candied darling who called himself 'Lucy Lastic'; who knew 'they' could never touch him for dragging up Sauchiehall Street as long as he didn't wear women's knickers; who knew no fear when it came to roaring 'fab doll!' at men the size of shipyards; who knew no shame when it came to recounting the gory details of his latest straight-corrupting conquest with his starter for ten, 'I've just been shafted'; and whose ultimate destiny in certain surgical procedures was beyond all reasonable doubt.

Jill Bryson, a pretty polka-dot Alice looking as if she'd missed the bus for Wonderland and ended up in Glasgow by mistake, living on the Great Western Road with her boyfriend and the rampant 'Lucy' in a flat below a dentist's surgery which rattled daily to the sound of drilling enamel.

Peter McArthur, Jill's boyfriend, a photography student and Southside punk who'd first befriended Edwyn at Glasgow College of Building and Printing, and later bewitched Alan with his shared love of Fellini, Pasolini, Cabaret and his unused ticket stub for the Pistols' phantom Apollo show. 

Drew McDowall, a performance poet from Paisley, and his young wife Rose from The Wee Scone Shop. When not surreptitiously handing out free pies to fellow punks under her boss's nose, Ross also played drums in Drew's band The Poems, once joined on stage by Edwyn and James for 'a musical recitation' of the hunting scene from War And Peace.

Gerry Hanley, Alan's usual lunchtime companion, who allowed him to join her cafe table of angry women in boiler suits, monkey boots and cropped hair, who shared a flat with the painter Adrian Wiszniewski and who herself, sometimes, could be coaxed on stage by Alan for a spot of performance art.

The tweedy man out of time called Malcolm Fisher, sufferer of untold allergies and pianist of unending jazz flourishes, who danced with his hands glued inside his raincoat pockets, whose flat, a chintz flock and floral eyesore like something from 101 Dalmatians, he shared with his similarly allergic sister.

And a punk graphic designer called Robbie Kelly, whose brother had very briefly strummed chords for the mythical Oscar Wild, and whose girlfriend, Anne, was usually seen pushing a shopping trolley down the street with a doll sat up front like a genuine baby.

As far as Alan was concerned, his new art school associates' rapturous reception to Orange Juice was an exploding plastic inevitability. He wouldn't be disappointed.

Detonation date was Friday 20 April 1979, as James Callaghan took forlorn stock of his final hours in Number 10 and as Art Garfunkel's 'Bright Eyes' bunny-hopped at number one somewhere above the shaking body of Michael Jackson, the wondering why of Sister Sledge and recently deposed yet eternally resilient Gloria Gaynor. The 1980s were but one catastrophic landslide victory and a few spins of the  glitterball away. The perfect time for Orange Juice, a name so wrong that it had to be right, to yodel their first Lifebuoy-scrubbed 'hello' to the universe.

Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 by Danny Baker (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2014)

Yet, despite the regularity of the work, in the mid-eighties I still felt as if it was all a larky distraction before I would return to writing of some sort. Or something. Fact was, I hoped I would never have to confront this dilemma – at least not in the next hundred and fifty years. This nebulous career plan was brought into clearer focus one day when I read a description of myself in a newspaper as ‘an old person’s young person’. That’ll give you pause, I can tell you. Another phrase that seemed to routinely be tagged to any press I got was ‘professional cockney’. I genuinely never understood what that was supposed to mean. I might concede to it if I were, like so many in the media, hiding some kind of public school background or an upbringing in one of the leafier parts of Surrey, but that not being the case I recognized it for what it was: the superior sneering of a relentlessly privileged middle-class industry. It’s a form of control, pure and simple. What they meant by ‘professional cockney’ was actually just ‘cockney’, and they really didn’t like the uppity working classes anywhere in their game unless they were in the canteen, post rooms or maintenance. I’m not sure if it has changed that much today. Even the most liberal university types go on the back foot when they meet someone who has simply got by on their wits, and they tend to feel threatened if that person is actually brighter than they are. So they resort to suspicion and the curled lip, attempting to denigrate this intruder by suggesting the whole ‘working class’ thing is an act and, really, all these ‘chavs’ have to offer is an accent. Thus even now you will read that someone is a ‘professional Geordie’ or ‘professional Scouser’; back in the eighties, you’d even come across a ‘professional black person’. Nobody who has come through the correct middle-class upbringing with the benefit of a few quid in their family coffers will ever be so disparagingly described. No, you’ll find they will simply be ‘professionals’.

While we’re here, I may add that, far from being a typical working-class ‘bloke’, I could never claim to be even marginally competent in the traditionally masculine field of home improvements. Away from a typewriter, latterly the computer keyboard, I am not only a disaster at DIY, I fancy I rather stand alone as the most clueless exponent of the handyman’s skills. This is another area where I am totally my father’s son. Though Dad was a terrifically hard worker, whether in the docks, clearing railway arches of rubble, or as part of an early morning office-cleaning gang, he could not for the life of him build, repair, install or decorate anything. Despite this, during the sixties he was given little choice in the matter, being required by Mum to wallpaper the front room in our maisonette roughly once a year. The rest of the family soon learned that it was absolutely essential for us to retire to another part of the house and cower in safety until it was all over. Like me, Dad had no finesse, no patience and genuinely believed you could inflict pain on any particularly finicky inanimate object that pushed you too far. I’ve no idea how many rolls of wallpaper it took to cover our small living room. Let’s say it was six. Dad, knowing how these affairs went, would order ten. This was because when a patterned section he was holding folded in on itself or refused to match up with one already in position, he could only achieve catharsis by furiously mashing it up into a ball, screaming ‘You dirty bastard!’ at it and throwing it across the room. Sometimes Mum would hear this happen four times in as many minutes and call out from the other side of the door, ‘You all right, Fred?’ to which he would explode, ‘No, I’m fucking not!’

The Second Half by Roy Keane (with Roddy Doyle) (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 2014)

We brought in some players in January. Carlos Edwards, from Luton; Anthony Stokes, from Arsenal; and Jonny Evans – we got Jonny on loan from Manchester United. They were all good signings, brilliant, and just what we needed. One of the reasons they worked, I think, is because I knew a bit about them, beyond the stats – something about their personalities.

Carlos had played against us when we beat Luton earlier in the season, and I’d seen what a good player he was. He gave us a right-sided midfielder. He had pace, and he could get us up the pitch; we could counter-attack away from home.

Jonny was a centre-half. He had the qualities of a Manchester United player, and he was bringing them to Sunderland. For such a young man – he was nineteen – he was very mature, and a born leader. Jonny was unbelievable for us. He lived with his mam and dad in Sale, near my home, so I picked him up there and brought him up to see the set-up at Sunderland. I knew I was on a winner; I knew him, and I knew what he was about. I remembered an incident when I was still at United; there’d been a fight in the canteen and Jonny had looked after himself well – I think he knocked the other lad out. I knew Jonny was tough.

Stokesy got us vital goals towards the end of the season. He was a good signing for us, because there’d been a lot of competition for him. Celtic and Charlton, who were still in the Premiership then, were after him. So signing Stokesy sent out another message: we could compete with other clubs. I spoke to Stokesy’s dad and, for some reason, he thought I’d be able to keep his son on the straight and narrow – because Stokesy was a bit of a boy.

The Drop by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow 2014)

Bob found the dog two days after Christmas, the neighbourhood gone quiet in the cold, hungover and gas-bloated. He was coming off his regular four-to-two shift at Cousin Marv's in the Flats, Bob having worked behind the bar for the better part of two decades now. That night, the bar had been quiet. Millie took up her usual corner stool, nursing a Tom Collins and occasionally whispering to herself or pretending to watch the TV, anything to keep from going back to the seniors home on Edison Green. Cousin Marv, himself, made an appearance and hung around. He claimed to be reconciling the receipts, but mostly he sat in a corner booth in the rear, reading his racing form and texting his sister, Dottie.

Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson (William Morrow 2014)

"I hear you were keen, quite a firebrand."

"Are you trying to embarrass me with my youthful politics now, Mr. Banks? What does that have to do with anything? Are you going to arrest me for being a communist forty years ago? Yes, I admit it, officer, I was a member of the Marxist Society. It was a long time ago. I was young and idealistic. Weren't you ever young and idealistic? I thought communism would solve all the world's problems. I still believe in equality, whatever you may think of me. Maybe you'd call me a champagne socialist. Isn't that the term today for rich people like me who spout on and on about inequality and social injustice? Guardian readers? I think everyone should have Veuve Clicquot rather than Freixenet, if that's what they want."

"Or a decent single-malt whisky," said Banks. "I couldn't agree more. Though I doubt the distillers and the winemakers would agree."

Lady Chalmers smiled. "Capitalist pigs." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "What can I say? We were young, naive, privileged intellectuals. There were people around then with the real will and power to do things, to change things, to do it violently, if necessary, through social upheaval. I was a bit too queasy for that. They could cause serious political and social unrest. We were intellectuals, theorists and ideologists. They were activists. The front line."

"The unions?"

"Yes, for the most part. As you might remember, they were very militant back then. There was the romantic idea of the true revolutionary hero, the proud worker standing on the barricades brandishing the red flag, not the bloke you see by the roadside leaning on his shovel and having a cup of tea every time you pass by some roadworks. Establishing the true workers' state. It was a very powerful idea. Very real."

"Mostly I remember the power cuts," said Banks. "Why did Gavin Miller telephone you after all this time?"

Lady Chalmers let out another breath and said, "He wanted to touch me for some money, for old times' sake. A few hundred pounds, just to get him on his feet. Apparently he'd fallen on hard times."

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein (Abrams Books 2014)

Lori Majewski: Not sure if you realize it, JB [Jonathan Bernstein], but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.