How football and music become intertwined in our memories with past life events, and the power of nostalgia…
MARTIN Phillips died this past weekend.
If that name means nothing to you, he was the lead singer of the New Zealand band The Chills. If The Chills mean nothing to you but you’re sensitive to jangly indie music and love a recommendation, then indulge yourself and thank me later. Start with their compilation ‘Kaleidoscope World’.
Words cannot express just how much I love that band and it hurts that this weekend saw its full stop.
(Yes, but this is about football, isn’t it? Liverpool have just played, Karl! What about Mo Salah’s goal? The academy lads who’ve stepped up? What is the formation?)
Music and football will always be linked for me. The two key obsessions. The Chills will always be entwined with the double winning season on 1985-86 when, a year out of school, I was open to all senses and ever so ready to be swept away by a passion of any kind.
A scratchy cassette of their first Peel Session plays over Kenny Dalglish’s Stamford Bridge winner in my head and washes over my heart. Rolling Moon, in particular. No idea why.
Obviously, that’s different for everyone. Divock Origi’s goal in Madrid might be synonymous with a song you heard in the pub that night. Likewise, a horrific defeat might bring Celine Dion to mind.
My two biggest obsessions but there’s one crucial difference. While football often disappoints, music never lets you down. Sure, your favourites might throw the odd dud out every now and then, but you’ll always have a better one to cling to.
Football seasons don’t work that way. If you’ve been lucky enough to see your team run around the pitch with a cup in May, it means little by August. There’s always another challenge to cut a celebration short, but we can put ‘Tonight’ by Bowie away safe in the knowledge that Ziggy is still there.
Being from New Zealand, Martin and The Chills weren’t around here much. I saw them only three times. The first was in Tufnell Park in 2014 when they played ‘I Love My Leather Jacket’ – a love song from Martin who had one bequeathed to him by former Chill Martyn Bull who died at just 22.
At the final chords played, my mate Tony turned to me and said: “That’s the best song about a coat I’ve ever heard.”
Yes, I know. ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ by Leonard Cohen, but I still think he’s right.
(Football, Karl?)
One by one the heroes disappear. I write this on what would have been Ray Kennedy’s 73rd birthday and though everyone must be sick to death of me banging on about him, it’s telling how episodic flashes stay with us for decades.
A through ball at Anfield in 1977, a grin to the away end after a breathtaking lob, a familiar intro to a song, a chorus that won’t leave you alone. Synapses flashing all over the place. Both have the power to form a smile and revel in its glory so many years later.
They’ll always be linked. Tell me you can hear ‘This Girl’ without shouting ‘Gini Wijnaldum’ after the pause or ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and reason solely that it’s from an old (absolutely mad) musical and has no other reference.
And somehow we feel that this is just the purview of our generation. That nothing like that happens to younger people in the same way we can’t imagine our grandparents pogoing or getting pumped about a really nice foxtrot, but it’s the same thing. Only the date of year changes. I’d be lost without both of them.
Jürgen Klopp has gone now. Probably sat on a beach, drinking something unhealthy, but his legacy never will. Soon his tenure will be seen as we treat all nostalgia – slightly saccharin while blithely ignoring all the bits we didn’t like at the time, but that’s what we do. We can still live on the afterglow of what he gave us.
Reading comments online it seems that some are already after Arne Slot, mostly for not being Jürgen, or calling next season a failure because we’ve not bought anyone yet. I think that’s borne of a fear of change. A fear of a lack of Jürgen, perhaps, but Arne Slot will have his own time, his own songs, his own moments for the ages.
It’s why I can’t get into battles about investment or stats. Football is soul for me, in the same way music is.
It’s how it makes you feel. It’s about collectivism in the face of opposition, it’s about the whole day, the full experience and not just the hours staring at a pitch. It’s everything in the same way that there’s more to music than stroking three chords. It’s where it takes you that’s the key.
I never properly met Martin Phillips, but last year he complimented me on my Lou Reed T-shirt and asked me if I’d visited the exhibition of the great man’s work in New York. A lovely conversation, if somewhat unusual as he was standing on a stage at the time and I was surrounded by an audience keen to get on with the next song.
Similarly, Liverpool’s very own Barry Venison once told a teenage me to “get your fucking arm out of my car,” when I pursued him for an autograph once. Heady times.
That’s nostalgia, though, and it’s not for everyone. The author Milan Kundera once said of it: “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algo means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
There might be something in that, but we’ll always have the good times and who wouldn’t want to cling to those. We all need something to attach to.
Rest in peace, Martin.
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Thanks Karl – a really great read. It was indeed incredibly sad news hearing about Martin Phillipps passing. His songs were part of my personal soundtrack as well. R.I.P Martin
Bloody good writing Karl. You‘ve made me recognise the synchronicity between great music and superb footballing moments. (Springsteen: Meeting across the river and Trent: Seeing that Origi was free against Barcelona.
Both continue to make me squirm a little.
I always enjoy your writing and I’m glad that I know you will keep doing it.