“Elvis and I are perhaps the most fashion-obsessed of The Pack, which is a pretty fucking well-dressed crew by anybody's standards. Most of us have wedges or side-partings and wear Samba or Stan Smith trainies, Lois jeans and cardigans. One or two of the older lads have still got BeeGee centre-parts and sheepies, but that’s expected of blokes in their twenties. They like to take the piss out of us lot freezing to death in rainlashed away ends, but they’ve seen the way the girls flock around us wherever we go. We look the part, and everyone knows it.” Kevin Sampson, Awaydays
I first started writing 11 years ago. My main topic wasn’t fashion. I used to love writing about music, books and films, and did a lot of interviews with bands, writers, actors and directors. I also used to write short stories and had a brief stint as advisor for a few Italian publishing houses. I was in my early twenties then and, while in other countries at that age you are considered a young bright thing, in Italy you’re usually seen as a dangerous and inexperienced licensed bullshitter, even when you’re actually right.
My stint at working with Italian publishing houses was brief not because I was shit, but because I met too many blind people. I guess there was also a “gender” problem: a young woman suggesting to publish books that were deemed as oozing with violence, sex and copious amounts of swearwords wasn’t just on.
Unfortunately for these publishing houses, some of the books I originally suggested went on to become bestsellers and in some cases they were turned into films. When things like this happened, I usually felt extremely happy. This is exactly how I felt when last year the film Awaydays was screened at the London Film Festival. The movie, directed by Pat Holden, is taken from Kevin Sampson’s eponymous novel and Sampson has also written the screenplay for the film.
I remember I was sniggered at when I suggested an Italian publisher to translate Awaydays when it first came out. Too violent, it wouldn’t have sold, that was the answer. But the book went on to become a bestseller in the UK and now it’s also a film.
What struck me about the book when I first read it was the music rather than the violence. These characters listened to bands I liked such as Joy Division, The Clash, Echo And The Bunnymen and thought (like me) that The Police were crap.
When Awaydays was published I was also doing a research on football violence in the UK between the end of the 70s and the 90s, and about the football fans’ dress-code.
I found the latter an interesting socio-cultural topic, as there was a time in the UK when you could have spotted the difference between one city and another by the labels favoured by particular football supporters.
The London ‘casual’ look wasn’t casual at all being mainly based on garments and accessories by labels such as Aquascutum, Bally and Gabicci; in Liverpool there was a combination of sportswear and scally-mod clothing with young people wearing Samba, Kickers, Pod, Fred Perry, Peter Storm and Adidas jackets and Lois jeans.
“In the Awaydays era you could spot a fan from Birmingham, say, by their ludicrous wide trousers, just as you could spot a Liverpool supporter by their wedge haircut,” Sampson explained me a few years ago in an interview.
In the news section of the Awaydays movie site it is stated that Adidas might be launching a range of Awaydays-themed shoes and clothing to tie in with the film’s release next spring. I wonder if football fans will like it. For the time being I’m just happy for Kevin Sampson, he surely suffered more than me in seeing his novel being turned into a film, yet seeing the film being released will be the very final climax of my very own revenge against fossilised Italian publishing houses.
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