2013-05-20T04:38:27-04:00 Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=billy-reeves Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Billy Reeves Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1504266 2012-05-11T19:00:00-04:00 2012-05-11T16:36:55-04:00

Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-reeves/
And, there's the fun of the summer to look forward to; the good old underrated fun of the pre-season friendly. Perhaps a much bigger club will come to town, a team you wouldn't normally face. The club shop will be open to launch the new kit and other such essential ephemera (perhaps the garden gnomes will be back in stock). The matches and the store's footfall are a very important revenue stream for smaller clubs before the season begins, especially as most grounds are not 'world class conference venues' and football is the only event that gets the tills beeping. Plus, of course, the first team needs to introduce all the new players to new tactics, new colleagues and fitness needs to be tested in a proper match environment.

Not in London. Not this summer. The Olympics is the law. Literally: the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 to be precise. This limits sporting events during the Olympics, mainly to make sure emergency services aren't bothered with too many non-Olympic things. This falls in the pre-season period. So that's the London clubs' pre-season cash injection down the pan then. Plus, this period is going to rub very close to the first round of the League Cup: bummer if a London club is drawn at home.

So you'd think all the lower-league clubs are aware of this and have made plans? Nope. I emailed all of the London clubs outside the Premier League (except West Ham, long story) and was mainly met by "ooh, we don't know". Two clubs said "it doesn't affect us" (oh, but it does) and I still await two replies. Two notable exceptions: One were going to have a testimonial for a player which they soon realised they can't do, and extra Billy-points to the club I support, Brentford, for only being all over this but having already planned how to get around the cash-flow issue: the Chief Executive Mark Devlin tells me a 'family fun day' is being planned where the ground (and the shop) will be open, the players will be there to chat to the fans and there will be the usual family-day activities.

So as a result of Lord Olympics, Brentford are going on tour! Hooray! It's very unusual that a football club such as ours will get to play abroad, but we're off to Germany (the former DDR in fact) for a 1970s-style training camp and three games against local sides. So rather than relaxing about pre-season and the usual trips to Staines Town and Lewes I'm actually rather excited to be enjoying a little bit of football exotica.

What about your club? What are they going to do? Start hoping. And planning.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1380060 2012-03-27T19:00:00-04:00 2012-05-27T05:12:02-04:00

Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-reeves/
Tee hee! It's funny isn't it, swearing. Classically British, seaside postcard, puerile, child-like.

I am especially aware of rude words being shocking/inappropriate as I work for BBC local radio, where even "bloody" is verboten on air. The BBC has a sweary chart which it published internally every two years (with 'MF' & the 'c' word usually being top dogs. (More recently racial slurs and slang to demonise the working classes have begun to appear).

It's all about context, apparently. I remember a long conversation I had with the head of Radio 4 in 2004 when she boasted of three "c*nts" in an Ian Pattinson play which had garnered just one complaint ("from an old dear who'd tuned in late"). I was amazed. Why? "...because my audience are intelligent".

The inference I took from this is that my punters, a C1, C2, D, E working class audience don't expect swearing from their local BBC station, to hear us swear would be like hearing one's Auntie Gladys swear, and, despite there being no 'watershed' on radio, it's more likely children are listening. The R4 attitude was very different.

This was in the days before the Ross/Brand clip was played out enough times to gain record complaints. Complaints are something the BBC is very sensitive to; the BBC stakeholder is anyone who pays the licence fee. Plus there's political pressures - and the likes of Mary Whitehouse's organisation (now called 'Mediawatch UK') keeping an ear and eye on what they regard as the BBC's duty to 'traditional' values.

People swear in front of each other for several reasons. It's often because a person feels comfortable in the presence of another, injecting a succinct emotional component into a conversation or relationship (so when someone we don't know very well swears unexpectedly we are offended because we don't feel they have the right to take that liberty). To use a sexual or scatological expulsion can be cathartic. It can display several emotions, surprise, anger, self-deprecation, humour or frustration.

It can also, of course, express hate. This is unacceptable, obviously, in any context. Homophobic, racist, classist, sexist etc. barbs are beyond simply 'taboo', they are designed to oppress, hurt and belittle.

Swearing is very common, and it is a very important part of language development; as we learn which words are naughty we learn much about our family, peer group and society in general.

So, with all this interest in swearing (I love Viz, Sarah Millican, I used to be a lorry driver) you would think nothing could offend me. I am not a minority grouping. I am extra aware of offending others (nothing wrong with being P.C., or BEING POLITE as I call it). White, liberal (small 'l') blokes like me rarely hear attack-language designed to oppress. But there is a word that upsets me, and, probably the middle-aged bloke in your life. Ask him. With all the swearing he does, he's probably not had the bottle to admit how offended he is by this disgusting word. If you don't like rude words, look away now.

The word is...



"willy".

The rude, oppressive words for female body parts, masturbation, and poo (often Anglo-Saxon in origin) feature lots of hard consonants. This is why they intuatively sound nasty and oppressive, hard sounds for something soft or feminine. Therefore willy is the reverse of this.

Men prefer the hard consonants for the penis (c*ck, tool, pr*ck etc.). To soften the sound, when mentioning the unmentionables, therefore immediately offends. The origins are clear: in many parts of the UK 'willy' is slang for 'soppy' or 'sissy', it half-rhymes with 'floppy' and a 'Will' is an old English word for 'helmet'. Plus, since around the time of the First World War, it's been used by mothers (and other female members of the family) to describe your knob when you're small - and it's small.

Sorry, lads. I realise I've empowered women to emasculate. But admit it. You hate the 'w' word.

Perhaps swearing isn't funny after all, eh? ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1375303 2012-03-25T19:00:00-04:00 2012-05-25T05:12:02-04:00

Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-reeves/
When a man gets to his 40s he becomes nostalgic for when he was eight. He wishes Brian Moore was on The Big Match after Sunday lunch and the FA Cup Final coverage started at 11am with a bunch of Liverpool & Everton fans taking part in a cut-price edition of It's a Knockout. But, this is selective memory.

Allow me a pop music analogy. If you've been watching the re-runs of Top of the Pops you'll know what I mean. We've forgotten all the shit that was around, and just remember and eulogise over the good stuff, Bowie, Krafwerk, Dr Feelgood - those pop records that we now consider to be culturally relevant. But culturally relevant pop was difficult to find, as it is now. We've forgotten Brendan, Pilot and The Rubettes country-rock period, and sprayed Boney M, ELO & Don't Go Breaking My Heart with the pleasant scent of kitsch.

Same with football. If you believe open terraces, skins with Stanley knives, getting coined at the railway station, unpoliced 'football special' trains, pitch invasions, running battles with police horses and throwing bananas at John Barnes were good - you want your head testing. Either that or you weren't there; I went to very few football matches in the '70s - I was too scared - I saw all of the above.

And don't even get me started about the bloody bogs.

Also, stop moaning about the financial rewards given to players, the ridiculous levels of debt and payola given to agents, unless you have a Marxist analysis. Football has been this way since Blackburn Olympic put up a fence around their ground and the football clubs of the industrial north and west Midlands started charging the locals to watch a game (giving them something to do with the half-day on Saturdays newly granted them by the factory act of 1856, rather than organise a Communist revolt). If you think football's too expensive then write to your MP and the local cop shop: the clubs have to pay for the police and for loads of stewards - you're paying for a safe environment. You'll pay less at Milan or River Plate but, by gum, you won't feel safe.

If we are going backwards to improve football going forwards, then let's go ALL the way back. Let's repeal some of the changes to the laws. (Ones that don't cost any money, mind: one of the prettiest tenets of the game is that it can be played to the same rules with the same equipment wherever the match is taking place, hence my objection to 'goal-line technology', which would make one game more important than another). Here's some from 1863 I'd bring back:

• Whoever gets to the ball first gets the throw in. I'd love to see the crowd getting involved in that too.

• The 'making of a mark', i.e. one could take a clean catch and take a free kick. It would be great if at least one player could do this, perhaps he could wear a special hat to denote him (I've never understood why only the goalkeeper has special powers. The wearing of roller-skates was only outlawed specifically in 1922, that would be good, but would break my rule of 'no expense').

But the biggest change that the game desperately needs is one that looks forward into the future, and would cause expense. Professional athletes are getting taller. Goalkeepers are 8" taller on average than in 1863 when the size of the goal was agreed upon. It's time to make the goals bigger. That'd be amazing.

So, what's the nostalgia of the future? Perhaps we'll mourn Jim Rosenthal. Or all the football that's free-to-air on telly - before the elite clubs set up their own channels. Clubs have always gone bust and stitched up their local creditors, but I hope new clubs, hopefully on a correct financial footing, come through.

Football's great now. The AMEX is better than the Goldstone. The new Shed is nicer than the old Shed. There's still a pub on each corner at Griffin Park.

The gentlemanly behaviour last Sunday at White Hart Lane proves it: Football has PLENTY of soul.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1374838 2012-03-23T08:46:40-04:00 2012-05-23T05:12:01-04:00

Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-reeves/
Among my top memories of being in a professional pop group (theaudience) are the two occasions where I got to meet the great man. He was using the same mixing engineer while working on Heart As Big As Liverpool (the greatest number one there never was; mooted b-side Liver As Big As Hartlepool) which is an utterly brilliant song.

He turned up to the mix of A Pessimist is Never Disappointed ("in that Soho") with a mate (of course called Wack) and a jiffy bag of cash which his head of A&R Dave Balfe had given him to keep him fed and in hotels while in London.

After 30 minutes of making us all fall about he realised he was taking over and asked "where's good to get one of them falafels?" We explained how to do so, it was about 300 yards away.

Three hours later he returned with a much thinner jiffy bag and a load of leg porn. (He'd spent so much money in one particular shop that the owner had given him all the pictures on the wall. Wylie admired the yellowing sellotape holding the leg porn inside the cheap clip frames. "They're going on my hall wall", he enthused).

I have nearly all my early Wah! 7s signed by him, each with his own scribbled (in biro) retrospective review. The legend scrawled on to Seven Minutes to Midnight what simply reads "Single of the week in four music papers!"

The second time I met him was at Abbey Road; I accepted his invite as I'd not there before. The fact that Wylie and producer Mike Hedges were allowed to hire Abbey Road for the Heart As Big As Liverpool project was testament to how much Balfe believed in it. The song wasn't ever released in the end. (It's on YouTube, check it, it's mighty, like a Liverpudlian Righteous Brothers).

At this session Wylie had bought in two slices of inspiration which he believed could seep into the song: A Phil Spector box-set and the complete poetry of Jean Baudrillard. Sitting next to the book, in the tidiest mix room I've ever seen, was a scrap of paper on which a crude picture of a cock and balls has been drawn in biro. Written next to this in Wylie's characteristic untidy handwriting was a Baudrillard quote: "You are born modern, you do not become so". I wish I'd nicked it.

His biggest hit The Story Of The Blues was recorded over three days, two days to work out how to programme the Linn drum (a brand new and exciting piece of technology in those days), 14 hours to record the song, half an hour to do the vocal.

He's on tour presently, by the way: www.PeteWylie.co.uk

I am a pop star in my own head. If you are a pop star in your own head, I salute you.

Pete Wylie. Part time rock star, full time legend. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1370073 2012-03-21T19:00:00-04:00 2012-05-21T05:12:01-04:00

Billy Reeves http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-reeves/
Inevitably, these events are greeted with the usual bleating. "We never win. Europe hates us" "It's all about politics", "It's just voting for your mates" etc.

These are MYTHS, perpetuated to disguise the fact that "we" have entered a bunch of pony songs, cobbled together at the last minute. Germany and Russia are just as unpopular and they've done okay recently.

There are problems; as usual the dear ol' BBC is the last of 43 representatives to get its entry posted up online; and the BBC hasn't got the funds to send Enge out on a promo tour (the Azeri government have reportedly spent $6million over the last three years).

In t'olden times the songs couldn't be released on vinyl until after the competition. This is now difficult to police. Germany's entry two years ago was number one in 12 countries by the day of the final. Millions already knew it.

Eurovision bosses have (partly) dealt with the geopolitical argument by combining televoting with 'expert' juries. Yes, geopolitics & diaspora play a part (Cyprus & Greece, Denmark & Germany, Russia & Serbia) but there is now so many countries these extra points are irrelevant. Plus, UK citizens, Ireland always give 'us' points and 'we' gave Jedward the full douze last year.

The 'neighbours' argument doesn't stack up either. Plenty of the Balkan nations hate each other. This doesn't stop them doing much better than the UK. Again, this is more to do with the proximity of promotional tours, concerts and TV appearances that the UK rarely gets involved with, unless the artist's management coughs up.

Eurovision is great. There is a unique skill in writing a song that can be popular from the west coast of Ireland to the eastern fringes of Siberia, from the arctic wastes of Finland to the trendy suburbs of Tel Aviv.

There's lots of cash to be made if your song wins. An artist can break new markets. The Eurovision Song Contest demonstrates not that "Europe hates us" but that "we", the inventors of pop music, are way behind the rest of Europe when it comes to the Grand Prix de Chanson. And, perhaps significantly, that we simply don't understand our near neighbours.

The simple truth is that the UK doesn't take Eurovision seriously enough.]]>