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 its gloriously unintended role as metaphor for street-level, Walter Mitty-esque British militarist dreaming. 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 photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of either Manchester City or Bolton fans in the late 1970s. The Photocopier can’t remember exactly which. The text is the precursor to a violent passage from Kingsley Amis’s novel, ‘Girl, 20’ (1970). The image, in felt tip, is His Royal Majesty King Nicholas of Montenegro, “somewhere in France”, 1916.
A photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of Bolton Wanderer’s Cuckoo Crew from the mid 1980s. The Photocopier remembers being uncouthly catcalled by some of them from a car as he went to watch his mate’s team, Blackburn Rovers in the same period. “Blackburn Bastard” was the phrase, which was patently untrue on a number of counts. Lord alone knows where the text is from. The biro drawing is of a Russian colonel in Salonika, 1916.
A photograph of a photocopy of a picture taken from a tabloid paper around the time that then-British Prime Minister David Cameron tried to get to grips with the rich-poor divide and a parallel crime wave by visiting a council estate in Manchester. Again, the text, about one of the great icons of Modern British Ladhood, Liam Gallagher, can’t be placed. The felt tip drawing is of a Greek Major General in Athens, 1917.
