When the best place to get some rest is a non-league football match
It felt at the time like a piece of behaviour that I couldn’t fully account for. More than three decades on, it feels like a piece of foreshadowing for the person I am today.
On the August Bank Holiday weekend in 1990, I was a fortnight short of 18 years old and halfway through my A-levels. And this meant one thing, my first music festival. There was no conversation to be had with my parents about it. They knew who I was going with and knew that I was a reasonably not-idiotic type of teenager. I’d be fine. Well I was, but it was a closer thing than I’d ever have admitted to them.
For me, Friday was all about Faith No More, who were second on the bill on the main stage behind The Cramps, after warming up with Jane’s Addiction and Mudhoney in the afternoon and spending the intervening periods generally drinking and having a splendid time. I’d seen FNM the previous April at the Brixton Academy, a show recorded for posterity for the non-too-subtly titled “You Fat B*st*rds” (their asterisks), which was released on video later that year, and while I wasn’t sure that they were my type of thing—all that gurning— but they’d put on a decent show and I was keen to give them a second go. I quite liked The Real Thing, the album they’d brought out a year earlier, but I was aware that, while this might have felt like a debut album, there was much more to them than that.
And they were lousy. Fucking lousy. It was primarily a matter of the sound quality. At the start the drums were—and I say this as a drummer—almost absurdly too loud, and things didn’t improve that much thereafter, either. Some months after the shenanigans of this weekend had passed, I was in a record shop in London and saw a bootleg vinyl copy of this show for sale. This one, to be precise, which you can hear here. I bought it because I kind of couldn’t believe how bad they’d sounded (and bear in mind that I’d seen them live four months earlier), and the bootleg was exactly as I’d remembered. (If anything, this version doesn’t fully capture how awful it sounded both in flesh and on vinyl.)
I kinda forgot about Faith No More in the end. By the time they put out another album it was 1992 and I was almost twenty and a substantially different person. I would love to tell you about what happened throughout the rest of that night, getting on for three and a half decades ago, so here’s what I definitely do and don’t remember. I’m not 100% certain who I even went to Reading with, though I know I didn’t go on my own. I know that I didn’t sleep at all that Friday night, and in an era before energy drinks, other stimulants were involved. Which they might have been, I do not remember.
What I know for absolute certain is that I was in cafe near Reading Railway station by late the following morning, every synapse of my entire brain feeling as though it had been on the receiving end of 1000 volts of electricity, with a full English breakfast and a cup of tea, reading the sports page of the local newspaper. My brain was still dancing a little bit, and while perusing the sports pages of the local newspaper an idea started to form. Involuntary, almost like a spasm.
Reading FC were not going to be playing at Elm Park that weekend. Even the Football League in the late 1980s wouldn’t have been so daft as to schedule a League football match on the same weekend as a music festival on the outskirts of town with 40,000 people in attendance. But. BUT. From my St Albans watching, I knew that another team in their division, Wokingham Town, were groundsharing there while getting on with some renovation work to their Finchampstead Road ground.
I’d been there with City a couple of years earlier, just after Christmas. It needed renovating, even by the… relaxed standards of the time. I narrowed my eyes and squinted down the fixture list to the Vauxhall-Opel League Premier Division. Saturday 25th. Wokingham Town vs Harrow Borough. 3pm. I couldn’t, could I? In the middle of a music festival? Non-league football? Looking back, it feels almost subversive. At the time, I thought, “you’re such a fucking dweeb”. Didn’t stop me from going, though. I was effectively twiddling my thumbs until The Pixies the following evening anyway.
Things I can’t remember: how I got to Elm Park. I’d not been there before, and my sole visual memory getting there that day is approaching the ground up a road of terraced houses and arriving on a corner, a stand to my right and an open terrace to my left. How I knew which way to go is lost to the ages. It was open. I paid however much it was, about two or three pounds at the time, and went in. It was a scorchingly hot day on a scorchingly hot weekend, and I’d been awake for something like the previous 30 hours. It is somewhat surprising that I wasn’t declared a biohazard. What I smelled like by this time is just about anybody’s guess, but I wouldn’t suggest guessing anything positive.
The teams came out to a ripple of applause, Wokingham kicked off, and scored within three minutes. I was sitting on the top step of the terracing, nearest to the exit. There was a cheer around the ground. The attendance that day, I’ve managed to find out thanks to the wonders of the internet, was 416. It was no great surprise to me that they’d scored early. They’d been runners-up in the league to Slough Town at the end of the previous season, while Harrow hadn’t finished so far above the relegation places.
The teams kicked back off and… I fell asleep. And I don’t mean ‘propped up against a wall and nodding off’ asleep, I mean ‘grab me a nightcap, a duvet and my teddy bear’ asleep, laying down asleep. I’d love to give you a write-up of the rest of the match but I can’t, because I was out. The hot weather and the warm concrete terrace had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I came to with a face peering into mine. Thankfully a steward rather than a police officer, since I couldn’t undertake with 100% certainty what substances might be in my pockets. He helped me to my feet. “It finished 1-0 to Wokingham”, he said. “I think you made the best decision, to be honest”. Other things I can’t remember: how I got back to the campsite. But being 17 years old, it only took that hour and forty minutes of sleep to breathe enough life into me to last the rest of the Saturday evening. My brain synapses had recovered sufficiently to not feel as though they were flailing around with sparks spitting out the end of them. We go again.
Wokingham Town did return to a revamped Finchampstead Road, but the costs of the renovation had spiralled out of control, and with debts approaching unsustainable levels the ground was sold in 1999. In 2004, following five years of ground-sharing, they merged with another club to form Wokingham & Emmbrook FC. They’re still going to this day, currently as members of the Combined Counties League Premier Division North. At the time of writing, they’re one place off the bottom of the table.
On my voyage of filling in the gaps to write this, I came across a photograph:
Could it be? It’s definitely from a Wokingham Town match. I found it on a Wokingham Facebook page. And not only is that definitely Elm Park, but another quick check at the Harrow Borough team photograph for the 1990/91 season, confirms that yes, this is their kit for that season. Add in the greenness of the grass (remember, this match was played at the end of August), and I was almost certainly at the match in this photograph from 33 and a half years ago. By the looks of it. I’d be behind the Harrow number three’s right shoulder, about a hundred yards back, snoring away on the top step of the terrace, maybe occasionally muttering in my sleep about wanting a biscuit.
And because—well, if you’re anything like a regular reader of this place you know exactly why—I’ve got the name of one of the players for sure, while I can hazard a guess at the other. First, the guess. My guess at the Harrow number three is Eamonn O’Connor, based entirely on him being the captain and wearing the number three shirt in the return match later in the same season. The Wokingham player, meanwhile, is easy to identify because he was already named on the Facebook page. He’s Darron Wilkinson, who later played 38 games for Brighton between 1992 and 1994. I’m excited to find that Darron was born in Reading and later spent time coaching at Harrow Borough. The triangle is complete.
A fortnight short of my 18th birthday, I thought I was a dweeb for doing this. With the benefit of hindsight, what I can really see is the extent to which I’m merely foreshadowing the person that I am today. And I do have to admit to myself that both of these statements can be true at the same time.
But I was back in time for the Buzzcocks too, so, you know.