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Kevin Sampson parla di “Awaydays”, film prodotto sulla scia del suo omonimo romanzo adattato con la regia di Pat Holden. Si tratta di una narrazione ambientata nei primi anni dell’era Thatcher, all’ incirca nel 1979. La pellicola, con una colonna sonora di tutto rispetto tra cui Joy Division, Cure, Ultravox, Echo e The Bunnymen ,ricostruisce dettagliatamente, a costante contorno della narrazione delle vicende del protagonista, l’ esplosione del “casual style” ed il forte fascino che esso immediatamente generò su tanti giovani adolescenti. Sampson dichiara di non temere che l’ opera possa venire additata come futura potenziale corresponsabile di disordini negli stadi in quanto afferma che in essa la violenza non viene decantata ma esclusivamente descritta per come era ed è nella vita di tutti i giorni. Sampson racconta anche un gustoso aneddoto tratto dalla propria esperienza sugli spalti, riferito al 1978 quando, per una semifinale di Coppa, l’ Arsenal dovette giocare ad “Anfield Road”. In quell’ occasione, secondo l’ autore del libro divenuto film, i londinesi si presentarono con una “firm” di tutto rispetto, rappresentata da migliaia di “boot-boys” dall’ aspetto rude alla quale, tra lo stupore generale, tenne costantemente testa un gruppo di circa  cinquecento giovani “lads” del Liverpool, vestiti alla moda, spesso con costoso abbigliamento sportivo. Quelli che Sampson ammise di avere visto come un “mob” anomalo e quasi effeminato creò non pochi problemi alla tifoseria dell’ Arsenal che all’ epoca godeva anche di una reputazione maggiore rispetto ai tempi attuali. Da allora, prosegue il quaranteseienne autore del libro che ha ispirato il film, per generazioni di “casuals” divenne argomento di conversazione cosa essi dovessero indossare la partita successiva; lui stesso termina l’ intervista dicendo che vorrebbe che Liverpool fosse sempre ricordata non per i famigerati coltelli “Stanley” ma per lo stile.

Kevin Sampson on the football hooliganism of Awaydays
The Times
07 May 2009
Tony Evans

Kevin Sampson, whose life as a football ‘casual’ led to the book — and now film — Awaydays, explains himself

“Always stations, always trains. Kevin Sampson is waiting for the London express, hanging around Lime Street station in Liverpool. It is not like it once was, though. He’s in a coffee shop and relaxed. Not like the stations in Awaydays, the film of his 1998 cult novel about football fans. There is no tension and no hint of trouble.
Sampson is an affable 46-year-old, still as lean as 20 years ago and dressed in a similar, sharp, urban manner. Like his characters, he’s a man of the moment — and ready for any criticism when Awaydays hits the streets. Some will see the film, to be released on May 22, as a glorification of football hooliganism.
“I’m expecting criticism,” he says. “But I’m not worried about it. I’m comfortable that the violence is not glamorised. It’s short, brutal and effective, like real life. There are no slow-motion shots. It’s not judgmental and it’s not gratuitous.”
He’s certain that the balance is right in Pat Holden’s film because Sampson lived through the sort of breathtaking, frenetic squalls of violence that the film depicts. Like the film’s fictional characters, Paul Carty and Elvis, he travelled up and down the country following his team in the late 1970s. It was an era when journeys were infused with threat; a malevolent piquancy that enhanced the experience. “It’s young men running wild,” he says. “That’s what young men do, whether you like it or not.”
The violence will grab the headlines but there is much more to Awaydays. The film is a coming-of-age story set in 1979, the first days of Thatcherism, a curiously flamboyant time for these lost boys of Birkenhead. The plot is driven by fashion and pulsating music as much as brutality. It is the best representation of the beginnings of the “casual” culture to reach the screen.
Carty, played by Nicky Bell, is a teenager recovering from the death of his mother. He is drawn, via the enigmatic Elvis, to a group of Tranmere Rovers fans known as the Pack. Carty is never able to gain a sense of belonging within the group, which is intent on building a reputation through causing havoc. In Elvis, however, Carty finds a kindred spirit. Liam Boyle’s Elvis is mesmerising, switching from romantic dreamer to psychotic hooligan in the swish of a Stanley knife blade.
“It was a time when there was a convergence between music and football,” Sampson says. “There was a dress code and a code of behaviour. It was very seductive.”
Always trains, always stations. Almost three decades ago, I was introduced to Sampson on the express to London in 1983. This was “the Ordinary”. Normal fans took the Football Special, with its police escorts and sense of security. The risktakers took the Ordinary — scheduled services that set them down unprotected in strange and hostile towns. In a subversion of language, being an Ordinary Boy gave you status. So what do Ordinary Boys do, having been introduced? Have a row. What would you expect from nihilistic thugs?
The minor spat was based on a misunderstanding. Sampson had written about the Farm for New Musical Express. The most recent review of the band had claimed that the trumpet player had worn a Slazenger jumper. It was, I thought, a grievous insult, because I was the man with the trumpet and Slazenger was ancient history. I’d got the wrong writer — but how should this be perceived? Two football thugs having a row or artist and critic at odds?
“People misunderstood the entire scene, at least from a Liverpool perspective,” Sampson says. “Those trips away were full of lads with ambition, who wanted to go places in life. Those carriages were full of creative people. When confrontations came, they could handle it but it was all about much more.”
It was a scene Sampson was drawn to in 1976. “I started noticing the young lads dressing differently. A new look was beginning to happen. These boys had side partings, adidas T-shirts, straight jeans and Pods shoes. It picked up speed after that.”
Sampson’s father died that year. “It made me harder to control,” he says. “I started going to the match. I was always interested in gangs and sub-cultures and this one was emerging in front of me.” The genesis of Awaydays had begun.
Most films about football fans emphasise the macho element of the culture. For Sampson this is a fundamental misunderstanding. “The wedge haircut arrived,” he says. “It was amazing. These fresh-faced young boys had this camp, plumped-up bowl of hair with a long fringe over one eye. I saw it most clearly when Arsenal came up for the League Cup semi-final in 1978. They brought the biggest mob I’d seen at Anfield. They were a sea of denim, thousands, all boot boys. Very butch. On the other side of the barrier were four or five hundred Liverpool urchins, young lads, all with duffel coats and massive fringes. They looked so effeminate, but they fought with the Arsenal all the way back to the station. It was one of the most terrifying and exhilarating nights of my life. I wanted a wedge. A duffel coat. To be part of it all.”
Style became an obsession in Liverpool, where the football crowd were the antithesis of shaven-headed bruisers. “The look was moving at such a pace that you never knew where it would go next,” Sampson says. “Boys were dyeing their wedges purple and wearing jumbo cords in massive primary colours. Liverpool were in Europe and everyone was coming back with adidas Trimm-Trab trainers in vibrant colours. The world had seemed to go from black and white to colour overnight. I laugh at the term ‘casual’. It was the least casual trend ever. You spent all week thinking about what you’d wear. I didn’t know where the scene would take me. But I knew it would assume much more importance in the future.”
As Thatcherism kicked in, the terrace foppery faded. “Everything got much more sober,” Sampson says. “The terrace look in Liverpool went from borderline gay to geriatric in a year.”
But if Merseyside had suddenly got straighter, Sampson still had a gender-bending move in his locker. He entered a Cosmopolitan writing competition under a girl’s name — and won. “They were bemused,” he says. “I got taken to dinner at L’Escargot and to the Groucho Club by Robert Elms. I didn’t know places like that existed. But when I went to pick up my prize — a typewriter — I’d been relegated. Someone else got the typewriter and the year’s contract on offer turned out to be freelance. But it got me a job at Channel 4.”
The creativity found another outlet when Sampson met Mick Potter, one of the creators of The End, a publication that changed the football fanzine landscape. One of Potter’s collaborators in launching The End was Peter Hooton, a social worker with ambition, who went on to form the Farm. Sampson became the band’s manager in 1984. Many times he went beyond the call of duty — when the caretaker at an arts centre was foolish enough to leave the keys to the bar in the hands of the band while he nipped out for an hour or two, most of the Farm refused to leave to do a local radio interview. While they drank their fill at the “free” bar, their manager had to pretend he was a band member over the airwaves.
While working in the media Sampson was given another chance to manage the Farm in their brief period of fame and fortune. When the pop ride finished, Sampson got down to writing. Awaydays, the first of his eight published works, came naturally. It is perhaps, the closest to his heart. Powder, his second book, is about the pop world (and his next film project).
It took 11 painful years of disappointment and rejection to get Awaydays made into a movie. Sampson formed his own production company and, with government tax incentives, raised enough cash to finance his dream. Not quite the entire dream, though. “The great thing about doing things this way is that you’re in control,” he says. “The bad thing is you’re always skint.”
Today, living in Liverpool with his wife, Helen, and a son, Leo, approaching 2, he looks as content as I’ve ever known him. Much was put into perspective by a near-death experience four years ago when, working in his garden, he electrocuted himself. “I was using a strimmer and went back in to get a cup of tea. I took my shoes off and was too lazy to put them back on when I went out. Then I skimmed the wires bare by mistake. I knew I’d done it, but carried on. Absentmindedly I gathered up the lead in my hand and touched the bare wires. The strimmer was swirling around in my hand and hit my head and shoulder. I couldn’t let go, I thought that was it. Someone called an ambulence. It took months of hospital and physiotherapy to get back and I couldn’t work for a year.”
Unsurprisingly, he is looking little farther than Awaydays at the moment. Will he feel responsible if some are drawn to violence by the film? “No. It happens and always will. There’s depression in the air and it wouldn’t surprise me to see trouble making a comeback. When there’s no money around, no jobs and no status, young, working-class men can get it through being hard, from violence. For the powerless any power is good, even if it’s only the power to scare.”
But to concentrate on brutality is to miss the point of Awaydays. The way the camera lingers on the clothes and training shoes gives a sense of the drooling desperation felt by the “dressers” — a sensual obsession most people tend to associate only with the New Romantics of the early 1980s.
Sampson says he wanted to capture something that was distinctive to Liverpool. “It happened here. It’s wired into the DNA of the Liverpudlian to be different, and when those people went to Europe en masse for the first time it altered their preconceptions. For me, it wasn’t about Stanley knives and anarchy, it was about an uprising of style.”