Robert Exley
According to John Winston Lennon, ‘Avante Garde is French for Bulls***’, a quote held in such high esteem by Noel Gallagher that it was once regularly emblazoned across the big screen every time Oasis played their hit ‘Live Forever’ live in concert. It’s probably fair to say that the word ‘raison d’être’ is another French phrase that would equally leave Noel non-plussed, though he and his beloved Manchester City are obviously both undergoing a major adjustment to theirs.
‘Citeh’ were central to the identity of Oasis on their emergence back in the mid-‘90s. On their first appearance on Top of the Pops in 1994 the late Bruno Brookes (well, his career is dead at least!) made a point of introducing them as ‘Manchester City fans’, no doubt at the insistence of their label, Creation Records. The nation was beginning to hate the successful and overly-commercialised dominant force that the Red half of Manchester was becoming, to such an extent that the band made capital by hitching themselves to the ‘Anyone But United’ bandwagon. Not to mention the emerging reality that, in order to be authentically Manchester, supporting a side where statistics alleged that 98% of the supporters do not actually come from the City wouldn’t have quite cut the right ‘Manc’ image that Oasis wanted to sell to the wider world. The fact that two-fifths of the group at this point were actually Man Utd fans was an industry secret that, back then, was as closely guarded as that of George Michael’s sexual orientation.
You see, Man City quite clearly had the underdog appeal, something Noel obviously wanted to cover himself in, judging by his quote that “We write music for the guy who walks down the street to get his copy of the Daily Mirror and 20 Bensons and has got f***-all going for him". Lo and behold, as this Paul Calf-esque image did wonders for their record sales, City did their part by getting themselves relegated out of the Premiership about a week after two sell-out Oasis gigs at Maine Road in 1996, and then down to the third tier just two years later. Things now, however, have dramatically changed – ‘Citeh’ are no longer the underdogs and, whether Sheik Mansoor gets the Daily Mirror or 20 Bensons every day, he certainly has plenty of petrodollars going for him – like Noel’s new band, Manchester City are quite clearly ‘High Flying Birds’ these days, rather than caught beneath the landslide of seventeen other Premiership sides like they were back in 1996. And there isn’t even a Maine Road any longer - not that that would trouble Noel too much. After all, these days there is no longer an Oasis – the Gallagher brothers have now clearly swapped the hits (be they of the musical or physical variety) for writs. However, like City, whose boardroom has since swapped Northern-workingman’s-club comedian made good, Eddie Large, for a Multi-Billionaire Arabic Feudal overlord, Noel himself isn’t quite that interested in being or championing the underdog much these days either.
One of Oasis’s endearing traits back in the 1990s was telling the world they would never schmooze the ‘corporate pigs in Ponytails’ to progress in the music world. However, in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph he admits he does partake in this activity, now stating: 'When I was with Oasis, we were far too up our own arses to do any of that nonsense. But what harm can it do?’ The worldview he presents also seems to be changing a bit too. The once-staunch Labour Party supporter who advocated the youth of Britain to shake Tony Blair’s hand at the Brits in 1996 verified his support for ‘Tone’ by overlooking Blair’s Neo-Thatcherite tendencies stating: ‘From when I went to school, all we ever knew was right-wing Conservative government. People say he went to meet Tony Blair. I didn’t. I went there to meet the Labour Prime Minister….our parents always drummed into us that the Labour Party was for the people and the Tories were not. And I went to meet the Labour Prime Minister – period’.
However, if Gallagher studied a lot of his recent opinions closely these days, his political allegiance would be a lot like his Footballing one – that of Blue over Red. Noel stated here in a Newsnight interview in 2007 that he was freaked that Thatcher was the biggest political icon of the last 30 years, yet in the same interview extolled a ‘charity begins at home’ message not too dissimilar from Thatcher’s own ‘Society doesn’t exist’ ethos. His response to the August riots was also redolent of that of a right-wing newspaper columnist blaming TV and Video Games for the violence, as well as questioning the level of poverty experienced by the rioters because they owned Mobile Phones, a stance that’s slightly hypocritical seeing that his own sibling rivalry gave many sadists a fix of violence long before Jeremy Kyle ever hit the screens, as well as his own past criminal activities such as burglary and stealing car stereos as an unemployed youth in Burnage – which (as I’ve been assured by many a Northern friend of mine) hardly vies with Moss Side for the title of the poorest area of Manchester to grow up in.
Back in the 90s Gallagher built for himself a reputation for working-class soul purity in juxtaposition to the middle-class students of Blur, Elastica et al, here boasting away about having previously worked on building-sites and done milk rounds. However, these days he seems to have no qualms about rearing offspring probably more pampered and bourgeois than any member of Blur or Elastica could ever have wished to have been. His children are privately educated, something even his hero Paul McCartney refrained from doing with his own children, which didn’t seem to hamper Stella McCartney’s career prospects in any way. Noel explained that his decision was because ‘I want my daughter to be Prime Minister and, for that, you have to go to a posh school’ - seemingly unaware that six of the last eight PMs were actually state-school educated. Also, in a recent interview with the New York Times, when asked whether he would be doing anything to prevent his kids becoming Paris Hilton-style idle rich, he retorted: ‘I don’t give a **** if they don’t have to work. If you didn’t have to work, would you?’ – A strange stance for Gallagher to take considering his bemoaning of a ‘Can’t be bothered’ working class at the bottom of society in his Newsnight interview back in October.
Noel, it seems, after finding success in his field, has eventually sleep-walked into becoming the very thing he hated back in the days when he was sitting at the bottom looking up – reactionary, bourgeois, corporate, hypocritical, on the side of the big guys and even, to a degree, Thatcherite. And, oddly enough, Noel’s Eastlands brethren - after finally hitting the big time after all these years - need to avoid walking into the very same trap. After all, Colin Shindler’s very own attempt at a Nick Hornby-style football-related autobiography back in 1998, said it all - ‘Manchester United Ruined My Life’. Aired on BBC2’s Fan Night (an entire evening’s programming that was dedicated to Football and hosted by professional ‘Citeh’ fans Mark and Lard) that very same year as City slipped into the third tier, it was turned into a docu-drama detailing the years in the shadow of the Red half of Manchester, the torture of City’s 1968 title overshadowed by United’s European Cup win, along with smug non-Mancunian celebrity United fans such as Eamon Holmes and Zoe Ball as the talking heads, juxtaposed by Curly Watts’s attempt at projecting City’s representation of humility, kinship and unity with other fans by merely singing ‘Stand up if you hate Man Utd’. Also, ironically enough, there was an almost sanctimonious quote from newscaster John Stapleton aimed at United fans, stating that supporting Manchester City was ‘about sticking through your team through thick and thin, it’s about your past, it’s about tradition, it’s about your family, it’s about what you really, really believe in – and not about following some team who happens to win a few pots because they’ve got lots and lots of dosh’.
It almost goes without saying that post-Sheikh Mansoor’s arrival, ‘Citeh’ will eventually attain a plastic support of bandwaggonists (and no doubt many born and raised in the Home Counties) who will be oblivious to names like Paul Lake, Steve Redmond, Trevor Morley and a time when Man City resided outside of the top tier of English football - after all, it’s not like Arsenal avoided attaining plastic fans after winning Premiership titles, did we? And if you’ve followed the game avidly over the last 30 years it’s also hard to begrudge City finally winning something. That said, hard-core City fans don’t have to enthusiastically embrace the very things they loathed about United for so many years – arrogance, shallowness, a loss of soul and a fundamental lack of grace – you know, like printing £100M banknotes with a Sheikh’s head on it and singing songs like ‘Van Persie is ours’. While watching footage from back in 1998 bemoaning City’s plight in contrast to United’s over-commercialisation and predatory marketing to indoctrinate the nation’s youth, as a fellow football fan you could have easily have concurred with every gripe that City fans had with what United were turning football into back then. It would be the cruellest of ironies then if, a decade and a half later, City fans avidly embrace what may well be good for City but overwhelmingly bad for football as a whole.
Where the Man United of the 90s made uber-capitalism a fundamental element required for Premiership success (to which Arsenal lamentably followed suit in order to keep up), City in the 2010s are building something far more malignant on the foundation stone laid by Abramovich eight years ago – that football continues to be an industry that’s collectively living beyond its means, fuelled by money not even made within the game, rapidly losing its original USP of healthy competition and that the only way of keeping up is to get an oligarch of your own, regardless of what dubious socio-economic order they represent in their indigenous country. And, far from blameless ourselves, way too many Arsenal fans these days seem all too quick to forget, or certainly not dwell on for too long, much of what Craig Murray warned us of about Alisher Usmanov four years ago in the vague hope that he might throw billions at us to make us just like City.
And what of Colin Shindler himself? Is he finally at peace now that City can easily live with United? Well apparently not. According to Shindler: "I remember when we won the league in 1968, and there were men droning on about the Championship-winning side of 1937. I wanted to say, 'But look at what's in front of you, it's fabulous'. The difference now is that Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison grew that team, whereas this is like playing fantasy football. This City team has been cooked in a microwave; very tasty, but if you really want something sumptuous you have to cook it for three hours in red wine, in the oven”. It isn’t just the fact that success was largely bought instead of grown, but also that Shindler feels estranged from what City has grown into, stating: ‘I don't recognise her any longer. She might look beautiful but she's rotten at the core. I still love her. How could I not after all these years? The opposite of love is indifference and I'm certainly not indifferent to what happens to Manchester City. I want to love Manchester City again. Just now . . . I simply can't’. You’d have thought that, after thirty five years of suffering, City fans wouldn’t be looking back in anger. Astonishingly though, some, like Colin Shindler, are actually are mourning in glory.
