1977 and all that…only here for the Beer!.... Memoirs of a teenage Leicester City fan written by mickyhoss and channys6thswan
In 1977 I hope I go to heaven, so said Messrs Jones and Strummer and I really thought I’d gone to heaven. My life was in a bit of a musical maelstrom as 1976 petered out but then 1977 arrived with a bang…PUNK HAD TRULY ARRIVED!
My beloved football team had started the 1976/77 season well enough, more ‘draws’ than a furniture shop told the story of the first quarter season. Nonetheless a solid 16 points had been gathered by the second week in November, which in the days of 2 points for a win wasn’t too bad at all. Liverpool was going to be the acid test of course and City failed it dramatically. Worthington had put City in front after twenty minutes, but like so many City Dawns it was a false one, as Highway and Toshack soon put Liverpool into the lead. Leicester ended up losing 5-1, but was that a lop-sided score line? Maybe, but our local scribe was all over this result like one of his cheap gaberdine macs, and from then on he wore out the typewriter keys for ‘long harsh winter’. And yet two respectable draws followed, one with the Cup Holders Man Utd the other away at dirty Leeds.
The long harsh winter finally arrived with a vengeance on the 4th of December that year, when, in sub-zero temperatures, we welcomed Birmingham to the Filbert Street ice rink. For some reason, the City players didn’t seem to give two fucks that day, starting with taking to the pitch in screw-in studs. Brum on the other hand had turned the pitch into Freeman Hardy and Willis pre-match, and by the time the game kicked off, they’d picked the right footwear. In yellow they raced into a four nil lead attacking the Tundra End, and four became six early in the second half. Six nil down seemed to be the wake up call the home team had been waiting for, and we pulled two goals back. But there was no credit in a second half draw, draw? My arse!
As the season to be hassled outside Lewis’s with an old man with a harmonica arrived, City got a respectable draw at West Brom and a pre-Christmas win against a poor Spurs side. But these blue boy points did little to silence the boo-boys. The Boxing day fixture at Derby and the New Year’s Day game at Norwich yielded zero points, the latter featuring a trip East that began for me with a banging hangover as well as a blizzard. Not the Clash I’d been hoping for. 1977 had arrived in a White Riot.
By then my musical tastes were all over the shop, too. I’d been all over Bowie ever since my mate got his brother to tape Hunky Dory and Ziggy for me, and paper round money had got me Aladdin Sane. Pin Ups arrived for Christmas and Diamond Dogs six months later for my birthday, and by the time Young Americans arrived I’d also found Quo, Sabbath and Deep Purple. By then, I, like millions of others saw the need for a good clear out, and punk did that for us. As punk took root, I went with it, spending most of my wages on records and football, and because you could also drink in Shilton Cricket Club for next to nowt, everything dovetailed beautifully. Apart from the big hitters like The Clash and The Sex Pistols I loved The Saints, Wire and The Stranglers, in the days when Rattus was still brand new. Glam was dead, and I spat on its coffin as it went down into the earth.
Only Glam was dead at Filbert Street, too. Jimmy Bloomfield’s glittering tenure at Leicester City came to an end on the back of grumblings from the Board and the crowd. We finished that season a respectable 11th, but the damage had been done. Jimmy’s resignation brought the curtain down on an era of sheer entertainment and what might have beens.
The Brave New World that followed could only be watched by the brave, or the new. June 1977 saw the rest of the country swept up in the mass hysteria of the Silver Jubilee, in an avalanche of souvenir tea towels and mugs. There were mugs aplenty at Filbert Street, too, pulled in to watch Francis McLintock work his magic as manager. The first signing, Eddie Kelly was seen as a master stroke, though the others that soon followed, George Armstrong and Dave Webb, smacked of buying big names, and big pasts long gone. The addition of Geoff Salmons on a free bucked the trend, but only because he looked like he cared, when others didn’t. The pre-season went past in a slow-motion blur, the players manifestly unfit, posing for Victorian silhouettes rather than the usual action photos. Alarm bells were ringing, and then on the 16th of August just four days before the new season started, Elvis Aaron Presley died.
