Miles, Blondie, ELO, Defunkt - all part of Rock n Roll Soccer

Here's a round-up of some more reviews of Rock n Roll Soccer, and an interview at the US Soccer Players website. This contained my favourite question of all: "If you were going to make a playlist to go along with the book, what would be on it?" In the book, I already came up with an NASL soundtrack. But a playlist is different, right? So I had the excuse to rummage through old CDs and records and re-think the musical accompaniment to the North American Soccer League. Here's a sample:

Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1972). From the album of the same name because it was, like the NASL, a one-off, revolutionary fusion of styles that drew from the past and the present, and pointed to the future.

Jeff Lynne, singing for the Blues (pic: bcfc.com)

Electric Light Orchestra – Livin’ Thing (1976). The peak years of the NASL coincided with the peak years of stadium rock, and the fan cultures of both shared a lot of features – the game/concert as a big event, the spectacle of mass entertainment, the easy availability of recreational drugs. I’m no fan of stadium rock, but ELO was an exception, and this fine, typically upbeat track from the wonderful and aptly titled A New World Record is a good example of Jeff Lynne’s ease at being cheerfully influenced by US AOR. He’s a Birmingham City fan too.

The International Soccer Network wrote that  Rock n Roll Soccer "is the definitive history on the original NASL. Nothing out there rivals the detail and variety provided by this book. It is easily one of the best soccer titles of 2015, if not the best. Plenderleith, one of the best top journalists anywhere  [Steady on! IP], is a magician with words and history, making the entertaining NASL even more exciting. That is quite a task indeed. You can’t go wrong with this one. This is an absolute must for any soccer fan, regardless of where your allegiances lie. It has the honor of being one of our favorite soccer books of all-time. It’s that good!"

The NY-focused Empire of Soccer looked in particular at chapter seven 'The NASL v s FIFA and the World', which has scarcely been mentioned in other reviews. "One thing," writes Jake Nutting, "is abundantly clear from Plenderleith’s engaging staging of all the many grievances the NASL embroiled itself in – neither incarnation of the NASL has ever been about going with the flow. Owners were openly hostile toward what they deemed intrusive oversight from the overlords at FIFA. Ironically, the league’s focus in the modern era has shifted to aligning American soccer more with the rest of the world, but the bickering within our own shores has remained robust."

"This is a far more substantive book than you’d expect from its title," writes the blog Message In A Bottle at Island Books, an independent outlet in Washington State, "but then the NASL was a far more substantive operation than history has acknowledged. When it’s remembered these days, it’s usually for garish disco-era uniforms, gimmicky promotions, and overpaid, over-the-hill stars from overseas. All of that is at best only partly true, as Plenderleith shows. [He] excels in showing what the teams and players were really like and establishes a historical context for the league, definitively answering the interesting question of how North American soccer compared to the kind played everywhere else on the globe.

"Today MLS trails only the National Football League and Major League Baseball in average game attendance, thanks mostly to the spectacular support of Northwest fans who insisted that their MLS franchises carry the names of their lost NASL forebears. Rock 'n’ Roll Soccer speaks to everyone with football fever, but to us most of all."

The Day I Silenced Radio 5 Live

Here's the link to my interview late last night on World Soccer Talk Radio with Nate Abaurrea, which was thoroughly enjoyable thanks to his having closely read the book we were talking about - Rock n Roll Soccer (published today in the United States and Canada by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books). That's not necessarily always the case, as I discovered when I was in the UK in 2001, attempting to promote my first book For Whom The Ball Rolls, a selection of adult-oriented, football-based short fiction (clearly not a category that anyone had a clue how to market, given its sales figures).   

Live and silent...thanks to me

I was booked in to appear on the Fi Glover Show on BBC Radio 5 Live, along with various other luminaries of broadsheet sporting journalism - Sue Mott of The Daily Telegraph and Jim White, at that time of The Guardian. We chatted in the booth beforehand. I was terrified. They were both very posh and confident. Jim told a funny story about something that had happened to him at a game at the weekend, and we all chuckled. They asked me about my book, pretended that they were really interested, and both promised to write something about it. Neither ever did, but hey, they're busy people, and a promise in the media world is worth as much as the sodden beer mat it's written on (a few years later my Dad bought me Jim White's book You'll Win Nothing With Kids, but eight years on I still haven't opened it. So there).

To the studio. Fi Glover wasn't there, and some bloke whose name I can't remember was standing in. He briefed us - we'd start by talking about my book, and then move on to a general chat about the sporting events of the weekend. Fine. The countdown - then the host introduced all of us. I was still terrified. He turned to me and announced my book to the world. "I haven't read the book," he said glibly, then added something like, "but presumably these are stories very much rooted in actual experience."

That was my cue. Was that an actual question? Was I supposed to agree with it? Say something like "Yes, they are" and see what he said next? Of course, looking back, it was a chance for me to promote myself by banging on about my vast experience of the football world, and how that had inspired me to write football-based fiction. At that second, though, my mind was a complete blank. National BBC Radio 5 Live experienced a five-second silence. It felt like five minutes, and I can still see the host's increasingly desperate face, waiting for me not to screw up his show in the very first minute. And here I was, the nervous debutant appearing in front of a huge and expectant crowd, and I'd clumsily conceded a penalty just 30 seconds in.

What's this about? "Er,
I don't really know."

Eventually I stuttered out something about the stories being more of a product of my imagination. That wasn't the right answer at all, and no one followed it up. We moved rapidly on to the sporting events of the weekend. Jim White told the same anecdote he'd told in the booth beforehand, and everyone except me laughed, like they were hearing it for the first time. Play the game, Ian. Maybe that's why he never wrote anything about my book, because I didn't laugh twice at his story. 

Now I was no longer being introduced as Ian Plenderleith, author of fantastic new book For Whom The Ball Rolls, but as Ian Plenderleith of When Saturday Comes magazine. Fine, if that's the way you want it. My nerves subsided and I started to talk. A lot. My friend Tim Bradford, who was at home making a tape of the broadcast, said that my normally accent-neutral voice gradually started sounding more northern, as though defiantly countering the well-honed tones of my southern counterparts. By the end of the show I sounded like I was from darkest Leeds, wilfully and bolshily contradicting everything that Sue and Jim said (okay, so that's why they never wrote anything about my bloody book). I can't remember much what we were talking about, but I do remembering slagging off Rangers and Celtic and the Scottish FA, and making a joke about Princess Anne being an actual horse.

The BBC never asked me back (though like Jim and Sue, they promised that they would). Tim gave me the tape, but I've never listened to it, and I don't even know where it is. Even if I wanted to hear me get into my stroppy stride taking on these titans of the established fourth estate, I could never face hearing again that five-second silence at the start of the show. And wishing that I had interrupted the sentence, "I haven't read the book..." with a full-on northern roar of, "Well then you're not doing your fookin' job very well, are you lad?" That's how you generate publicity.

Kicks against the Cosmos

The Kicks: simply Ace

The Minnesota Kicks once beat the Cosmos 9-2 in a playoff game, in one of the North American Soccer League's more bizarre results. But that's not the only reason why I think they embodied the League's spirit of rock n roll soccer more than their New York rivals. There was the spontaneous, organic nature of the Kicks' rapid rise from nothing to crowds of 46,000 within weeks of playing their first ever game. There was the free-scoring, attacking nature of their play. And there were the proto-Rave tailgates where - outside the Kicks' stadium before the game - thousands of young people enjoyed the summer weather, the drink, the drugs, and each other. Read more here in my piece at The History Reader, a spin-off site run by the US publisher of Rock n Roll Soccer, St. Martin's Press.