In conversation:
Anthony Clavane and John Lake
Thursday 23 February 2012
7.00 – 8.30pm
Admission Free
PSL, Whitehall Waterfront, Leeds
glamourie.co.uk/events
One of a series of Dark Heart > M1 events curated by Chris Bloor and Derek Horton alongside the exhibition Glamourie at PSL [Project Space Leeds]
In Promised Land, Anthony Clavane argues that both its football team and the city of Leeds itself are typified by a combination of brash assertiveness and parochial anxiety. A north/south, Leeds/London dynamic (at work in aspects of Glamourie) will be the starting point of a talk and public discussion between Clavane and the writer, musician and novelist John Lake, exploring these ideas in some depth, and looking at the similarities and differences between the impact they have on different aspects of culture – football, visual art, the music scene, literature and drama.
Anthony Clavane writes widely on sport, arts and culture. He currently writes for The Sunday Mirror, The Guardian, Sabotage Times, Blizzard, Backpass and The Jewish Chronicle. He wrote the songs for the play ʻStill Waiting For Everythingʼ and he teaches non-fiction writing and journalism at the Arvon Foundation. His book about Leeds and its football team, ʻPromised Land: A Northern Love Storyʼ, won both Football Book of the Year and Sports Book of the Year at the 2011 National Sporting Club Awards. He has been commissioned by Red Ladder Theatre Company to write a play based on the book to be performed later this year, and his next book, ʻDoes Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?’, will be out in October 2012.
Anthony was born and brought up in Leeds. He went to Sussex University and taught History in various schools for six years. He then became a journalist, first writing for the East Anglian Daily Times as a news and feature writer and then The Independent as an arts and culture writer. He now writes about sport for the Sunday Mirror and has covered three Olympics and two World Cups.
He has won Press Gazette Feature Writer Of The Year and BT Regional Sportswriter Of The Year awards. He wrote the music for Still Waiting For Everything, a highly-acclaimed play which toured England, and teaches journalism, feature writing and non-fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation.
His book Promised Land: A Northern Love Story – published in 2010 and out as a paperback in September 2011 – was described as “glorious” by The Guardian and named both Football Book Of The Year and Sports Book Of The Year by the National Sporting Club – as well as sports book of the year by The Radio 2 Book Club.
A play of Promised Land, produced by Red Ladder Theatre will be launched on February 22nd 6.30 pm at the Carriageworks, Leeds.
What are the literary precursors to Promised Land?
There are four books which influenced me:
The Damned Utd by David Peace
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
The Hounding of David Oluwale by Kester Aspden
Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
How different was it writing long form, a book, compared to journalism?
Having to write 80,000 words in a year wasn’t so tough, seeing I tend to write about 2 to 3,000 a week with my journalism.
I keep needing to have deadlines though – as I am needing at the moment with my second book. In fact, I should be getting on with it now, because it’s due in the end of March!
As we speak I’m in the British Library doing my journalism – a column about Joey Barton and an interview with Gordon Strachan – and once they are out the way, I will write – hopefully – 2,000 words on my final chapter of my second book.
So, so far, not really different.
The big difference for me is in the rewrite – or should I say rewrites. With journalism it’s wham, bam thank you mam (or sir). It’s all very immediate, the first draft of history/yesterday’s fish and chips paper (take your pick) and all that.
With the long form, once the first draft of a book is written, then the writing really starts. It’s like a sculptor getting his material and shaping it, and reshaping till it makes some sort of sense.
With Promised Land, I also kept going off to visit cemeteries and old ghettos and interview people.
Ultimately, though, a non-fiction book with literary pretensions (pretentious, moi?) is a history not a documentary. And I suppose my favourite form of writing, and reading, is literary history.
Promised Land fuses the personal and the political, the city of Leed, its football team and the Jewish experience. Why haven’t we seen this before?
The three subjects of football, Jewishness and post-war, post industrial cities have all connected, for me, in a political way. In essence, all three came out of the cold at the same time – in the socially-mobile 1960s – and became exciting vehicles for transformation. In the 1980s, all three – in my case Leeds United, Leeds Jewry and Leeds itself – seemed to return to the wilderness. There was a resurgence in the 1990s and now I’m worried that – in an age where out-of-touch southern toffs are back in charge – another return to the wilderness is imminent.
Joey Barton has been roundly mocked for his attempts at intellectualising on Twitter. Is this because Joey Barton is Joey Barton or is there a broader sense that football, maybe even writing about football can’t be serious?
I’ve always thought that Barton was a deep and enigmatic thinker – the Eric Cantona of our times. He’s as comfortable quoting Nietzsche as launching a martial arts-style kick at a Crystal Palace fan. The Bard of Shepherds Bush is the Premier League’s tweeter-in-residence and should be revered as such. Disappointingly, the last time I interviewed the Bartster – in conjunction with a select group of hacks – he confined his musings to The Smiths, Arsenal and Neil Warnock’s superstitions. His minders instructed us not to ask about Nietzsche, because Neil didn’t want a controversial piece. A few months later Neil and his superstitious ways are now history and, on his favourite social media website, Joey is tweeting very controversial things about his ex-gaffer. As Cantona would say: “C’est la vie.”
Okay, serious answer. Here’s a recent Barton tweet is: “Don’t/haven’t u realised over the last decade, I am at my best when u give me stick. I continually make u eat ur words. Do urselves a favour… I find it humorous u haters think ur negativity and sniping will effect me. I don’t want or need ur advice, praise, negativity… …or any other thing u offer. U will never effect me. I am far to driven for u. Thanks for helping me be successful. I love u all xx”
And we all love u Joey. I suppose he is an antidote, of sorts, to the sanitised modern reality of the Premier League, but he is no Cantona. “When the seagulls follow the trawler,” the French Judas once intoned, “it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”. And who, in their right mind, could argue with that?
It’s easy to take the mickey – and I recommend Martin Kelner’s Monday column in The Guardian as the best example of tongue-in-cheek football writing – but there has to be some middle ground between the cosy inanities of Alan Shearer and the Brent-esque eccentricities of Cantona/Barton. I think Blizzard, Jonathan Wilson’s new magazine is a superb example of serious football writing. Brian Glanville has written seriously about football for six decades. And, at the moment, Patrick Barclay and the doyen, Hugh McIllvaney, are still writing great stuff every week. And there has been a welcome resurgence of serious football books. In the past, we had Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Now there is Wilson’sInverting The Pyramid, David Winner’s Brilliant Orange, Simon Kuper’s work, David Conn’s investigative journalism and a whole host of interesting new writers.
I very much agree. There’s always been a suspicion of the working-class autodidact. The Guardian writer, Barney Ronay, is another terrific sportswriter. Elevating sports writing, like Promised Land, to the elemental feelings fans have when following their team. Are there any new books in the pipeline? And if so, do you see it as the ‘difficult second book’?
At the moment I am writing a play based on the book – with music! It will be on at Leeds Carriageworks in June. There is a launch on February 22nd at Carriageworks if anyone is interested in finding out about it – 6.30 pm Carriageworks – because it’s a community play and we want the community to get involved, as actors, musicians, ‘extras’ or whatever.
Okay, plug over. I am writing the second difficult book as we speak. It’s called ‘Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?’ and it’s about the 150-year Jewish encounter with England through football, from the first penniless immigrants to the third and fourth-generation Jews who have helped shape the game. It’s a hidden history which no-one has written about before.
What excites me when I write – and read – is making conenctions that haven’t been made before. Whether it’s Jewish or Irish-Catholic or Afro-Caribbean, I am fascinated by the way outsiders try to become insiders. And what price they pay for belonging. Englishness is suffering a crisis in identity. What it needs to come to terms with, embrace even, is its fluidity. There is a Downton Abbey view of Englishness which people pine for, but the reality is that it’s a myth. England has always had migrants and migrants have always shaped England, often invisibly. It’s the tension between the myth of Englishness and ‘the Other’ – often an immigrant community – which has propelled some of our greatest cultural developments, from fish and chips to the Ealing comedies. There has been a similar tension, I would argue, in the way English football has developed.
You mention out of touch Southern toffs being back in charge. In your view, do you see any new ‘in touch’ voices to counter that? Beyond the usual oppositionalism and agitprop?
The antidote to the Downton Abbey myth has always been, for me, regional dissenters. From the northern new realists of the 1960s to the Manchester bands of the 1980s and 1990s. There is nothing as astonishing as the poetry of Tony Harrison, John Cooper Clarke and Ted Hughes around at the moment, although I love Simon Armitage and Ian McMillan. There is nothing as revolutionary as Boys From The Blackstuff either. But I would argue that a new ‘Yorkshire Noir’ movement is emerging, influenced partly by the mighty David Peace, and I hope it gets the national recognition it deserves. God’s Own Country to the rescue.
Personally, I think we need a bit more oppositionalism and agitprop, although that’s not the way I write. I loved ‘Big Society’ at the Leeds City Varieties, for example, which was a superb fusion of entertainment and oppositional-agitprop. Looking back to the 1980s, when Thatcherism ruled the roost, there were occasional howls of protests through northern writers like Harrison, Bennett, Bleasdale, Russell and the great Stephen Patrick Morrissey. I think Cameron’s attempt to appropriate dissent by saying he liked The Smiths or the film ‘If’ is laughable.
You’ve announced the ‘Leeds Movement’ in an article in the Guardian. How have your attempts to raise the profile of Yorkshire writers fared?
I argued in The Guardian that a disproportionate number of kitchen-sink writers who reshaped the English novel were from Leeds and its surrounds: Keith Waterhouse, Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison, Willis Hall, David Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow – “throw in Jack Higgins and Barbara Taylor Bradford (and, at a stretch, Barry Cryer, who formed an unlikely comedy duo with Harrison) and you have the Leeds Movement.”
But I also pointed out that, unlike the Merseybeat Poets or the Madchester Sound, it was never officially acknowledged. The anonymity is all part of the charm.”Leeds has hugely influenced writing and thought,” argues Mick McCann in How Leeds Changed the World. “It’s just that no one seems to know it. It’s part of our Leedsness not to blow our own trumpet. To keep our feet on the ground, to not show off, to never get ideas above our station.”
Both Mick and I think that Leeds should big itself up more. So we are trying to produce an anthology of Leeds writing. And some of us are also trying to get a Leeds Literary Festival going. Watch this space
What shape do you think the anthology might take? Do you feel a responsibility to be ‘diverse’ rather than representative of the best of Leeds writing? Can it be both?
I really liked The Book of Leeds, which was the best of Leeds writing in the mid-2000s, especially Tom Palmer’s introduction. Peace, Harrison, Palmer – and great stuff from less-known writers. I envisage this new one being bigger and possibly more diverse. In the ensuing 10 years, lots more Leeds writers have emerged. I think you can be diverse and have the highest quality. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Anthony, you’ve worked across forms and genres. Are more contemporary writers doing this?
I enjoy writing books, plays, music and journalism. I hate the idea of being stereotyped. When you are introduced and someone asks you what you do, there is an immediate tendency to be pigeonholed. I do it myself. It saves time.
I love it when writers do something different – like Martin Amis’ journalism for example. I’m not a big fan of his recent novels, but his reporting on American politics in the 1980s was exemplary. I grew up reading Keith Waterhouse’s columns in the Mirror. I looked forward to his musings every Tuesday and Thursday. Now there’s a chap who could write across forms and genres. And take Storey. One minute he was playing rugby for Leeds, then he was hopping on the train to London to the Slade School of Art. He wrote plays, novels, films – and, as he was trained to do, painted pictures. He published some great poetry a few years ago.
The other thing that influenced me was the ‘gonzo journalism’ of the NME back in the day (the mid-to-late 1970s). I bought it during the punk period and even though the music was exhilarating and, at times, life-changing, the articles by Burchill, Morley, Shaar-Murray, Penman, Parsons et al were often better than the music. Sometimes it was pretentious crap, of course. It was the literary equivalent to listening to the John Peel show.
I suppose that fewer contemporary writers are doing this. Given the demise of the printed press, with high-quality journalists getting the chop, there is a tendency to specialise in order to guarantee your income.
A play of Promised Land, produced by Red Ladder Theatre will be launched on February 22nd 6.30 pm at the Carriageworks, Leeds. To find out more about Anthony Clavane.
Fanhouse UK 14/9/2011
At a London coffee shop journalist and author Anthony Clavane reels off a list of names at breakneck speed: “Sprake, Reaney, Cooper, Bremner, Charlton, Hunter, Lorimer, Clarke, Jones, Giles, Gray”.
“That’s my party piece,” he adds grinning.
This is the archetypal starting XI of Don Revie‘s Leeds United. The team that dominated British football for almost a decade, winning two First Division titles, the FA Cup, League Cup and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups.
Clavane is a fan having been born in Leeds in 1960 and he grew up worshipping Revie’s much-maligned side. He has used the experience as the basis for his book, Promised Land, which collected a series of laudatory reviews upon release and went on to be crowned Sports Book of the Year at the 2011 British Sports Book Awards.
However, labelling it a sports book sells it short. Football is only one of the threads that Clavane picks up. As the title suggests it also explores the author’s Jewish faith as well as the city of Leeds. These three strands provide the framework for the book and it is testament to Clavane’s skill as an author that the interplay of ethnicity, city and football doesn’t feel trite or forced.
Clavane decided to write the book in the wake of David Peace’s wildly successful The Damned United, which focused on Brian Clough‘s tumultuous short stint in charge of Leeds United in 1974.
“I think The Damned United is a brilliant sports novel and the finest novel about sport in this country since This Sporting Life,” he says.
“But it is very much also about Brian Clough, about the Brian Clough saga and it is an exploration of the demons that Brian Clough faced.
“Leeds United is a background to that and I wanted to put Leeds United in the foreground.”
However, the book was not inspired by feelings of joy or happiness but rather despair stemming from Leeds’s relegation to the third tier following a prolonged period of upheaval.
“I felt in 2007 that I had to write myself out of a depression and the depression was based on the fact that not just that Leeds United had been relegated and in the third division for the first time in their history but that it felt like something was over.
“As I was approaching my 50th year I felt that this was a good time to reflect on how football has defined me, how Leeds has defined me, how my Jewishness has defined me [and] how the writers I like have defined me. It somehow felt that there were a lot of connections between all these things and if I could put it into a book it would help me.”
Clavane’s decision to combine the history of Leeds United with that of the city of Leeds and his own life story elevates the book above standard sporting hagiography. Indeed, the subtitle was changed when the book was published in paperback form to reflect this wider focus. “The Reinvention of Leeds United” became “A Northern Love Story”.
Gone too was the original cover art showing Billy Bremner lifting the FA Cup. Instead he chose an image of a child walking down a deserted street with a Leeds United scarf hanging by his waist.
“We were criticised, rightly, when the book came out for being slightly misleading. The cover of the hardback is all about Leeds United and the title and subtitle are Leeds United and yet the book is obviously about the north, it’s about [the] Jewish community, it’s about lots of things.”
Yet, as is to be expected, the football club features heavily, with the stars of the show, undoubtedly, being Revie’s side of the 1960s and 1970s and in particular The Don himself.
The Damned United cast Revie as Clough’s nemesis and it is obvious where the readers’ sympathies are supposed to lie. This chimes with the general view of Revie as someone who wanted to win at all costs and who sacrificed beauty for functionality – despite the fact that his Leeds United team was comprised of supremely talented individuals.
However, according to Clavane this is an unfair and simplistic assessment.
“I think it’s undeniable that from 1961 when Revie became manager to 1968 … [that] they certainly would introduce the kinds of gamesmanship that hadn’t been seen [before].
“[Revie] realised that the only way to succeed, or the only way to drag a team from nowhere into the first division and make something of them was to have this attitude of do or die.
“I don’t think Leeds were dirtier than the others but they gained a reputation for being dirty and that kind of reputation helped because teams almost felt beaten before they began.
“But then my argument is that by the time they won the league in 1969 – for the first ever time with a record number of points and only 2 defeats – Revie had realised that this team of awesome talent should be taken off the leash.
“Then for the next five years they became a team to compare with Real Madrid or Ajax in that they played total football.
“They were a beautiful team … why they didn’t get credit for that I don’t know.”
But at the same time there is a sense of unfulfilled potential hanging over that team. Under Revie, Leeds finished as Cup runners-up or in second place an incredible 10 times. To use Clavane’s words, they choked. Often. Considering their dominance they could and should have won much more.
“I think Leeds were a great team under Revie but they would have been an even greater team … if they hadn’t on so many occasions stumbled at the final hurdle.”
Perhaps the biggest mistake was down to Revie himself. The great Leeds team that he had built to his specification remained largely intact for the entirety of his stay. When he jumped ship, first Clough and then Jimmy Armfield inherited an ageing team full of players who wielded enormous influence.
“[Bill] Shankly replaced Liverpool’s ageing great team; Shankly himself was [then] ruthlessly kicked out of Liverpool, no room for sentiment there.
“[Bob] Paisley came in, built up a new team [then] ruthlessly replaced them with a new team; [Kenny] Dalglish came along and did the same. So Liverpool did it and had this sustained success for many years.”
Clavane maintains that Leeds could have done the same and gone on and thrived in the late 70s. Instead they remained fixated on the past and blinded by loyalty, so much so that it ended up costing them the greatest prize.
“If Sir Alex Ferguson was in charge of the 1975 European Cup Final team he would never have played for old time’s sake eight players who were the Revie boys.”
In the late 70s Leeds entered a period of decline and at the end of the 1981-82 season were relegated. Clavane himself stopped attending matches but not because of the team’s failings on the pitch, but because of what was happening in the stands.
“I admit that in the 1980s I stopped going to football matches. I went to university and discovered girls and politics and writing and music and all these things that were far more important.
“There is no way that that period of hooliganism could ever be justified.
“It wasn’t just high-jinks by a lot of adolescent lads. It was actually violent, sinister, racist and anti-Semitic … not to mention sexist.
“I felt I was colluding with the racists and I felt that it wasn’t just Leeds, I mean it’s not fair to say it was just Leeds. Hooliganism was the national sport.”
Clavane himself was a victim when he was set upon by fans while watching Leeds take on Anderlecht, an event he describes in his book with a comic touch that belies the shocking nature of the attack.
A couple of fans started asking him questions, convinced that he was not a real Leeds fan. They asked him where he was born and where he went to school. He gave satisfactory answers but they remained unconvinced. They then asked him to name the Revie Team. He named the starting eleven but forgot perennial twelfth man and local hero Paul Madeley. The oversight earned him a punch in the face.
Eventually football was cleaned up and although things are far from perfect today, the vitriolic abuse that both players and fans were subjected to has largely ceased. The change eventually brought Clavane back to the club he continues to love even from his exile in the south east.
And out of despair came hope.
Leeds were promoted back to the Championship and for most of the 2010-11 season looked like they were going to secure a place in the Premier League.
The club that had been gutted through years of financial mismanagement was about to return to the Promised Land. And then they choked.
Patrick White
The Guardian 17-8-11
Anthony Clavane’s top 10 football fictions
As another season gets under way, the author picks a dream team of beautiful game tales, from Barry Hines to BS Johnson
“In King Lear, the boy Shakespeare has the Earl of Kent – the Joey Barton of the early 1600s – kicking Oswald and calling him a ‘base football player’. More than 400 years later, we are still waiting for The Great Football Novel. The paucity of outstanding fiction about the sport remains mystifying. The American national game has been well served by novelists. Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel linked baseball with communism; Don DeLillo’s Underworld opened with the New York Giants winning the National League in 1951. In the brilliant Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby restricted his musings on obsessive male behaviour, modern romance and Liam Brady to the safe confines of non-fiction. In recent years there have been some tremendous football books, but writers have, on the whole, eschewed fiction. So compiling this list wasn’t easy. Hopefully, the critical and commercial success of The Damned Utd will inspire a new generation to write equally-original works about the passion, hubris and tragicomedy of the world’s greatest game.”
Hines’s 20-page account of a football match was immortalised by Ken Loach in the film Kes. Like David Storey in This Sporting Life, he is unafraid to use sport as a metaphor for Yorkshire insularity. And like Storey – who played rugby league for Leeds – he knew what he was writing about, having turned out for the England Grammar School team.
As a Leeds fan, people assume I’m offended by this reinforcement of the “Dirty Leeds” myth. But I found Peace’s fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s 44 days at Elland Road – with its imaginative use of Clough’s troubled inner voice, its two time-frames running in parallel and its repetitive, Beckettian rhythms – to be viscerally exhilarating.
3. The Unfortunates by BS Johnson
Denounced as avant-garde nonsense on publication, Johnson’s notorious book-in-a-box is, in fact, an affecting, deeply personal and emotionally engaged story about a hack returning to an industrial city to cover the City-United match. Ostensibly about football, it is really a meditation on memory, bereavement and loss – and a subtle critique of the self-serving Sixties.
Like The Unfortunates, this short story is set in Nottingham and uses football to symbolise a bigger issue – in this case a failing marriage. Sillitoe’s raw realism, however, is a million miles away from Johnson’s experimentation with form. Published in 1959, and linking the protagonist’s abusive behaviour to his disappointment at a match, it eerily predicted the violence to come.
As a young boy obsessed with football, my life changed after reading this gritty, beautifully-paced account of the bitterness, frustrations and unglamourous lifestyle of an ordinary footballer. It felt like an authentic glimpse into a world of sideburned centre-halves, dilapidated dressing rooms and muddy fields. Glanville was, and remains, one of the doyens of football writing.
Another classic better remembered as a (black and white) movie. It was a huge hit in the 1930s, giving the public a rare insight into one of the country’s biggest clubs. Gribble was a famous detective novelist of the era, but he is clearly in awe of the 1939 Gunners team – which he repeatedly, and shamelessly, namechecks.
Jimmy Stirling’s disillusioned middle-aged anti-hero is on the verge of a nervous breakdown; a reckless, neurotic, self-deprecating sports hack struggling to get in touch with himself. All those who love the game unconditionally – and write about it uncritically – should read Stirling-Buckley’s hilarious rants on the absurdities of the post-Sky game.
At the beginning of every January, football journalists (like me) lazily evoke the romance of the FA Cup. This goes some way to explaining why many of us adored Carr’s charming tale about a village club triumphing against very long odds. Like Hines, his writing feels authentic because he was a former amateur footballer. Roy of the Rovers stuff, Brian.
I am not a great fan of the hoolie-porn spawned by this book – but there is no denying its force. Whether you view football hooligans as a lost tribe of white working-class males or just idiotic thugs, King’s brilliant dissection of their vicious dementia is undoubtedly a tour de force.
The first nine choices have given the impression that football writing is exclusively a male preserve. But three of the 13 stories in this collection are written by women, the best being The Match by Linda Cracknell. Her protagonist goes on holiday by herself because her football-obsessed boyfriend refuses to miss a fourth round Cup tie. Truly she is the anti-Hornby.
Literature and sport are perfect match
Yorkshire Post, Friday 1 July 2011 11:47
Anthony Clavane’s debut book has been named Sports Book of the Year. Ian McMillan on why he chose it as one of his personal favourites.
As a reader and a sports fan, I’m always looking for good sports writing that I can get my intellectual teeth into.
Of course, newspapers like the Yorkshire Post do a very good job of writing about a whole range of sport from the region but I’m keen on what they call these days “longform” sports writing, massive articles or whole books about sport and its relationship to the world around it.
I remember with affection lost and forgotten magazines from the 1990’s like The New Ball, a big fat book-sized publication dedicated to good cricket writing, and Perfect Pitch, a magazine that tried to do the same for football.
And maybe that’s why I chose Anthony Clavane’s book Promised Land as one of my books of the year when I was asked onto the Simon Mayo show on Radio 2 at the end of 2010.
At the time I said that my wife, who’s not a huge football fan, was captivated by it – by the prose, by the sentences and by the emotion; and, in the end, maybe that’s all you want from a book: prose, sentences and emotion, in that order.
I’d worked with Anthony on a project to get young people interested in writing about football at the Arvon Foundation’s centres in Devon and Yorkshire with schools from Plymouth and Barnsley and I knew that he was passionately committed to the idea of mixing literature and sport, as I am. After all, they’re both fine examples of human endeavour, although you might not always think so when you’re watching a dull nil-nil draw on a December Tuesday night at Oakwell.
The hardback edition of Promised Land that I first read on endless train journeys across the country is subtitled “The Reinvention of Leeds United” and it’s a fan’s-eye view of the club’s journey over the last fifty years to the edge of the European Cup and the edge of bankruptcy. It’s also about growing up Jewish in a city that prided itself on its modernism at the same time as it celebrated its cultural and artistic heritage.
Interestingly, the paperback edition is subtitled A Northern Love Song, and perhaps that’s nearer to the truth.
I’ll be asking Anthony about the change of subtitles when we chat together about the book at Waterstone’s in Leeds next week. In the end, I reckon his book really is a love song to The North, and all the contradictions and little irritations about the region that make us love it even more. I’ll ask him to define that love, of course.
Anthony’s also passionate about the literary heritage of Leeds, from well-known writers like Alan Bennett and Keith Waterhouse and David Peace to less-celebrated writers like Bernard Hare, whose book Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew was celebrated as a classic when it was published but which has since fallen below the radar.
Anthony himself is now part of that heritage. He was born in Leeds and after going to university he became a journalist, originally on arts and culture but eventually moving to sport, which he writes about for the Sunday Mirror, covering World Cups and Olympics as well as endless, endless football matches. He’s strongly opinionated, which is a good thing. He believes that sport can be written about in the kind of sparkling prose that’s often devoted to nature writing or to fiction, and he’s sure that Leeds can become a centre of new writing in the same way as London or New York.
I’ll be asking him about all these things when we meet next Thursday.
I might slip in a cheeky question about what he wrote about that game last year when Barnsley beat Leeds 5-2. Mind you, perhaps I’d better not: next Wednesday’s an away match for me!
Anthony Clavane and Ian McMillan in Conversation, Leeds Waterstone’s, Albion Street, July 7, 7pm. 0113 2444588.
Journey to promised land
Anthony Clavane’s Promised Land tells the story of the ups and downs of Leeds United, but it also tells a much wider story.
Clavane uses the changing fortunes of the city’s club to chart the similar rises and falls of the city itself. It looks at the fortunes of the city’s Jewish immigrant population.
In May it was named as the Football book of the Year at the British Sports Books Awards, which put it in the running for Sports Book of the Year – which it won this month.
As well as being about sport, Jewish immigration and Leeds, the book is also a paean to northern working class writers.
Author, author
‘Leeds revels in its image as a grim, sullen, anti-intellectual, no-frills, proudly independent, dark and gritty city’
Leeds Town Hall. Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian
Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen’s Hotel,
that grandish pile of swank in City Square.
Too posh for me! he said (though he dressed well)
If you weren’t wi’ me now ah’d nivver dare!
“The Queen’s English” by Tony Harrison
Every few months or so, David Peace and I meet at that grandish pile of swank, made even grander during the city’s rebirth as a shiny shoppers’ paradise. The man who invented a new genre of fiction – “Yorkshire noir” – is back in town. After his decade-long exile in Japan, the prodigal son has returned, like Ed Dunford in his first novel, 1974, to find that things have changed. Once the region’s boomtown, Leeds is now a synonym for the fall. Outside the hotel, there are holes in the ground. New buildings have been mothballed. Thousands of new flats lie empty. The cuts are in place; the harrowing of the north is upon us. “The darkness,” Peace notes, “is back.”
But, whisper it softly (whispering it softly is very much the Leeds thing), while he was away there has been something of a literary renaissance. A new generation of edgy provincials is about to storm the citadels of London, throwing itself about town and flaunting its talent. Or at least it would be if it could be bothered to get on the train. For it appears to be afflicted by Billy Liar Syndrome; in Keith Waterhouse’s classic tale, William Terence Fisher bottles it when his freewheeling girlfriend offers him the chance of a swinging time in the Big Smoke. Getting on the train is, of course, a metaphor for aspiration.
The words “Leeds” and “literary” are rarely, if ever, used in the same sentence. As a Harry Enfield character once mocked: “Don’t talk to me about sophistication – I’ve been to Leeds.” And yet, in the 60s, that golden age of aspiration, Waterhouse was part of a crack force of prickly outsiders who barged through the privileged ranks of the elite.
A disproportionate number of these iconoclasts were from Leeds and its surrounds: Waterhouse, Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison, Willis Hall, David Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow . . . throw in Jack Higgins and Barbara Taylor Bradford (and, at a stretch, Barry Cryer, who formed an unlikely comedy duo with Harrison) and you have the Leeds Movement.
Never heard of it? That could be because, unlike the Merseybeat Poets or the Madchester Sound, it was never officially acknowledged. “It’s something to do with a lack of self-identity,” Peace explains. “It’s the same with music. Manchester and Liverpool have clearly defined music scenes. But while Leeds has had great bands, it has never really had a scene.”
This anonymity is all part of the charm. On my last visit to Elland Road, Leeds United‘s football ground, I bumped into Bernard Hare, whose disturbing memoir Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, about underclass kids growing up in east Leeds during the 1990s, was hailed as an instant classic. “I’ve become a recluse,” he smiled, anticipating the haven’t-seen-you-in-yonks question. “Leeds has hugely influenced writing and thought,” argues Mick McCann in How Leeds Changed the World. “It’s just that no one seems to know it. It’s part of our Leedsness not to blow our own trumpet. To keep our feet on the ground, to not show off, to never get ideas above our station.”
This is only part of the story. Personally, I think Dickens’s “beastly place” – much to the horror of its civic boosterists – revels in its image as a grim, sullen, down-to-earth, anti-intellectual, proudly independent, no-frills, dark and gritty city. Peace’s characters in his astonishing Red Riding quartet frequently toast each other with the words: “To the north, where we do what we want!”
The new wave of West Riding iconoclasts – Peace, McCann, Caryl Phillips, Kester Aspden, Dave Simpson, Alice Nutter, Boff Whalley, Ian Duhig, Wes Brown, Tom Palmer, Robert Endeacott and John Anthony Lake – do what they want. I interviewed some of them for my book Promised Land, a cultural history of Leeds United, and they all made it clear they wouldn’t want to belong to a movement. This, I suppose, is what makes them iconoclasts. Like the Waterhouse generation, they write about escaping a life of provincial confinement. Some have escaped – but they all seem to return, in their writing at least, to the dirt and the darkness. Brown’s Shark depicts an underclass struggling to belong, grafting for its patch. Aspden, Phillips and Duhig have all written movingly about the murder of rough sleeper David Oluwale, one of the most notorious racist crimes in British history. “I think that darkness comes from growing up in West Yorkshire in the 1970s,” Peace says. “It was a dark time: not just the Ripper, police corruption and miscarriages of justice, but economically and politically.”
As the city braces itself for another big hit, a harrowing that will put Thatcher’s assault in the shade, he finds it reassuring to meet up for the occasional cuppa in the Queen’s Hotel, the art-deco meeting place of his heroes, the old Leeds literati. Bennett, Storey, Harrison and Waterhouse all used to stay there before boarding the train to London. “When I was growing up, I would come into Leeds every two weeks or so with my mum and dad. They would go shopping and then to the Queen’s for a cup of tea, pretending to be posh.”
I, too, can remember special trips there as a boy. My dad would delight in telling me that the hotel was white underneath its filthy, blackened coating. When he worked there, as a clerk, he used to leave through the side entrance leading directly into the station. There was a sign that bore the legend: “Leeds, The Promised Land Delivered”. The sign was taken down sometime in the mid-80s.
Promised Land has been named 2011 Sports Book of the Year.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Anthony Clavane’s book Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United is the public’s choice as Sports Book of the Year.
As readers of The Sports Bookshelf will know, eight category winners at the 2011 British Sports Book Awards were put to the vote in an online poll, which closed yesterday.
The Awards organisers announced today that Clavane’s book, which brilliantly interweaves social and football history, had come out on top in the poll, beating ‘61: The Spurs Double and Beware of the Dog, by Brian Moore, into second and third places respectively.
Promised Land won the Best Football Book award when the judges’ verdicts were revealed at the Savoy Hotel last month. ‘61: The Spurs Double was named Best Illustrated Title and Beware of the Dog crowned Best Autobiography.
Sunday Mirror journalist Clavane, born in Leeds but who now lives in Wivenhoe, Essex, said: “It is really pleasing that the book has won the public vote. I’m glad it appears to have had an appeal beyond football.
“It took me a few years to research and write, but I wanted to pay tribute to the community I came from. I’ve found the story of my city and its team to be a fascinating one and it’s nice to see that many people outside Leeds think so too.”
Rowan Yapp, from publishers Yellow Jersey Press, said: “Promised Land is a brilliant piece of storytelling and we are thrilled it is Sports Book of the Year.
“To write about not only your football club but also your city, your ancestors and what shaped you is an ambitious undertaking. To do this with such passion, humour and humanity on every page is a really great achievement.”
An updated, paperback version of Promised Land, freshly subtitled ‘A Northern Love Story’ will be available from July 7th.
The British Sports Book Awards exist to celebrate the best in sports books of all kinds. About 50 publishers submit books for consideration, and a panel of sports journalists, pundits and ex-professional sportsmen determine the best of those put forward. The 2011 awards were the ninth so far.
Read an interview with Anthony Clavane.
BUY Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United
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PRE-ORDER the paperback edition Promised Land: A Northern Love Story
Read more about the British Sports Book Awards
When you put down the book, you feel you know not just the story of a football team but the city it represents; its rawness and talent, its achievements and its failures and, maybe most of all, its resilience. Another native son, Keith Waterhouse and his creation Billy Liar, get almost as many mentions as the brilliant, tortured Leeds manager Don Revie and icons like Billy Bremner, John Giles and John Charles, but with no loss of focus on the central parable.
— James Lawton, The Independent. Read more…
“The best sports book I’ve read all year which is difficult for me to say as a Barnsley fan. A humane, witty and literate account of following Leeds through good years and bad, paralleling the fortunes of the city, of the Jewish community, and of Anthony’s development as a writer and a human being. And a Leeds fan! “
Poet Ian McMillan on the Radio 2 Book Club
Best football history: Daily Telegraph
“It is hard not to think of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch as you read this marvellous cultural history of Leeds United. Among other things, it is a study of one fan’s lifelong passion. But while Hornby’s book was essentially an internal narrative, Clavane looks outwards, to the skyscrapers, shopping precincts and council flats that have transformed his native city. By the end, you understand Leeds United because you understand Leeds itself. And vice versa. Reading Promised Land is a revelatory experience, because it shows what a powerful prism sporting history can be for understanding the world around us.”
Daily Telegraph
“The book presents a compelling argument that Leeds and its United are umbilically bound: loathed beyond the borders, defensive, beautiful and brutal, with visions of greatness undermined by a wilful outsider status and crippling self-doubt. Mirroring his own love/hate relationship with the city, Clavane’s book is powered by a dynamic drama of the reactionary versus the progressive, the good versus the unjust, through Leeds’s travels from grimy industrial centre to “Knightsbridge of the north”. Promised Land is glorious…(it) will have an appeal far beyond football.”
Dave Simpson, The Guardian, 13-11-10
“Promised Land is a revelatory work not merely for Leeds fans but for those unfamiliar with the city, such is Clavane’s skill in weaving together the city’s history, Jewish heritage and sporting ambitions. A rich, complex book about football and fandom, origins and expectations, Promised Land is more than just promising; it’s absolutely brilliant”. Simon Redfern, Independent On Sunday
“Anthony Clavane’s excellent book is a fine achievement. Broad and general yet hugely personal; socio-historical but sporty; academic but approachable; partisan but even-handed; sensitive but unsentimental. It prompts the reader to evaluate his or her stereotypes, assumptions and attitudes concerning Leeds because it’s so well-written and interesting.” Tom Dart, The Times
September 13, 2010 | News
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