British football culture has long fascinated Richard the Photocopier. Its idiocies, its fashions, its smells – its march from being a rabid, unregulated, violent cavalcade to a bovine testing ground for control through entertainment – have been played out in front of him since the mid 1970s. And very often, he couldn’t be arsed understanding it. It was an ever-present shade, formed from Albion’s darkest, most begrimed and befouled underground recesses. It needed no explaining, outside of it being a perfect help-meet for the heady, Ice Cream War dreams of British militarism. These photocopies were deliberately photographed in a manner that left questions, showed edges, felt scruffy, uneasy. And secretly homoerotic. Like the past they depict. Note the amount of bums in the pictures.
A truly Baroque image of some matchday aggro at Manchester United; the composition is worthy of Caravaggio. The butcher’s coats were quite the thing in the early to mid 1970s and may owe something to Clockwork Orange. Or not. The head is wearing the Mark I pattern British helmet. At first glance it looks like a typical depiction of the long-suffering Tommy, but the Photocopier thinks it could well be a Doughboy. The Photocopier can’t remember the provenance of the Anthony Burgess quote. Maybe the preface to the Penguin edition of Clockwork Orange. It sounds a very 1970s thing to say.
A photograph of a photocopy of a photograph from the internet showing some determined police action in a crowd disturbance from the mid 1980s. The drawings in pencil are mannered caricatures of Russian and German officers from early in the war. The (unintended) homoerotic nature of this particular image is particularly striking. Of course the photograph was taken in the moment. But as with many of these pictures there are a lot of bums in tight-fitting jeans on show. And Burgess’s text from Clockwork Orange only adds to the frisson.
A photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of a full bloodied charge from the mid 1980s. The text may have been written by a half-cut Photocopier during his marathon 10-hour drawing session) but is Homeric in its longevity. The caricature of two French officers, resplendent in their kepis is executed in biro.
