Thursday 12 April 2007

I read a review of the Arctic Monkeys live show in The Guardian yesterday. The writer bemoaned the fact that the audience seemed to be made up of 2000 football shirted (gasp...) men! Now I have a real problem with this. I am a music snob and I've hated it in the past when my favourite little underground band have made it big and play to a much bigger and more mainstream audience. I've seen the Jam andManic Street Preachers in tiny venues and subsequently seen Paul Weller and said Manics in huge venues where the crowd do seem to resemble a footy match. There are shaven heads (a nod to the 30/40 somethings in the crowd with MPB rather than an homage to 1969 skins to be honest). What irked me about the review is that she wasn't keen on being surrounded by white working class men. it was almost as though she believed that rock music be the preserve of students, post grads and earnest young people in duffel coats and sandals. This isn't the case however. The Monkeys (if I may call them that?) play raucous indie/new wave/punk rock favoured by blokes! yes I've said the B word!
I guess I'm a bloke, my style of humour is seen as being quite laddish (albeit with a subtle twist). This is my dilemma you see. I don't wear football shirts but I know a lot of people who I consider friends that do. I don't eat humus and listen to avant garde jazz but I know a lot of people who I consider friends that do. It's almost like I'm stuck in a kind of John Osbourne esque half world that isn't my roots (white working class) or my post graduate life (Social Sciences, The Guardian, Private Eye etc). If I'm honest I'm comfortable in both. I like to consider myself metro class. Until that is, until...I'm invited to someones house for a dinner party and I realise very very quickly that I am and always will be, working class.

The football fan thing in the media bothers me. The Guardian Arctic Monkeys review and to a lesser extent Toby Hadoke's otherwise genius piece "Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf" perpetuate the myth that working class football fans are either racist, violent or indeed both. I think that there's a more subtle feeling that all white working class people hold the same views. If you're middle class ask yourself how would you react to being in the middle of a mostly white council estate? Would you shit yourself then regale your friends with stories of "how these people live"? OK then, what if it was a mostly Black/Asian neighborhood you found yourself in? Would you mock "the community" you'd just visited, would you dare say that you were frightened when you saw a large number of black youths hanging round the shops? Of course you wouldn't, but football wearing white "chavs" are easy targets for the liberal left. I've been through all of these emotions as a socialist and committed anti fascist comedian, it's difficult not to poke fun at easy targets that won't hold you up for scorn from the Guardianista
I'm going to go out with a footy shirt on tomorrow, wear it with pride and shit the woolly liberals up when I buy my fresh croissants then humus for dinner...
FTM!