As most of you know, I’ve also been a football writer for 25 years, with two Sports Book Of The Year nominations behind me. It’s a very different discipline to writing about music. For a start people can mistake their tribal loyalty for objectivity, so that if you write something they disagree with, they’ll think it’s just wrong and not just a different opinion, often quite vehemently.
The other thing I have to contend with, and I’m not alone in this, is that people make up a profile of me in their head and then think it’s accurate and forget it was just their invention. Thus you’re judged against their fiction.
It’s very frustrating and no amount of words which contradict their sense of me makes any difference. It’s very hard to shift a perception, even a totally false one. It’s so bad that I could write a thousand words about something I like and be critical of something in 100 words and someone will always call you a misery, ignoring the 1,000 words of celebration. Someone even criticised me for being miserable and not saying what aspects of the Premier League I enjoyed because I was too busy saying what I liked about football everywhere else. Too busy being positive to be positive? Riiiiight.
You can’t please people is the lesson, I think, writing about football. Obviously not everyone is like this, it’s a minority, usually of younger people who must think I’m an old bastard and incapable of understanding anything.
It would surprise these people that I totally understand them, because back in the day I was like them too. I was convinced my views on music were 100% right and I would hold no truck with alternative views. I had emotionally invested in it so much, it meant everything to me and I just couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t like Deep Purple. Very like how people are about their football club. That people just had different tastes didn’t adequately explain it for me.
It’s an immature attitude that I obviously grew out of (later than you might think) but when you’re a teenager or even into your 20s, feeling part of a culture, something you can call your own, seemed very important, at least to me, possibly because home was quite dysfunctional, so rock music acted in loco parentis.
Of course I can’t tell people this in response to their delusions. Nothing enrages them more than being able to see through them and especially empathise with them. I know I must seem impossibly old and though the 70s might seem close to me, to them it must be like the 1920s seemed to us used to.
All of this writing, music, football, my novels, is all part of me. Some write in a way which isn’t so clearly them. I tend to expose more of myself than many. Dawn often says I give too much of myself to it but it’s the only way I know how to write, which makes the imaginings of a few critics even more bizarre.
If I said I loved the colour red, these people would complain about how much I wrote about my hatred of blue. I don’t exaggerate at all. It’s that mad.
That’s where it's changed since we were kids. I just took against people who didn’t like Budgie, I didn’t invent their passion for the Rubettes!
