Keyboard player Jonathan Coe has got a better excuse than most for his band’s rather lacklustre release schedule of just two albums in 41 years; when he’s not playing in the jazz-influenced popsters The Peer Group, Coe is one of Britain’s most successful novelists, notching numerous awards for books like The Rotters’ Club, Bournville and Middle England. Singer Ralph Pite has been busy too, spending his days as an English professor in Bristol. What about Andrew Hodgkiss, who shares vocal duties? He’s a consultant psychiatrist. Guitarist and keys player Jeremy Gregg was the only one of the quartet to work in anything like a ‘regular’ job, having recently retired as a graphic designer. But when I caught up with Jonathan and Jeremy for my Brum Radio show recently, it was evident that for all their collective success since meeting at Cambridge University in the mid-1980s, they had all fantasised about a full-time musical career.

“Yes, it’s something that I think we all we all dreamed of” Jeremy admits, while Jonathan chips in that “when I was first playing with the band in in the 80s, I was completely divided as to whether I would pursue a career as a musician and as a writer, and it was purely accidental, really, that I got a novel accepted by a publisher. That was what happened first - before we landed a recording contract - so that decision was made for me. I was lucky to be published when I was young - I was only 25 - but I’ve had to wait a bit longer than that for my music to get out there. But the novelist Mary Wesley, I think published her first novel when she was in her 70s. So it’s never too late to make your debut in a different art form.”

Even though The Peer Group never troubled the charts Jeremy insists that “we were proud, and continue to be proud of the work that we’ve that we’ve produced.” And so they should be. There’s a level of musical sophistication and technical virtuosity evident in both their self-released albums, 2014’s If You Have To Ask, You Can’t Afford It, and their new set Breath of Stone. The sound is cool, wordy and sophisticated - nodding to the more thoughtful end of 80s synth pop. It’s certainly some distance from the prog referenced by Coe in The Rotters’ Club, which took its name from a Hatfield And The North album released in 1975. Jonathan admits: “I always seemed to be about two years behind whatever was trending at the time, so I got into prog and jazz-rock, in 1976/1977 when all the bands were breaking up, and punk was smashing all that into oblivion. So while all my friends were off to see The Clash and The Damned and The Pistols, I was sitting in my bedroom with my little noodly jazz numbers in 7/8 time and I was very happy. That really was the kind of music I started writing for The Peer Group, playing slightly fiddly jazz instrumentals, but that didn’t last too long - probably for the best.”

Jeremy adds: “I’m a few years younger than the other guys, so when I started listening to music in my mid teens in the late 70s, I was much more interested in the punk/new wave/post punk world. So I bring a little bit of that aesthetic to the show. But I’ve always been interested in those earlier 70s, more complex pieces of work as well.”

As the various members sought common ground, Jonathan says the classier end of 1980’s chart music provided a gravitational pull: “There was a lot of nice melodic pop music being written in Britain in the 80s. We liked Aztec Camera, Orange Juice. Everything But The Girl, and we all liked the Smiths in those days. Jeremy’s guitar playing was very much influenced by Johnny Marr. I think at that stage, we started doing more and more song-based stuff, and Ralph had all these curious, quirky lyrics that he was writing that he wanted to contribute. So we quickly became a songwriting band.”

In another lifetime, these are songs which you might imagine being buffed and polished in the plushness of a studio like Abbey Road; they have a lush quality that could perhaps benefit from layering and overdubs. As it is, for all their musical accomplishments, The Peer Group generate a lo-fi ‘home brew’ sound, as Jeremy wryly acknowledges. “These are very much a collection of tarted up home recordings, using home studios at both my place and John’s. The technology that we have available to us now makes that doable. It would be great to go out and play and spend a bit more money and work in a bigger studio environment. But I think the setup that we had to record these worked for us. So we’re happy with what we’ve achieved with the technology available to us.”

Jonathan scoffs: “The budget for the album was very very low. Given our Bandcamp royalties, I still don’t think we’re going to break even. I don’t think we’re going to be heading to Abbey Road any time soon.”

Check out The Peer Group’s Breath of Stone here

Listen to the full Brum Radio show featuring The Peer Group below.

https://www.mixcloud.com/BrumRadio/adventures-in-music-with-adrian-goldberg-johnathon-coe-and-jeremy-gregg-15082026/

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I can’t remember wanting a team to fail as badly as Argentina in the World Cup Final. My hostility had nothing to do with islands in the South Atlantic; nor was it provoked by the simple fact of their victory against England in the semi. The truth is that throughout the tournament, Lionel Scaloni’s team attempted to push, shove and hack their way to victory; a thuggish, anti-football tendency which has been indulged by FIFA and, as a consequence, ruined what should have been football’s showpiece occasion. Even the sending off of Enzo Fernandez following a wild challenge which sent Pau Cubarsi somersaulting through the air was only for a second yellow card, not the straight red his lunge deserved. The cheers which echoed around my living room when Spain’s Ferran Torres struck the back of the net 10 minutes into extra time will have been echoed, I’m sure, by millions of fans around the world.

Maybe FIFA President Infantino was too busy brown-nosing Trump to notice; perhaps he hoped the dismal half-time ‘entertainment’ during the Final would distract the global television audience. Either way, among the oil state sponsorships and the hydration breaks, he took his eye off the one thing that really matters - the game itself - encouraging the South Americans to indulge in the kind of industrial-scale shithousery that shames the sport.

Is this just sour grapes from a bitter England fan? You’re entitled to think so, but bear this in mind; it’s been reported that Argentina committed more fouls than any team in the tournament but were unique amongst the 48 competing nations in not having a VAR intervention against them. The question of whether they and their star player Lionel Messi were given special treatment was also raised by Egypt’s manager Hossam Hassan who lost to Argentina in the last 16. He said “perhaps they wanted to keep the world champion in the competition. Perhaps they wanted Messi to stay in the running.” Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

It’s not the first time Infantino has been suspected of showing favouritism towards the Argentine genius. Remember how FIFA manipulated the rules of last year’s World Club Championship to allow Messi’s Inter Miami to participate, rather than LA Galaxy, the actual champions?

Messi was certainly treated leniently when he escaped without even a caution for raking his studs down the calf of Algeria’s Aissa Mandi during the group stages.

We sometimes hear the complaint in England that “the game’s gone”, usually in reference to a soft refereeing decision that would never have been considered a foul in bygone years; but the World Cup Final was a savage reminder of how much our domestic game has improved over the last few decades. The Premier League and the The Championship, for all their faults, encourage the most gifted ball players to express themselves without fear of being clogged into A&E. Argentina’s cynical spoiling tactics were a throwback to what has, thankfully, been lost in the English game, as exemplified by the vicious 1970 FA Cup Final between Chelsea and Leeds.

When Argentina were defeated 1-0 by Germany in the stultifying 1990 World Cup Final, the International Football Association Board responded by banning the back pass. After the 2026 World Cup, we don’t need any more rule changes - just a determination by Infantino and his ilk to enforce the laws that we already have, fairly and equally, without fear or favour.

Luke was smitten by the Westway’s finest, and instantly cast off the loons and the cheesecloth shirt - and, of course, the lip decoration.

“I didn’t really know what to expect,” he admits. “In that really hot summer of ‘77 I listened to The Ramones. I’ve always liked up-tempo hard rock but The Ramones was something else. I listened to the first album throughout that whole steaming hot summer, and I started to write songs a bit more like that - a bit more uptempo, just simple chords and some bratty attitude lyrics. Then one of my roommates Miki Cottrel said, ‘There’s this band called The Clash at Barbarellas? I think it’s one of those punk bands - we should go. I said, ‘alright’ and it just blew my mind. It was amazing.

“First off, the club owners had advertised the price at 50 pence to get in, and when you got there, it was a pound. Somebody came out and said, ‘The Clash are not going on stage until every one of you gets a 50 pence refund’. We all went outside, came back in, and got our 50 pence, which meant I could meant I could buy a half pint at the bar. And then they came out and played this absolutely mind-blowing show - I’d never seen anything like it.

“I went right home and the first thirst thing I did was shave off my moustache. I cut my hair myself in the kitchen with some blunt scissors, spiked it up with some gel. The next day I found this really friendly large dog that had a really big collar with studs on it - I took the collar off the dog. I got a black T-shirt and a razor blade, and I slashed holes in the T-shirt, and that was it. Everybody thought I’d lost my mind, saying ‘but Luke, you can play. What’s all this three chords anarchy stuff? You’re a good muso’. I’m like, ‘no, the excitement of this has got me bouncing off the freaking walls, man.’ And that was it, you know. A transition because of that one Ramones album, and then the show by The Clash.”

Luke’s first band was Fashion, a post punk and reggae band who skirted fame and fortune, although he quit after the first of their three albums, disillusioned by the evil ways of the music biz - though not before touring with US, The Police and the B-52s. After relocating to the States, he remained musically active, and his new double album ‘Killer’ with Ricky Humphrey - under the guise of This Twisted Wreckage - is out now via Bandcamp.

Stylistically, it’s closer to goth than classic punk as Luke explores the mind of a cop Nick Webster, whose sister is murdered. “It’s a whole story,” Luke explains. “Somebody suggested to me, ‘you should pitch this to Netflix, because it’d make a great series’. I thought about it, but the idea of spending all this time away from music to try and make a load of money and be famous with a Netflix series doesn’t interest me anymore.

“What interests me is just playing music; sending it out and hoping it makes somebody else feel something. That’s always been true since I was 18 and it always will be. I often sign off correspondences by saying ‘rock till I drop’, and I’m not kidding, because I’m 74 now and that’s what I’m going to do to the best of my ability”.

Watch the full interview on Goldberg At Large here.

(Pic: Brian Rice under Creative Commons)

Stamford Bridge in the 1980s was an untidy, ramshackle bowl with mostly uncovered terracing at both ends. Weeds sprouted from fenced-off areas of the ground.

Unlike most English stadia, it had a running track around the pitch, a relic of its 19th-century origins as an athletics track. It was later used for greyhound racing. This put a very un-English separation between supporters and the pitch.

The single exception to the overall air of decrepitude was a vast, three-tier stand which dominated the east side of the ground. It looked entirely out of place – a palace on a council estate. When it was built in the early 70s, it was meant to be a vision of the future, the first stage of a long-term plan to develop a 60,000-capacity stadium.

“One day, son, all football grounds will look like this…”

But the club over-reached. They appointed an architect with no experience of building stadia; a builders’ strike caused extensive delays; costs spiralled out of control. Never mind ‘the East Stand’. This was almost Chelsea’s last stand, such were the costs involved.

Facing bankruptcy, the Mears family who owned the club sold the freehold of the ground to a property developer, Marler Estates in a corner of West London regarded as prime real estate.

Marler wanted to demolish Stamford Bridge and replace it with a £32 million housing and office complex. They offered Chelsea the option of a ground share eight miles to the south at Crystal Palace. When that plan ran into vocal opposition from supporters and local councillors, Marler proposed another ground share, this time closer to home, at Fulham.

Ken Bates, who had bought Chelsea as an independent business, separate from the stadium, refused to budge, recognising that for supporters, its traditional home had a value beyond money.

The club organised bucket collections for a ‘Save the Bridge’ campaign. Supporter Andy Scott recalls that a faintly amateurish barometer was erected in the old North Stand, measuring supporters’ contributions. “It went up a little bit, week by week, and it was a standing joke at the time, but Bates had his heart in the right place. He wanted to keep the club at Stamford Bridge.”

That opportunity came after Marler sold the ground to Cabra Estates, another developer, which went bust in the property crash of the early 90s. Bates finally bought the freehold and generously empowered ordinary fans to purchase the ground through a company called Chelsea Pitch Owners, which now has 23,000 shareholders worldwide. CPO leases Stamford Bridge back to the club at a peppercorn rent.

With the future of the stadium secured, Bates then began the long-overdue process of rebuilding it, with the assistance of Matthew Harding, a lifelong Chelsea supporter and one of Britain’s richest men.

By the time Roman Abramovich arrived in 2003, the running track had long gone and it had evolved into a compact modern arena with a 40,000 capacity. This chequered history is important, because it helps explain why so many supporters gave Roman Abramovich an unhesitating welcome.

After years of struggle, Chelsea felt like a big club in the making. Ken Bates had even called them ‘the Manchester United of the South’. Fans saw Abramovich as the game changer, capable of turning that rhetoric into reality – regardless of the source of his wealth.

This is an edited extract from ‘Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football’ availablw now from Byline Books

That’s not to say that TS5 doesn’t have its moments, as it pits Buzz, Jessie, Woody and co against a vicious new rival, Lily, a frog themed tablet, who bedazzles her young owner Bonnie with computer games and social media apps. These, however, only make the kid unhappy, until she bonds with Blaze, another tween who introduces her to the joys of playing creatively with traditional toys. This conflict feels very much like an adult preoccupation; and even the best gags in the movie - revolving around Woody’s thinning thatch - seem to be aimed at the grown-ups among the audience.

To be clear, this is not a bad film. The stellar voice cast, which includes the like of Tom Hanks, Tim Allan and Joan Cusack, never fails to deliver; and the animation is faultless. But ‘Toy Story’ has set the bar high and as the plot labours towards the terminus, the sound of grinding gears is unmissable. This episode definitely lacks the sparkle which made earlier episodes such movie landmarks.

Toy Story 6? Thanks - but no thanks.

‘Backrooms’ is like an arthouse movie that wandered into a multiplex…which, it should be said, is no bad thing, especially in this era of superhero landfill and endlessly recurring franchises.

Based on first-time director Kane Parsons’ YouTube videos - themselves inspired by images posted on 4Chan - the film explores the concept of liminal spaces (ie eery abandoned buildings) though the troubled mind of furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his equally disturbed therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). Both principals, it should be noted, are excellent; likewise Lukita Maxwell as shop assistant Kat and Finn Bennett as her boyfriend Bobby.

When Clark discovers a secret passageway into a mysterious office building next door to his struggling outlet, he can’t be sure if he’s losing his mind or discovering a dark secret. Or - dun dun dun - possibly both.

Much has been made of the fact that Parsons, a digital native, has been able to translate his online experimentation into a box office hit, and the figures are certainly impressive; ‘Backrooms’ has already taken more than $300 million globally and is that rare phenomenon of a movie release that earned more in weeks two and three than on its opening weekend. That’s because good old-fashioned word of mouth is enticing punters, rather than the usual bludgeoning marketing campaign.

There’s something traditional about the film-making, too, with its auteur-ish nods to Poalanski’s ‘Repulsion’, ‘The Blair Witch Project’, and even ‘Eraserhead’. Truth is that if Backrooms - with its leisurely pacing, off-kilter angles, sometimes stilted conversation and odd atmosphere - had been released in the 80s, it would now be hailed as a cult classic. It’s great to see it making the big time.

Lord Faulkner - “call me Richard” - ushers me into his central London flat, and we sit around a kitchen table, cluttered with files and documents.

If David Mellor was the public face of the Football Task Force - which initiated Supporters Direct - Faulkner, its Deputy Chair was the power behind the throne.

He’d worked unpaid on Tony Blair’s comms team during the 1997 election, having previously served as a councillor in south London.

His CV also included a lengthy stint as deputy chair of the Football Trust, a quango for funding stadium redevelopments which he helped set up in the 70s.

The Labour establishment regarded him as ‘a safe pair of hands’, so when the Task Force was created, Faulkner was a shoo in for a senior role.

As we sip coffee, the ruddy-cheeked elder statesman reflects on the organisation’s genesis in the late 1980s and 90s.

“There had been a number of crowd control tragedies…Hillsborough the Bradford fire, Heysel…there was a feeling that stadiums were not safe and desperately needed modernization” he said.

“But the governance of the game was not healthy either. There seemed to be rather too much concentration on making money for a small number of very rich clubs, which was the main reason for the establishment of the Premier League.

“It meant that clubs lower down the Football League were largely ignored.”

The creation of Supporters Direct was perhaps the most radical outcome of the Task Force, but there were several other commendable achievements.

They dedicated an entire report to improving facilities for supporters with disabilities, and Faulkner observes, “I think we made a real difference.

“It feels as though clubs and the game as a whole have accepted the principle that because you have a physical or a mental disability, you shouldn’t be prevented from attending football.

“It’s not perfect yet and there’s still a lot to do. There’s a particular problem with older stadiums, which can’t be easily adjusted, but there has been a major step forward in this area.”

Another Task Force report recommended that individuals should be individually liable for prosecution for racist chanting at matches, even if they were joining in as part of a group That’s now on the statute books.

Calls for more funding for junior football were heeded, too. The Premier League has become a key partner in the Football Foundation, a charity which has awarded more than £1 billion to improve grassroots facilities since 2000.

On all of these issues, English football was able to present a progressive, united front.

The one stumbling block was the question of how the game should be regulated.

Although the government called for consensus, none could be reached, with the Task Force polarised to the point where it was forced to issue two separate and starkly conflicting reports in December 1999.

The majority report, backed by Faulkner, highlighted the lack of unity in the game’s administration.

It identified the creation of the FA-backed Premier League as a moment when a significant rupture emerged in an already fractured sport.

It offered football one last shot at self-governance, calling on the FA to reform itself and create a new Football Regulation Authority “capable of taking independent and objective decisions”.

The FRA would consist of eight members - four from inside football, plus a supporters representative, and three independents, including a chair appointed in consultation with the government.

No one who reads the report could be left in any doubt about what it was implying; the FA - which should have been a growling watchdog with sharp fangs - had become an obedient poodle answering to the commands of the Premier League.

Had the majority Task Force proposal been accepted, the FRA would have created a code of conduct for clubs, and held them accountable for ticket prices and accessibility for young fans.

Owners would have also been forced to consult with supporters over stock market flotations and major share sales.

It proposed a monitoring and compliance unit to protect the game’s financial integrity, weed out rogue directors, and reduce inequality between large and small clubs.

The ultimate penalty for non-compliance could be “suspension or expulsion from a League or FA membership, or the expulsion of individuals from being involved in clubs.”

These recommendations were backed by all of the ‘great and good’ on the Task Force, including Sir John Smith (an ex Metropolitan Police chief) and Sir Herman Ousley (former chairman of the Commission For Racial Equality).

As Faulkner says, “we were all of the view that something needed to be done in order to establish a proper regulatory framework for football.”

Adam Brown, an academic and football writer, helped compile the majority report.

He wrote later that “the basis of these arguments was the belief that the nature of consumption in football is qualitatively different to consumption in other sectors, based as it is on a ‘brand loyalty’ and emotional attachment which (in most cases) far outstrips brand quality.

“In other words, football clubs have a captive and loyal consumer base and, in the 1990s, have exploited this local monopoly to great effect.”

There was even a call in the report for the government to step in if its suggestions went unheeded.

“If in a period of two years, sufficient progress has not been made to implement the specific recommendations in this report…we recommend that the Minister appoint a regulator by legislation.”

The only members of the Task Force to object were the FA, the Premier League and the EFL, who produced their own minority report.

Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore insisted that his organisation was committed to “making the game transparent, accountable and responsible.”

But he predictably described external supervision as unnecessary and cumbersome.

“It would be another layer of regulation, it would be an interference and it’s not been clearly thought through.”

Sports Minister Kate Hoey encapsulated the government’s dilemma, saying that “one of the tasks of government is to help…strike a balance between the necessary business interests of clubs and those of supporters, without whom clubs would not exist.”

In the event, there was no balance. Tony Blair’s business-friendly government sided with Scudamore, leaving football to carry on much as before, ushering in an era of oligarchs, oil states, and structural financial instability.

As missed opportunities go, It was the equivalent of receiving a pass two yards from an empty goal, and blazing it over the bar.

The only practical outcome of this clash on governance was the creation of an ‘Independent Football Ombudsman whose scope was strictly limited.

Despite their grand title, the ‘Ombudsfan’ adjudicates only on individual supporters’ grumbles (about poor stewarding, for example) but has zero say on the overall strategy of the game.

Faulkner recalls: “The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and, I believe, 10 Downing Street heard the case that the Premier League was still in its infancy, and hadn’t really demonstrated what it could do for English football.

“They thought it would make no sense to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs.”

Was the government ‘nobbled’? Did the Premier League sabotage the FRA?

Faulkner phrases his response diplomatically.

“I think the Premier League successfully used their influence at the highest levels in government in order to get their point of view, first of all, understood and then supported.

“They wouldn’t call it sabotage. They would say they saved the game from what they felt was going to be ruinous regulation.

“ I don’t believe it would have been ruinous then, and it certainly won’t be ruinous now.”

***************

In the years that followed, politicians intermittently called out the Premier League’s financial extravagance.

Former Task Force administrator Andy Burnham warned in his role as Culture Secretary, that “the time has come for football to reassess its relationship with money and with its supporters.”

Speaking at the Supporters Direct Conference in London in 2008, he argued that “despite the levels of money in the game, football must be a sporting competition run like a business and not vice versa.

“The game makes money because of the way it began - because of the fierce rivalry between fans and the history of civic pride and local allegiance forged over a century or more.”

It was, he warned, “becoming increasingly polarised. The top clubs who build on global success are in danger of becoming detached from the communities that build them.

“We need to ensure the flow of finance furthers football’s interests as a sport.”

Burnham argued that the ‘Fit And Proper Persons Test’ (by now the Owners And Directors Test) originally introduced in 2004, should be strengthened, following Thaksin Shinawatra’s controversial purchase of Manchester City.

He also suggested a quota system for home-grown players and demanded a rebalancing of the game’s finances to promote more equal competition.

“Having strong competition as a primary goal is the way to ensure commercial success”, he said.

“Football clubs do not exist to be pure businesses. They do not exist to put each other out of business. The product is the competition.

“Football has special characteristics and a fundamental role in our community.”

It was a clarion call for change from a senior politician echoing the majority report of the Football Task Force, to which he had been a party almost a decade earlier.

The FA’s progressive chair chair Lord Triesman drafted a 26 page draft response to Burnham.

He proposed that the FA should oversee a new system of financial regulation for the Premier League, and that clubs should enter formal relationships with supporter groups and share money more equally.

Under his proposals, clubs would also have been encouraged to nurture the development of a greater number of young English players.

Triesman’s missive never saw the light of day because - as David Conn at The Guardian revealed - he was ordered not to send it by the FA Board.

Representatives of grassroots clubs were said to have been ‘reminded’ by Premier League rep David Richards that a significant amount of their funding came from the top flight.

With a nudge and a wink, Triesman was forced on the retreat. Instead of positively engaging with the Culture Secretary’s demand for change, the FA’s official response blandly stated support for the status quo.

As Conn put it, this episode “encapsulates English football’s lopsided organisation: an FA, the governing body, instructed not to send even a meaningful reply to government questions about the running of the sport.”

It was to be another two decades before politicians would seriously grapple again with this issue of how football should be regulated.

You can buy ‘Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football’ here.

Within 15 months of their debut at a small venue in Birmingham, Wolverhampton’s Mighty Lemon Drops had recorded their first John Peel session, released a best-selling indie single ‘Like An Angel’ and became part of the NME’s exclusive ‘C86’ club. Somewhere along the way, they also found time to release their debut album ‘Happy Head’, which has now been re-issued in limited edition coloured vinyl, with a bonus 7” single. A good moment, then, to catch up with guitarist and co-writer David Newton at his home in the United States.

Dave recalls that after the Lemon Drops’ debut in 1985 at a bar called Peacocks in Brum’s Needless Alley, “it went a bit crazy” following an enthusiastic review of their first London date by the NME’s Everett True a few months later.

Such was the power of the music press in that era that True’s review instigated an A&R scramble, before the band was snapped up by Blue Guitar - an indie-style subsidiary of Chrysalis Records, run by Geoff Travis of Rough Trade fame. When they were dispatched to record ‘Happy Head’, The Lemon Drops opted to record the album at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, far removed from the bright lights and distractions of that London.

“We’d only worked in smaller studios before that, and a lot of our favourite records were done there” Newton explains. “Going back to the punk days, one of my favourite bands was The Boys, and they’d done ‘Alternative Chartbusters’ there, which is still one of one of my favourite albums of all time. And I remember a ‘ZigZag’ article with pictures of them recording at what looked like a posh studio in Wales. It was homely and nice…”

The band’s chosen producer was Stephen Street, then on a roll with The Smiths.

“He’d just finished ‘The Queen is Dead’, and he was about to start ‘Strangeways Here We Come,’ Newton says. “We were booked in for three weeks, but we ended up finishing it in two. And we didn’t work super long days either”. Street he remembers as being “weird, actually. Every night, about 6 o’clock, before dinner we’d have a game of football outside. Stephen would always come out in a freshly laundered England kit. We were like, ‘where’s he getting all these strips from?’”

Weird or not, Street certainly knew his way around a mixing desk. ‘Happy Head’ still sounds fresh. There’s an obvious nod to Echo & The Bunnymen and the neo-psychedelia of the post punk period, but a love of classic pop structures in also in evidence with Newton’s ringing guitar foreshadowing the retro charms of the Stone Roses. The guitarist slips into an enthusiastic groove when talking about his influences.

“After the punk thing, we learned that a lot of bands were listening to stuff we weren’t really aware of. We knew of the Velvet Underground, but we didn’t really know much about them, so we went back and started listening to a lot garage punk from the late 60s and that became an influence on what we did, especially the melodic sense, which mixed with post punk energy. I can’t over-emphasize the importance of punk, but it was the post-punk thing as well, from 79-81. As a guitar player, I loved the angular sound of Andy Gill from the Gang of Four, Wilko Johnson before that, and the very early Wah! Heat singles, when Pete Wiley played guitar. They’re much overlooked nowadays.”

To these ears, ‘Happy Head’ still stands up well in 2026, especially when you consider how inexperienced the band was - although it helped that both Newton and co-writer Tony Linehan, the band’s bassist, were both steeped in the West Midlands’ band scene - in Newton’s case, through a short-lived punk outfit called Active Restraint.

“Our first album was all the songs we had,” he admits. “We recorded everything that we’d got. When the band formed, Tony and I wrote separately, but then we put our ideas together and tweaked each other’s songs. We’d only been together about a month when we did that first gig at Peacocks, but Tony had already got a bunch of songs and I’d already got a bunch of songs, so that was half a dozen there and I think most of those ended up my being on the album. Once the band started going, we started writing more, so by the time we came to do the album, which was just over a year later, I think we had about 14, 15, 16, songs, which I guess is quite an accomplishment.”

You can buy the remastered and reiussed ‘Happy Head’ here.

The arrival of Tony Xia at Aston Villa was seen as a cause for celebration by supporters when he arrived in 2016. Xia was hailed as a ‘Chinese billionaire’ - just the man to restore the fortunes of the Birmingham club in the aftermath of relegation from the Premier League.

Villa’s previous owner Randy Lerner has just limped back to the States with a £300 million hole in his pocket. Before that, Doug Ellis had presided over nearly quarter of a century of mediocrity, when what is arguably the biggest club in the Midlands seriously under-achieved. None of this, though, bore any comparison with Xia’s disastrous reign, which left fans fearing the club was on to the brink of extinction.

To get the full story, I head to Billesley, a 1930s council estate in South Birmingham. Broadcaster and social historian Carl Chinn greets me on the doorstep of his unpretentious redbrick semi and declares, “Aston Villa is everything”

Chinn - salt and pepper hair, black and white checked shirt - explains that following the club is, “not just about the football. It’s part of who I am as a person. It’s my family.” He and his father Buck were public adversaries of Doug Ellis, who ruled the roost at Villa in two separate spells, spanning more than three decades.

Ellis was succeeded by US billionaire Randy Lerner who arrived in Birmingham with high hopes and deep pockets. By the time he returned across the Atlantic a decade later, he’d received an expensive education in the unforgiving ways of English football. Under his ownership, Villa plunged into the Championship for the first time in the Premier League era in 2016.

In these circumstances, the arrival of Chinese ‘billionaire’ Tony Xia to replace Lerner in the wake of relegation was warmly welcomed by long standing Villa fans like Chinn.

“The idea that this massively wealthy Chinese guy was going to come in with massive backing was exciting, especially after the decline at the end of Randy Lerner’s ownership when everything seemed to be going wrong. I was thinking this could be good. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn in saying that Aston Villa is the biggest club in the Midlands, in terms of history and fan base.

“I just thought, ‘why hasn’t somebody grasped this opportunity?’

When Xia arrived at Villa Park, he told The Guardian his target was to make Villa one of the “top three [clubs] in the world – even the best well known in the world – in less than 10 years.” Given that they’d just been relegated to the second tier this sounded a tad optimistic. All the more so when it was reported that Xia’s conglomerate, The Recon Group, had made a loss of £80 million in the previous financial year.

Keith Wyness, an experienced business executive who’d previously worked at Everton, was drafted in as CEO and quickly sensed a problem.

“I probably started to smell a rat on the very first day”, Wyness admits as he speaks to me on Zoom from his home on Merseyside. The boardroom veteran - bald with grey hair around the temples - declares he was “amazed” the takeover was approved under Football League’s Owners and Directors Test.

“Nevertheless, they took him at face value, and he was approved.”

Xia certainly made funds available in his early months at Villa Park, but Wyness recalls that, “by the February of the second season the money dried up completely. I had a real problem, because obviously, the minute suppliers think there are financial problems, there are no sausage rolls on a Saturday.”

When Villa travelled to Wembley in May 2018 for the Championship play off Final against Fulham, newspapers were already discussing the club’s ‘financial nightmare’ if they failed to secure promotion. In the event, a precise, left footed shot by Tom Cairney took the West Londoners up; leaving the West Midlanders staring into the abyss.

Villa were facing a tax demand of almost £5 million and Wyness, as Chief Executive, had a legal obligation to ensure they weren’t trading in insolvency. He started sounding out potential new investors but his efforts were interpreted as undermining Xia. His reward for trying to save the club from going bust was suspension.

He later won a case for constructive dismissal, and in his absence, Villa courted disaster. According to Wyness, they were “probably a matter of days” from going into administration - and potentially out of business.

The dying weeks of Xia’s time in charge at Aston Villa in the summer of 2018 left supporters like Carl Chinn feeling that their club could disappear altogether. Chinn says, “suddenly, there was a fear. It felt like something was being ripped out of you.”

You might imagine that Aston Villa - with seven FA Cups, seven League titles and a European Cup win to their credit - were “too big to fail”, but viewed through Carl Chinn’s historical prism you’d be asking ‘why not?’

Plenty of other hallowed West Midlands institutions had gone under in recent years, so there was no reason to imagine that a football club would be immune.

Big names like Lucas Industries, which once employed 92,000 people around Birmingham had been swallowed up by overseas investors. The HP Sauce factory, a national landmark, was closed in 2007, when production moved to the Netherlands.

Chinn himself had led a campaign to save the talismanic Rover car factory in Birmingham, only to see the company collapse in 2006 with the loss of 6,000 jobs. Over the next few years plant and machinery were physically removed to China in a “lift and shift” operation.

No one seriously expected that Villa Park would be reconstructed brick by brick in the PRC, but there were real concerns that another iconic West Midlands brand might vanish.

In the event, they were rescued in 2018 by billionaire investor Nasef Sawiris and Wes Edens, from Egypt and the US respectively, whose vaulting ambitions matched those of the fans. They helped Villa secure admission to UEFA’s elite competition, the Champions League for the first time in more than four decades, following a fourth placed finish in the Premier League in 2023-24.

For Carl Chinn, it was nothing less than Villa deserved - and an almost unbelievable transformation from the threat of bankruptcy under Chinese ownership just a few years earlier.

“We all felt it was close,” he acknowledges, with the air of a man suffering PTSD. “You’re thinking, there’s this grand old club, formed in 1874, second winners of the Double, winners of the European Cup, a club that is connected to the community, and we could have ended.

“There was this real concern. Will we be playing football next season? Will there be an Aston Villa? I can’t imagine my life without the Villa”.

Read the full version of this and many other stories in my book Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football which you can order here.

Most major cities had one. In Sheffield, Bristol and Aberdeen, it was green. Manchester’s was pink. In the Black Country, you had a choice of two. I’m talking, of course, about dedicated Saturday evening sports newspapers, rushed ‘off stone’ within minutes of the the final whistle, hurriedly printed, then despatched in a fleet of vans to city centres and suburbs, where thousands of football fans would pore over the day’s results, then delve inside for more detailed coverage of their favourite club.

These publications now seem as archaic as 78 RPM records or quill pens. Fluctuating kick off times following the advent of Sky TV meant publishers could no longer rely on a regular Saturday night audience; the rise of the internet gazumped their sense of immediacy. All in all, their time was up - but they were fun while they lasted; essential reading for any regular match-going fan and plenty of armchair supporters besides.

Birmingham based historian (and fellow Baggies fan) Norman Bartlam has now curated a beautiful collection of one of the best of these papers - the Sports Argus, which ran for 109 years before its closure, 20 years ago this week. It’s a fitting tribute to a much-loved West Midlands institution, featuring contributions from the likes of Steve Tudgay, who became a senior Sky producer; and one-time editor Jeremy Griffin, now a big cheese at The Times. As Norman reminds me, the Argus didn’t only feature big-time football; there were extensive non-league reports, plus cricket, greyhound racing, tennis, rugby union, speedway, bowls and (especially) angling.

You can watch my interview with Norman above, but if you’re looking for a shorthand verdict in the style of Argus, I’d sum up the book this way…

Form Rate: Outstanding.

Buy the book here

Typical. I spend weeks carefully crafting a deep investigation into the world of 3D printed firearms for the BBC - and then the Labour Party decides to descend into one of its periodic bouts of infighting. For the broadcaster, the possibility of a Prime Ministerial defenestration is, understandably, a ‘clear the front page’ moment, but Tuesday’s Downing Street drama unfortunately edged out any preview coverage of the programme I made with Paul Grant (who, as producer, did all the hard work).

Never mind, it was aired on Radio 4 last night and gets another airing today. It’s also available on BBC Sounds, and I do urge you to give it a listen.

Law enforcement has long been wary of the advent of 3D printed guns, which give criminals and violent extremists the opportunity to make deadly weapons at home. So far, the police have been remarkably successful in foiling plots linked to improvised firearms, but as experts pointed out, it only needs one or two of these DIY armourers to be successful to create mayhem on the streets. Three far right extremists said to “idolise Hitler” were jailed last year for planning to attack a mosque, highlighting how the risk from 3D printed guns is no longer theoretical. Indeed, Luigi Mangioni, suspected of shooting dead United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in 2024, is believed to have used a partially printed 3D pistol.

It doesn’t help us on this side of the Atlantic that detailed plans for how to make 3D printed guns are available on various online platforms, promoted by US second amendment activists, who robustly defend their right to bear arms. There’s a sizeable hobbyist community in the States who develop new designs and share them via the internet. These are, of course, also available to anyone in the UK with a laptop and a browser, even though we have far stricter gun laws here. I spoke to the founder of one such group, Gage Moran in Mississippi, who reasoned that, “if somebody's wanting to hurt somebody, they're going to find one way or another.”

Meanwhile, a law banning the downloading or sharing of designs for 3D printed guns has received Royal Assent at Westminster, but - thanks to the quirks of parliamentary procedure - it still isn’t in force. The Home Office told us it would commence “as soon as possible,” without naming a date. Possessing a 3D printed gun or attempting to make one is already a crime in the UK, yer all the evidence we gathered during the making of this programme suggests that in the coming years, the attraction of these kinds of firearms, both to criminals and violent extremists, is only likely to grow.

Listen here to ‘Locked and Downloaded: The Rise Of 3D Printed Guns’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002w5v6

This audiobook ends with a glorious Record Mirror review from 1980 of The Hollywood Brats’ only studio album, pretty much hailing them as the greatest rock n roll band on the planet. Unfortunately for The Brats and their frontman Andrew Matheson, they had split six years earlier, amid a blaze of record company apathy. In Matheson’s mock-heroic telling - and what a bitchy, witty, joyous telling it is - the band were trailblazers, shining a light on the path to Punk by connecting with the true spirit of rock n’roll, in an era when the music biz had become bloated on its own self importance. Whether or not they were ever as good or significant as the singer imagines is kinda beside the point; he thought they were awesome and this swaggering, egotistical self-delusion was the motor for a phuttering career that saw him and his colleagues live in filth, whilst occasionally rubbing shoulders with the filthy rich.

There’s a punch-up with Freddie Mercury; some truly top class freeloading at Cliff Richards’ house, regular passing meetings with Keith Moon, who is never seen without booze or a blonde. They also get signed to a dodgy management company with links to the Italian mafia and the Krays; while a party with porn baron Bob Guccione’s Penthouse ‘pets’ ends in an avalanche of champagne bottles and bloody nose or two. Matheson wrings the Withnail and I comedy from every moment, although there’s pathos, too; the melancholy of missed opportunities and frittered futures.

Fusing Stonesy riffs with the kind of glamboyant fashion sense of the New York Dolls - their closest musical peers - the Brats were both a throwback to the 60s and a nod to the future. After the band had fallen apart, Matheson and keyboard player Casino Steel attracted the interest of what the singer describes as ‘two annoying hippies’. The pair were, in fact, seminal characters in rock music’s next wave - Mick Jones (later of The Clash) and Tony James (Generation X). Steel even joined their proto-punk band London SS before helping found The Boys. The band’s legacy was thus intact - if not, quite, Matheson’s equilibrium. He quit the music biz until the 90s when - somewhat bizarrely - he was nominated for a Best New Solo Artist Award in his native Canada.

This is not a new release. It won a Mojo ‘book of the year’ award in 2015, but don’t let that worry you. It’s frequently laugh out loud funny - a timeless story of foolish and reckless young men following the rock n roll dream - as well as a peek into the sometimes weird, often squalid and always violent world of 70s Britain.

The Brats may - or may not - be ‘Britain’s great lost punk band’ - as per the subtitle - but Matheson, who died last year, is certainly a great lost writer.

Top of the bill are Guy Chadwick’s brilliant, moody alt-popsters The House Of Love, whose shimmering, Alan McGee-approved post-punk kept the indie kids bopping through the late 80s. The resurgent Michael Head, once of Shack and John Peel favourites The Pale Fountains - normally a worthy headliner in his own right - has also been signed up and will appear alongside Birmingham faves Independent Country, who curate the event and - as their name suggests - put a distinctive twang into some of your fave alternative sounds.

Johnson and Finnemore and Ollie Cook & Hogwash complete the line up.

I caught up with the Independent Country guitarist Campbell Docherty, who talked me through the bill. You can watch the full interview below, but here are the edited highlights.

The House Of Love

“I went to see The House Of Love about 18 months ago in Glasgow at the University Union - and that’s where I saw them play 30 years before, when they were in their first flush. It was sold out, and half the audience were my age, and half were my age when I first saw them. What happened to the House Of Love was Nirvana and grunge, and then Britpop and they just got swept away by it. But before that, they were on Top of the Pops. They were a big band that was going somewhere, because of the quality of the songs. The songs were just there. They were just unlucky in the way that music fashion changed on them. But the quality of that band and the quality of the songs…you could tell that kids were discovering all that. And I don’t think it’s parents dragging people along. I think it’s kids just finding some of this music for themselves.”

Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band

“He’s just a great songwriter. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to get them, because that craft of songwriting is something that’s important to us. I know we don’t write the songs that we play, but we rewrite the vocal melodies and - not be too highfalutin about it - we do take the craft of it quite seriously, you know. And Michael Head is just one of the greats, a great songwriter.”

Independent Country

“If you remember Johnny’s Cash’s American recordings - a few of us in the band were big fans at the time. And every now and again, we would take a song and do it in that style, just for fun. This is before Independent Country, when we were in other bands, and we did it in a doom laden Johnny Cash voice, just for fun. But kernel of that idea came back. Some of the indie songs that we do aren’t songs that we were particularly fans of at the time, but it became an exercise in songwriting, because we’re songwriters and arrangers, and we’re creative in different ways, and we found that, importantly, people liked it, so that gave us the opportunity to actually get on stage and play to more people than we’d ever really done in the other bands that were in in the past. So it kind of opened up doors, but it also satisfies our creative edge.”

Johnson and Finniemore

“They’re really, really tasteful, very stripped back, it’s a set of really beautifully played and really well written tunes.”

Ollie Cook & Hogwash

“They’re gonna be the scamps of the day, bringing a bit of youthful energy to the proceedings.”

Get your tickets here https://macbirmingham.co.uk/events/ryland-caravan-2026

*The Ryland Caravan is named in honour of Louisa Ryland, who gifted Canon Hill Park - where MAC is situated - to the people of Birmingham

Watch the full interview with Campbell Docherty of Independent Country here.

I know it might sound a bit chippy, but if this record was released by a gaggle of 18 year-olds from Chortlton or Wythenshawe, the tastemakers at 6 Music and elsewhere would be falling all over themselves to book a Sweetpool session; as it’s by a trio of middle-aged blokes in the West Midlands, I fear it will get overlooked. If so, that would be a great pity, because this is an excellent LP.

There’s a propulsive post-punk energy that drives the record forward; it’s intense, but full of hooks and while it sometimes spins off into trancey psychedelia - as per the appropriately titled Moon - it’s never too noodling to be fun.

Meeting No One From The Train sounds like the bastard offspring of The Gift by the Velvet Underground - an absurdist tale with more than a hint of menace; while current single No One Believes Anything Anymore is a tightly wound blast of social commentary.

Nic Beales jittery guitar lines are offset by Ant Cook’s motorik drumming and Jase Holgate’s dungeon deep bass, all swirling about in a whirlpool of effects, earning the occasional comparisons to Hawkwind. Why, Sweetpool have even been booked to play prog festivals.

I can fully understand that, but I’d say a more accurate reference point would be The Sound, Adrian Borland’s criminally under-rated 80s band, with whom they share a similar love of layered sounds and a lurking sense of anger.

Either way 3AM, Head Of Snakes should be added to any decent playlist.

Order the record here

Willy Vlautin doesn’t merely write ‘songs’ - he composes beautifully observed micro movies which are channelled through the haunting vocal talents of his muse, Amy Boon and complemented by a band who can play brilliantly, whilst understanding that ‘feel’ is the most valuable sonic asset.

New album The Set Up, which is featured extensively in this Nottingham set, is a case in point. Against a simple piano accompaniment, Walking With His Sleeves Down tells the story of a typical Vlautin character - a hollow-eyed loser who, ‘once again has done himself in…disappearing his way through town’; The Meter Keeps Ticking has a more urgent tempo, offering the point of view of a woman set to spring her partner from hospital, while suspecting that ‘if the nurses weren't there…he'd take a swing at you.”

There’s much more to The Delines than perceptive lyrics and Boon’s world weary voice - Vlautin’s own delicate guitar lines, Cory Gray’s lacerating trumpet, Freddie Trujillo’s fluid bass and Sean Oldham’s subtle drumming. All the same, it would be perverse not to to honour the narrative qualities of these vignettes, which bring an accomplished novelist’s eye to the world of Americana.

Both country music and deep soul, the influences Vlautin most heavily draws upon, have always featured characters in desperate situations, but he goes further, developing an entire world view of the States; a gritty perspective of struggle and survival that is all-too rarely featured in Hollywood movies.

Vlautin has a compassionate but unsparing eye, which encompasses opiod addiction, desperate getaways, domestic violence - as well as fleeting moments of passion and joy. These are sad, but all too recognisable lives, ennobled through these wonderful tunes.

Order the new Delines album here.

Once again Leicester City feature prominently in the national football conversation. Ten years on from their fabled Premier League victory they look like they may now drop into the third tier. This makes a good headline, but it’s not extraordinary. Leicester historically have always been a yo-yo team, alternating between the top, the second and occasionally the third division. Indeed, they went into the third division (currently styled ‘League 1’) as recently as 2008. Moreover, Blackburn Rovers, who won the Premier league in 1995, currently have exactly the same prospect of relegation as Leicester.

Leicester have also been docked six points after being charged by the Premier League for overspending according to its Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) during the three years up to and including 2023-24. A body of opinion has it that the excess expenditure was worth it because Leicester were promoted to the top division at the end of that season; this seems to me a misreading.

What’s gone wrong? A popular view, expressed with some emotion by BBC Radio Leicester pundit and former City player Matt Piper, is that the decline dates from the death of the former chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter crash of 2018. The new chairman, Vichai’s son ‘Top’, is said to have neither the interest nor the business expertise that his father had. On top of this, King Power, the family firm running duty-free shops at major Thai airports and downtown locations, is known to be in financial difficulty.

'“Sell the club.” says Piper, along with many among the local football public, and all will be well. I think there’s been an over-emphasis on the owning family and a disregard for the circumstances in which the club found itself following their purchase of it.

Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha and his son Aiyawatt (Top) bought Leicester City in 2010 when the club was still in the Championship. They had no known interest in football and like most people who buy football clubs they saw the club as a means to publicise their business via the global television coverage that English football enjoys; the aim would be to gain promotion to the Premier league, where this coverage was at its maximum.

Their first moves were to stabilise the club, which they did by, for instance, buying the ground back from an American pension fund. There’s no reason to suppose that either father or son knew anything about the football business. In football matters they depended, like all owners, on football specialists – managers, coaches, ‘Heads of Recruitment’ and ‘Directors of Football’. So, despite the popular local view that the club’s fortunes ‘went down with the helicopter’, the respective business abilities of father and son are unlikely to have been a major factor in what’s happened at Leicester City.

Moreover, the apparent decline of the King Power business has probably been overstated simply because the ‘Financial Fair Play’ regulations, in play for most of their tenure, in any event placed limits on their spending.

There’s little doubt that the Srivaddhanaprabha family wanted to see Leicester City in the Premier League and, perhaps, to establish Leicester as a ‘top club’. It seems unlikely, however, that they knew what this would entail. This issue would not have been clarified for them by the fact that that, before they had begun to invest heavily in the team, Leicester – in what was arguably the most improbable achievement in English football history – won the Premier League. The team that did so was modest by Premier league standards. It included seven players who had been rejected by other clubs and two (remarkably gifted, as it turned out) unknown quantities – Ngolo Kante, signed from Caen in 2015 and Riyad Mahrez who had joined the previous year from Le Havre.

Kante, a midfielder of seemingly limitless stamina, was previously unknown to manager Claudio Ranieri, who played him initially him on the wing. Mahrez, another hitherto undisclosed talent, could, as it turned out, unlock any Premier league defence; however, when East Midlands news sent a camera crew to Le Havre to interview his former teammates, they were told that Mahrez’ penchant for tricks had been regarded as needless self-indulgence.

Thus, two of the best players of the decade had washed up, quite by chance, at Leicester City. As soon as they were able, they were off to clubs in the Premier League cartel.

Leicester City’s title win was a delight to football people all over the world whose allegiance was not to one of the premier football brands, who normally mop up all the trophies. But it was also, surely, the key factor in the current situation. The club reached heights where the financial air was too rarefied for them to breathe for long. Contra to the popular view, Leicester City have simply gone back to being Leicester City.

As Champions, Leicester, although not members of the Premier League cartel, had to act as if they were. They were in the Champions League and needed better players. Such players, however, were never going to come to Leicester. Leicester couldn’t pay Champions League money, for one thing, and they were not members of the established coterie of top European clubs within which players of that calibre circulate. Thus, almost none of the players that came to Leicester after the title win was any better than the players the club already had.

German goalkeeper Ron-Robert Zieler, Spanish centre back Luis Hernandez, French-Senegalese midfielder ‘Papy’ Mendy, young Polish winger Bartosz Kapustka, Nigerian forward Ahmed Musa, Algerian striker Islam Slimani…all came and went; none commanded a regular starting place nor lived long in local football memory. Only Wilfred Ndidi, a long-legged ball winner from Nigeria, met the required standard; he would stay ten years. Meanwhile, as some of them have said, the 2016 victors struggled to stay on their perch: they were now often playing two games a week, travelling long distances and always facing opponents determined to beat ’the champions’.

They began to falter – inevitably, one might think, since they had been dramatic over-achievers – and Ranieri, feted as a miracle worker the previous year, was sacked and replaced by his assistant, West Midlands football veteran Craig Skakespeare.

In spite of strong evidence that Cinderella’s coach was turning back into a pumpkin, the King Power people nevertheless promised expansion. The problem of attracting top quality footballers to Leicester could, they decided, be resolved by building a new, £100 million, state-of-the-art training complex outside the town, for which an entire golf course at nearby Seagrave was purchased in 2020. In 2022 plans – so far unconsummated - were announced to enlarge the capacity of the King Power stadium to 40,000.

The notion that Leicester City were ‘no longer a selling club’ gained currency in the town and on the fan web sites. The thinking here has always looked fanciful. There’s no evidence that good players, young or established, are more likely to come to Leicester because of a luxury training facility. And Leicester City cannot now reasonably expect to attract crowds of 40,000 people. That sort of attendance belonged to the 1950s and the record crowd at Filbert Street, Leicester’s ground until 2002, is no more than 47,000 – set in 1928.

As with all clubs now, managers have come and gone. In 2017 Leicester took on Claude Puel, former manager of Lille. Puel had just been sacked at Southampton, the victim, in the words of the Guardian’s Paul Doyle, ‘of Southampton’s admirably unreasonable expectations’ (15 th June 2017). Similar expectations at Leicester saw Puel replaced in 2019 by Brendan Rogers. Rogers had had three years at Liverpool, a cartel club. Perhaps the owners thought that a manager of such pedigree would be the one to maintain Leicester in the big time; that was a popular view in the city. 2023, however, found Leicester facing relegation from the Premier League and Rogers making anguished demands that the team be ‘refreshed’.

The truth is, I think, that Leicester had continued to struggle to recruit in a way that was commensurate with their ambitions. A growing number of players arrived for substantial transfer fees and were seldom seen in a Leicester shirt. Portuguese international Adrien Silva , for instance. Signed for £22 million in 2018, played only 14 games for the first team in two years; Filip Benkovic, signed the same year for £13 million spent two years out on loan before making his debut as a substitute in 2020 – he was helped off almost immediately with a knee injury and left on a free transfer; ex-England fullback Ryan Bertrand, given a two year contract in 2021, spent almost the entire time being treated for injuries and only played four games.

Perhaps the most vexed case was that of Patson Daka, a Zambian striker, signed in 2021 from RB Salzburg where he had been a prolific goalscorer. Daka was given a five year contract at a reputed £75,000 per week. He has since played 123 games, mostly coming off the bench and scored 19 goals – a website in 2025 calculated that he had cost Leicester £12.9 million per goal. The point here, surely, is that cartel clubs can cope with miscalculations and bad bargains of this kind; clubs of Leicester City’s stature (the majority) can’t.

Following Rogers’ departure and relegation to the Championship it became known that Enzo Maresca, a coach at Manchester City, was interested in taking over. Maresca came shrouded in the myths that surround Manchester City (and football managers in general). A club teeming with good players and sustained by the massive wealth of a Gulf monarchy, City’s many successes are attributed nevertheless to the purported wiles of their Catalan coach Pep Guardiola. Maresca made much his association with Guardiola and claimed to know the secrets of Manchester City’s success.

To work his wonders, however, Maresca demanded a strong squad – which included the ex-England midfielder Harry Winks, signed in 2023 on a three year contract at £90,000 a week, and, in all, eight of the division’s top ten earners. Maresca also prescribed a safety-first, possession based brand of football which many of the crowd found stultifying but which resulted in promotion back to the Premier League. Maresca then departed leaving a squad which he and everybody else must have known could not survive in the top flight.

Leicester still have eight of the top earners in the Championship but in almost every case the squad is unsuited to the hard graft of Championship football. They move the ball slowly and lack resilience. Above all they have no effective no.9, the talismanic Jamie Vardy having departed in 2025. Recently the more reliable football web sites have reported that Leicester’s salary bill has been around £200 million, around four times what other Championship clubs spend. This, understandably, has created resentment among other clubs and their supporters. Likewise commentators, again understandably, insist that Leicester have therefore enjoyed an unfair advantage, but there’s little evidence that this overspending has benefited Leicester. On the contrary, they seem to have passed the last ten years in the same cleft stick – behaving like an established Premier league club in defiance of market realities.

The players that have been brought to Leicester over that decade mostly fit the same profile: not the top notch of Premier League standard but unsuited to the bread-and-butter football of the Championship, paid more and for longer than they would likely achieve anywhere else. This has become the subject of many jokes on Facebook, most of them at the expense of ‘Director of Football’ John Rudkin. Rudkin certainly seems to have compounded Leicester’s difficulties but the truth, I think, is that Leicester City, having stumbled improbably into the big time, simply lacked – and would always lack - the wherewithal to stay there, a fact they have been slow to acknowledge.

Comer is Tessa, a working class Liverpool girl made good in London legal circles where, as a barrister specialising in defending men accused of sexual assault, she becomes an expert in spotting loopholes in prosecution arguments. But what happens when she becomes a victim, and the same legal ruses are used against her?

Such is the substance of Miller’s play, which sees Comer glide with astonishing ease (and remarkable physical poise) between the characters who populate Tessa’s world. She plays a posh boy legal eagle, her own mum, an actress in New York, a senior male barrister, along with various other roles, enacting an internal dialogue that highlights the mysogyny rooted deep within the legal system.

In other hands, this might sound more like a lecture than a drama - at the play’s core is a commentary about both class and gender - and given the nature of the subject, it can at times be harrowing. But you can’t look away, because Comer’s 100 minute tour de force is also utterly magnetic, bringing to life the sometimes messy reality of rape and the secondary trauma of a system which places its own priorities above those of justice.

There are no easy solutions to the problem Miller highlights, of course. Acknowledging that there is a problem, though, is a start.

It’s no accident that Prima Facie has been showered with awards and ranks as the National Theatre’s most watched stage to screen production - it’s call to action is timely, gripping and irresistibly watchable.

After learning the basics of business by selling rubber ducks on the streets of Moscow, Abramovich became a successful commodities trader, but got his big break thanks to President Yeltsin’s privatisation spree in the mid 1990s.

Yeltsin was desperate to raise election funds, and auctioned off state-owned Russian assets for his own benefit, under a process widely acknowledged as corrupt.

Abramovich pounced, parting with around $100 million in 1995, to become owner of the state owned oil company Sibneft - part of what economics professor and Russia expert Paul Gregory has described as “the largest single heist in corporate history.”

Two decades later, Abramovich cashed in by selling Sibneft back to another government controlled energy firm, Gazprom, for more than $13 billion.

His lawyers insisted there was no basis for alleging he became rich through crime, but in a court battle with former partner Boris Berezovsky, he admitted paying $10 million to buy off a Kremlin official during the original Sibneft sale.

Using revenues from the oil company, Abramovich diversified his business interests and later shared ownership of the world’s largest aluminium company and the Russian state airline Aeroflot.

Within a decade he became one of the world’s richest men but his success did not go unchallenged at home.

An investigation by MPs in the lower house of parliament, the Duma, claimed in 1997 that the Sibneft deal had cheated the Russian government of $2.7 billion.

The BBC reported that Russia’s Department for Economic Crimes wanted to bring a prosecution for fraud over the purchase of the oil company, but had been prevented from doing so by Yeltsin.

With awkward questions being asked at home, Abramovich moved to internationalise his portfolio, founding London-based investment company Millhouse Capital in 2001.

He and his family would eventually own more than 70 properties in the capital, including their principal residence - a £120 million, 15-bedroom mansion in Kensington.

Back home, Abramovich combined business success with political influence, becoming elected governor of the remote and sparsely populated province of Chukotka, between 2000 and 2008.

He was a noted philanthropist, but the Interfax press agency reported in 2004 that government accounts for this traditionally poverty stricken region had been questioned by auditors - not least because of huge tax breaks given to Sibneft.

When he quit as governor, dissident journalist Yulia Latynina wrote a striking, if rather cryptic summary, in a Russian tabloid.

She said, “Abramovich spent an enormous amount of money on Chukotka.

“He built everything in the region from the airport to hotels and hospitals. He was kind of praying for the forgiveness of his sins in the region.

“It’s just like the Russian trader who stole something and then lit a candle in church. Chukotka was Abramovich’s personal candle.

“And minimising Sibneft’s taxes was just incidental.”

Among the beneficiaries of those ‘minimised taxes’, it seemed, was Chelsea FC.

You can order Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football here