Robert Exley
It’s 16th August 1977. The setting is the Vortex club on London’s Wardour Street ahead of a gig for cult Punk act The Adverts. The DJ interrupts the music to announce the news which has just broke that Elvis Presley has died. The response from the crowd of punks congregated within the club was to break out in spontaneous cheering. Taking the stage to berate the disrespectful punks was famed Millwall fan and future 606 presenter Danny Baker, then co-founder and editor of Punk fanzine ‘Sniffing Glue’. Incensed by their failure to acknowledge Elvis’s importance to the story of popular music as ‘the first punk’, he refers to them as ‘Neanderthals’, ‘drones’ and ‘w**kers’, later describing that: ‘I accused them all of being bandwagon jumping, knee-jerk s**t-for-brains who bought into a cookie-cutter cartoon nihilism the way the Daily Mirror ordered it’.
For his trouble, Baker gets hit on the cheek by a bottle thrown from the crowd before being pulled off stage by Sham 69 lead singer Jimmy Pursey for his own safety. Backstage, Baker - while cleaning the blood off himself - sees Punk’s greatest champion on mainstream radio, John Peel, in tears, personally thanking him for getting up there and putting it straight to a largely obnoxious and ignorant audience. Arguably though, both Baker and Peel would have been hypocrites, due to the fact that it’s highly unlikely that either of them would have chosen as their record of the week Elvis’s latest track, ‘Way Down’ (which received an indifferent public response, before suddenly shooting up to the top of the UK chart on news of Elvis’s death).
Both Danny Baker and John Peel would have spent the mid to late 1970s busily fawning over The Ramones or The Damned to be too bothered about an irrelevant and aging Elvis Presley and his increasingly underwhelming output. That doesn’t mean that either of them would have been daft enough not to acknowledge that two decades prior, Elvis sounded a lot more exciting than Winifred Atwell, looked a lot cooler than Bill Haley and frankly, Tommy Steel was simply no substitute. The Danny Baker Elvis death moment sprung to mind this week on hearing that Arsene Wenger would be finally leaving the building at the close of the 2017/18 season.
I’m not going to lie. I’ve spent seven years calling for ‘Wexit’ through The Gooner’s pages, either online or in print (AFTV has only existed for six). Arsenal’s collapse at the end of the 2010/11 season made me realise that title wins and serious challenges for the Champions League (something the most supported and historically successful club in London should really be aiming for) were becoming increasingly unrealistic. In fact, this season has begun to show that even the dream of Champions League qualification by finishing above fourth in the table is increasingly becoming a flight of fantasy for a Gooner. On hearing the news however, my first reaction was relief. Not triumphalism.
Relief that Wenger’s decline would reach no lower than finishing sixth or seventh in the Premiership. People forget that the tenures of both Bertie Mee and George Graham ended in the bottom half of the League table. Arguably, if the Wenger era dragged on for longer, that’s a place he could have also headed to, but thankfully we’ve now been spared that indignation. Also, relief that after living off past glories, Arsenal have now got the opportunity to find a new manager that can give them a fresh impetus and a new direction (and no, not Brendan Rodgers. Personally, I’d rather we’d have muddled along with Wenger than take a punt on a bloke who failed with Liverpool).
The news also brought a hope that the imminent exit of Wenger sees the end of the ludicrous cyberspace battles between parts of the club’s fanbase. Sadly, there seems to be little evidence of that at this present moment. As pointed out, we currently have ‘Wenger Ins’ calling ‘Wenger Outs’ ‘hypocrites’ if they show respect to the man’s past achievements. Admittedly, accusations of hypocrisy might be less befitting if such social media commentators had been more fair and balanced in their criticism of the man, instead of spending the last five years portraying things in black and white and covered in vitriol for the sake of attracting YouTube hits (your average AFTV contributor probably thinks a nuance is someone who hangs around a park with a packet of sweets).
For the ‘Wenger Outs’ not wanting the hypocrite tag, they’ve mainly been in self-congratulatory mood since last Friday. Sadly, like with Elvis in 1977, you have to point out to certain ignorant and obnoxious weathervane pundits in cyberspace that Arsene Wenger was once hugely important to Arsenal, regardless of how 2017/18 pans out (for me, I unreservedly wish it ends victorious in Lyon). Their portrayal of the misery which Wenger has forced on them also looks a bit dumb when his fourteen years of relative decline since 2004 took in twelve Champions League qualifications and three FA Cup wins in four years. That’s a record that would probably have qualified as a golden era for about four fifths of current Premiership clubs (particularly the Spurs fanbase who have spent the last few years winding up Arsenal fans by singing of their wish for him to stay in N5).
As of May 2018, Arsene is finally gone from Arsenal. Sadly, there’s no sign of the black and white thought process of social media warriors following him out the door. Rather than simply being an Arsenal problem, this has become a growing public nuisance embedded in the national discourse over the past ten years by social media, though undoubtedly it stands on the shoulders of a general process of mainstream media dumbing down over the last three decades at least. If this tone hasn’t ended yet with Brexit, it’s a bit optimistic to hope it’ll end immediately with ‘Wexit’. Hope lies in the trolls? I doubt it. Victory Grows Out of Dis-harmony, has never been a motto for anything really, has it?
Robert Exley can be found on Twitter@robert_exley
