Gregg hits the right note with tales of punk rock and football
Nick Hornby crafted such a brilliant piece of work with the groundbreaking Fever Pitch in 1992 that any subsequent attempts to write about football matches, social history and self-discovery in an autobiographical format were bound to suffer through comparison. Yet Chelsea fan Al Gregg has made the idea work for him with The Wrong Outfit , a story of growing up in Britain in the 1970s written with two major reference points: football and punk rock. Gregg has set out his tale as a novel but one which is strongly autobiographical, featuring a central character, Adam Nedman, who shares the author’s own passion for Chelsea Football Club and for the rebelliously coarse new musical genre that became the soundtrack of the era. Born in the shadow of Stamford Bridge, into a Chelsea supporting family, Gregg was destined almost from birth to develop a strong bond with the club. It was a time very different from now, of course. After Gregg had witnessed the likes of Peter Osgood, Ron ‘Cho