West Ham Legends hit Brentwood

Best part of the weekend was going to see 'West Ham Legends' Trevor Brooking, Julian Dicks, Frank McAvennie and Tony Gale at Brentwood Live on Friday night. Brentwood Live is a strange venue, basically a sports hall with seats and not actually in Brentwood but Doddinghurst. But a taxi trip from the station soon delivered Fraser and myself to the venue, where we found a thousand or so geezers in replica shirts and Camden Pale on draft.

Tony Gale was a fine compere for the evening, full of wit, delivering a surprisingly accurate impression of Sir Trevor Brooking and revealing that Trev once said a four-letter word on the golf course. Sir Trev stalked us through his FA Cup winning goal and said that although Ron Greenwood was a great coach John Lyall was a better man manager. Predictably he rather sat on the fence on possible replacements for Pellegrini, but did say that he thought Ajeti wasn't good enough. Dicksy added that the current side just doesn't work hard enough. Mention of Roberto inspired memories of Allen McKnight from Frank McAvennie.

There were lots of tales from the 1980s and 1990s. Frank McAvennie had a story of the players breaking a curfew in Amsterdam and John Lyall asking for £50 to be given to charity from every player who had sneaked out of the fire escape. Lyall was very surprised to find £1200 left on the table when he returned. There was also the story of Mitchell Thomas faking injury so that McAvennie could come on to score a hat-trick in his final West Ham game.

We had plenty of examples of footballers' banter. Tony Gale recalled the time Trevor Morley was in the treatment room after being stabbed by his wife and Julian Dicks had placed a series of knives in the anatomical skeleton on display. 

Dicksy remembered himself and Frank hitching a lift on a milk float during a cross country run under Billy Bonds; and also the time Billy Bonds wanted to fight him at half-time during a game at Coventry. Despite their differences though, Julian considered Bonds to be the best player he played alongside.

Everyone had massive respect for Bonzo and when asked by an audience member "Did Harry Redknapp stab Billy Bonds in the back?" Tony Gale replied that all he could say was that Billy was as honest as they come.

Tony Gale also revealed that the epic 1985-1986 season charge to third place was inspired by a pre-season defeat at Orient when a fan who looked like a member of the ICF broke into the dressing room and lambasted each player in turn. If that fan is still around then perhaps he could break into the dressing room again and deliver a few more ripostes to our underachieving side.

Overall a fine night of nostalgia from four players who still seem to enjoy each other's company. And what wouldn't we give to see these four back in the side today?

The only way is Brentwood

There's a double-page feature in today's Guardian on my old home town of Brentwood, to mark the start of the 16th series of Towie. The tourists are still packing out Sugar Hut and the Brentwood Holiday Inn, while coach trips are still driving round the shops of Sam and Billie Faiers, Amy Childs and Lydia Bright. It seems incredible that Towie has lasted so long, since nothing much happens bar a bit of dressing up and gossip about who's dating who. 

But writer Tim Burrows makes an interesting point that the Towie tribes are basically performers of an Essex stereotype that perhaps shouldn't be taken seriously at all: "Through years of representation in Mike Leigh films, Birds of a Feather, newspaper editorials and the rest, the idea of Essex has manifested into a kind of performance. The vulgar Essex person was in part invented by the media, but in lampooning self-made men and women for luxuriating in their sudden wealth, it created a myth, and gave the children of the original Essex men and women a lucrative commodity for our age of communications: themselves." Click on the link to read.

Oh I wish I was Brentwood bound…

Why Paul Simon wished he was homeward bound to Brentwood

As a teenager I’d heard a rumour that Paul Simon wrote his classic song Homeward Bound while sitting at Brentwood Station in the 1960s. Back then it was easy to imagine him in the moribund waiting room writing lines about shades of mediocrity.

But in the internet age it’s possible to verify such assertions, and the truth is that Simon penned Homeward Bound in either Ditton or Halebank stations in Widnes, while waiting for a train back to Brentwood, where he was living with his girlfriend. Blimey. Yes, it was Brentwood that made Simon and Garfunkel get all poetic.

SITTING IN THE RAILWAY STATION
He made his UK debut at the Railway Inn Folk Club in Brentwood in 1964 and met Kathy Chitty there, the inspiration for Kathy’s Song and America. She was a 17-year-old Essex girl on the door selling tickets to bearded men in cord jackets. They dated for two years until Paul returned to the US. Kathy now lives in Wales and maintains a diplomatic sound of silence on all Simon-related subjects. Although I can picture her as a slightly folksier version of Celebrity Big Brother’s uber-Essex babe Chantelle.

These days if Simon was homeward bound to Brentwood, he’d walk out of the station, trudge 100 metres up King’s Road and come to the Amstrad headquarters. You wonder what Sir Alan Sugar would make of the wandering folk troubadour:

“Paul, shut up a minute will yer, you’re doing my head in! You took a bloody trip to Widnes to play a gig and all you could do is whinge about yer bleeding girlfriend Kaffy. No sales figures, just lyrics scrawled on a British Rail timetable. I’m not having that. Shut up, I am talking! OK, you can knock out a decent tune, but you ain’t doing it for me. If I asked you to build me a swimming pool you’d be knocking off every time you saw some leaves that are green turn to brown. With regret, Paul, you’re fired!”