HELLO CHARLIE AND THANKS FOR AGREEING TO THIS CHAT.
1. How have you been occupying yourself during lockdown?
I’d always believed I lived a life of relentless hedonism and adventure. Then lockdown happened and, well, nothing really changed. Other than socially-distanced queuing at Sainsbury’s and the pubs being shut OH MY GOD DAVE THE PUBS ARE SHUT my everyday existence isn’t much different: I’ve worked from home for donkey’s years now anyway, and am an antisocial curmudgeon at the best of times, so I was already well prepared to keep clear of the yawning chasm of housebound ennui that’s opened up beneath the nation.
Having said that, there are days only a 21-disc Looney Tunes boxed set can salvage.
I am missing football, though. Not even the actual game so much as the routine. I’m a season ticket holder at Deal Town these days, but no matter the team or the level I miss the walk to the ground, the cheery exchanges with turnstile operator, programme seller and tea bar proprietor, the nodding at familiar faces whose names you don’t know, the scrutiny of the programme notes, some before the game but saving some for half-time and the pub afterwards. God, I miss that.
2. A little known, but hugely impressive, fact about you is that you were Bromley FC’s youngest ever programme editor. Any particularly fond (or otherwise) memories of the time?
Blimey, yes, I think was 17. I’d been going to Bromley since Charlton upped sticks for Selhurst Park in 1985 and have some extraordinarily fond memories of that time. I was a bit of a lonely kid who was going nowhere really, and the friends I made at Bromley, people like Nick Evans, Mike Head, Ben Salmon, Colin Head, Roy Oliver of course, genuinely helped bring me out of myself.
I can’t remember how I came to edit the programme. A guy called Gus Johnson did it before me and his notes were these wonderful florid things, tossing bouquets of clauses at the reader that included snatches of Latin, terrible puns and some pretty gloves-off criticism of under-par team performances that wasn’t afraid to name names.
He packed it in and I think John Self might have taken over briefly, but I was doing a few match reports on away games for the Bromley Times and banging out a fanzine called Down The Lane at the time and that must have led to me taking over the programme. As a lifelong programme nerd this was like being asked to headline Glastonbury. Gus was a tough act to follow but I was keen to give readers value for money so crammed in as much text as possible only to have the more, ah, mature section of the support complain that it was now too small to read. Important lesson learned.
I tried to carry on when I left for university in Colchester – John Fiorini lent me an old typewriter - but it didn’t really work out so I gave it up. I couldn’t afford to get back for games either so started watching Colchester United instead and the habit was lost, never to be regained, and when Charlton went back to The Valley I went back with them. I’ve always looked out for Bromley’s results and when your splendid books started appearing I was transported again to the tin enclosures behind the goals (which I spent one summer helping to repaint with some iffy tins of bitumen stuff someone found in the long grass behind the old stand).
3. Your book on Liechtenstein’s attempt to qualify for the 2002 World Cup is a superb read. Are you still in touch with any of the players and did being a supporter of Charlton and Bromley help you relate to a team that viewed a narrow defeat as a victory?
I am still in touch a few of them, yes. In fact, the team back then was so young some of them haven’t long hung up their boots. I think I was trying to find in Liechtenstein the kind of thing that had drawn me to Charlton and Bromley – some ill-defined spirit of the game. Charlton were in the Premier League then and while everyone loves seeing their team do well the naked commercialism of it all was leaving me a bit cold.
I followed Liechtenstein through their World Cup qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup in the hope of finding that indefinable something that made me fall in love with the game in the first place, something more than winning and having the best players, something to do with community and making the best of what you have.
Back then Liechtenstein only had one professional, so this bunch of postmen and bank workers – the captain had his own vineyard and missed international games when the grapes needed picking – from a country with a population the size of Dunstable would turn out against some of the best players in the world and play absolutely out of their skins. When losing 0-2 at home to Spain feels like winning the World Cup itself, you know you’ve found something special, the very soul of the game. Some party, that night, too.
4. Your most recent book, Last Train to Hilversum: A Journey in Search of The Magic of Radio is amongst my favourites of yours. Radio had been thriving during lockdown - what do you put this down to?
I’ve been a massive fan of and advocate for radio since I was a kid hanging a coathanger in my bedroom window at night connected by a lead to an old radio and spending evenings turning the dial and hearing mysterious voices and music arriving from across Europe. When you grew up in an anonymous south-east London suburb like I did – so anonymous that when people ask me where I grew up I don’t really have a specific answer – that was important reassurance there was a world out there beyond the cracked pavements and vandalised bus shelter outside our front gate.
For me radio has a kind of shared intimacy, if that’s not an oxymoron. The voices are speaking to everyone, yet they’re speaking to you directly, and in a way that television doesn’t. Also, radio makes you do some of the work. As the hoary old cliché has it, the pictures are better on the radio and that’s because you create them yourself. You’re always interacting with radio even though you don’t realise it, because the images are yours, whereas television spoons it all into you like a kid in a high chair and there’s not the same engagement. And now, more than ever, we need engagement.
5. Earlier this year you launched a series of podcasts, Coastal Stories, in which you tell true stories of the sea and those who find themselves in it. One of the highlights is The Curious Afterlife of Ambrose Gwinnett, which I’d love to think really happened. Do you have a favourite episode and how can people find these podcasts?
I live right by the sea and these days and even throw myself into it every morning. It’s always fascinated me. I’ve written a couple of books about it and, bless my soul, do you know what? I’ve a new book called The Channel out this month too. *cleans spectacles* *looks out of window*. Well I never, a new book called The Channel, eh? I mean to say. Good gracious.
Anyway, yes, during my research over the years I’ve collected quite a few maritime tales, some I couldn’t fit into the books or could only mention in passing, and I thought because there aren’t enough podcasts in the world - there are hardly any, nobody’s doing them - I’ll fill the void by telling some of these stories.
I think my favourite one is the elegy to the foghorn. Partly because it’s the first time I’d put a noise into a podcast that wasn’t my nasal, honking voice or the waves I record to use as a background, but mostly because I think it gives a good account of what the sea means, especially to us as an island nation. There’s a kind of romantic sadness in the tone of a foghorn, it’s a bit forlorn, but it’s altruistic, there to keep people safe.
The podcast is called Coastal Stories and it’s on all your favourite podcast platforms. Also some you’re probably ambivalent to and a few you probably couldn’t give a toss about.
6. Who are your all time favourite Charlton and Bromley players and why?
He was only at The Valley for a few months and his wages almost literally bankrupted the club but… Allan Simonsen. Picture Charlton in 1982. Skint, moping about in the lower fathoms of the old Second Division in front crowds of 4,000 in this vast, disintegrating concrete bowl ostensibly capable of housing 66,000, going nowhere except possibly Division Three and a tour of some local loan sharks. Then we sign a former European Footballer of the Year, from Barcelona (and his first game? They put him in the reserves. The reserves).
It was madness, it couldn’t last, it didn’t last, but goodness me, he was magical. This wisp of a thing, swamped by his shorts alone, dancing across the mud past the industrial threshing machines masquerading as opposition defenders, putting the ball on a sixpence to where no Charlton player in a million years would anticipate or just caressing it into the net himself. I interviewed him once, in the Faroe Islands. He was lovely. And tiny.
For Bromley Paul Edwards is a contender, an elegant beanpole of a defender who could read the game miles ahead of the lumps he was marking. Very spitty, covered the pitch in flob hacked up with a noise like a thousand football rattles, but a great player and a very funny man.
It’s got to be Alen Scotting, though. He had no shoulders, his kit hung off him like a (shoulderless) coathanger, shirt out, socks down. There was something faintly nefarious about him, he sometimes slouched around the field like he was only there because he needed an alibi, but put the ball at his feet and magic happened. He had this awkward, crouching run, almost bent double (I think he was a postman so maybe it was the legacy of carting a heavy bag around on endless freezing mornings), meaning defenders couldn’t get near the ball without the top of his head thumping them in the midriff. And he was a genius. A proper genius. He should have been a pro, had spells at Gillingham and Northampton Town I think, but I imagine he put clubs off with his, ah, abrasive attitude. Opponents hated him because he was gobby and brilliant. Other clubs’ fans hated him because he was gobby and brilliant. I think even referees hated him too, probably just because he was gobby. But I’ve not seen many players send such a charge through supporters the way he did when the ball arrived at his feet.
I remember a game at Hayes Lane in the late 80s, we went a goal down early on and it was one of those days where Bromley had done everything but score. Might have been against Hayes, or possibly Harrow Borough, they were filthy anyway, horrible side. ‘Cods’, as Scotting was inexplicably nicknamed, had been winding up defenders all afternoon and been kicked black and blue when deep into injury time, facing the car park end, he won a free kick about 25 yards out. It had to be the last kick of the game. He picked the ball up, plonked it on the mud, waited for the whistle, took three steps forward and hit it. It went like a rocket, never rising more than a couple of inches above the turf, flew past the wall and whump, there it was in the bottom corner of the net. Keeper never saw it, it was one of the hardest shots I’ve ever seen. All of us behind the goal went bananas; I was jumping out of my skin and screaming. Cods kept running, up to the erstwhile defensive wall and laughed right in the face of the defender who’d been beating him up all afternoon, then was buried under a pile of teammates.
It was the first time I can remember thinking that there were football gods after all, and sometimes justice was done. Not all the time, rarely even, but on that cold, dank Saturday afternoon Alen Scotting’s particular brand of genius had brought down the gavel, just for once, on the side of right.