Nick Hornby, author of the greatest work of non-fiction since Fraser Pettigrew s magnificent Hibernian Greats, is much the same in person as he appears on paper: a cheerful, animated, amusing, fast-talking, self-deprecating obsessive with a train of thought that tends to veer off on numerous tangents but which inevitably and unerringly arrives back at the station from which it started, that station being Arsenal.
Fever Pitch, Hornby s hilarious first-person account of the trials and tribulations of the chronic football addict, has just been turned into a low-budget feature film starring Colin Firth and Sarah Gemmell, and while it barely even begins to measure up to the original, it should strike a fond chord of recognition among those who can relate to the matter in hand. Sipping coffee in the Clarence Hotel, Hornby comes across as a fairly contented soul, although it s difficult to figure out whether this owes more to Arsenal s recent run of fine form than to any especial sense of career satisfaction.
So, Nick, what s all this I ve heard about you not even going to live games any more?
(Quizzical furrow of brow) Oh yeah, that was a misquote. It said I didn t bother with live games these days. It should have said, I don t bother with SKY live games any more. I was a bit pissed-off when I saw that, it s just not true, I still go to every home game. I ve missed more than I used to, cause I ve been travelling a lot more, so I ve missed two this season.
Has it been a shock to the system to see Arsenal playing watchable football?
Well, this year s been just amazing, even some of the games we haven t won have been fantastic. I think the new manager s brilliant . . .
Do you ever miss George Graham at all?
(Emphatic shake of head).
How did you feel about the whole bung thing?
I had no sympathy for him whatsoever.
Really?
Nah, course not. How does he deserve any?
Well, he was hardly the only manager at it . . .
Yeah, well it s like rapists, isn t it? he replies, drawing a rather extreme parallel, one in ten are caught, but I don t feel that sorry for the one who is. I mean it s just quite clearly wrong, it s my money, I ve been paying for the club and he s been carrying it off in a briefcase . . . I wouldn t have minded if it had been for Bergkamp, but it was for two really dodgy Scandinavian players (John Jensen and Pal Lydersen), one of whom never played for the first team, and the other one took three years to get his first goal. If you compare what we had then to what we have now . . .
Do you think Graham became too complacent?
Well, his last two years were awful, there was just literally nothing to watch at Highbury at all. And he set great store by the Euro thing, but the Cup Winners Cup is such a poxy little competition. Y know, you play two games before Christmas against a team from Cyprus and a team from Norway, then you maybe play a decent team in the quarterfinals, a good team in the semis, then you re there, and that was the whole season as far as he was concerned. Everything else went out the window, and we had to sit through twenty-one League games when nothing was happening, and this went on for two years . . .
Did it ever occur to you to just stop going?
No way. I enjoy the occasion too much to worry about the actual ninety minutes. I mean, I worry about it, I get fed up and frustrated, but I d just feel weird being anywhere else at three o clock on Saturday. And your team not playing well is part of the drama of it, as well. You re in this permanent narrative of what s going to happen to your team, and if they re no good for a couple of years, then that s just part of it.
One of the things that struck me as strange about Fever Pitch was your complete indifference towards the English national team . . .
I m not alone there, he replies, I don t think it s a unique reaction, especially among people who had to put up with that shit in the mid- 80s. It s extremely hard to identify with a team when their fan profile is, you know, drunken Nazis making monkey noises at their own players.
Haven t things improved a bit over the last few years?
They have, yeah, Euro 96 helped a lot.
Did you feel personally, emotionally involved with the England team s run?
Erm . . . (very long pause) . . . I felt emotionally involved in the way you can get emotionally involved in a good movie. I was interested, and when we lost, I felt gutted, but sort of mildly. Nothing like with Arsenal.
Another strange feature of Fever Pitch was the lack of any real venom towards Spurs, Arsenal s closest rivals . . .
Well, I really wanted football fans to identify with the book, rather than just Arsenal fans, so to make it too explicitly partisan would have been . . . I mean, they know how I feel, it comes with the territory, if you re an Arsenal fan you hate Spurs, simple as that.
Do you still feel in awe when you meet the Arsenal players?
Oh yeah, well they re among the most famous people in the country. It could be because they re so strong and healthy, but as soon as you meet them, you know that they re men of enormous substance.
Talking of substance, what do you think of the drinking, drug-taking and general debauchery that Arsenal have become associated with?
Well, it is incredible, by this stage you wonder if they re trying to do it because it s expected of them . . .
Do you think it s anything to do with the fact that they live in the capital, with all its myriad attractions?
Well, none of them actually live in London, that s one of the things I found most disappointing about them, they all live in Hertfordshire.
What are your feelings about that noted philosopher, sage, singer, savant and wifebeater Paul Gazza Gascoigne?
He s the epitome of this whole New Lad thing, really. I mean, some aspects of his behaviour are just horrible. I know you never know what s true and what s not true with the media, but he admitted to beating his wife, and I can t really find any sympathy for wifebeaters. I wonder about his future sometimes, I mean, you can t really see him as the next England manager, can you? You know, taking the team to Amsterdam for a crunch World Cup game, he d probably give the game a miss and go on the piss in the red-light district. I mean, presumably he s all right financially, but you can imagine him propping up some bar in 20 years time and saying (adopts Biffa Bacon accent) I used to play for England, me !
What do you make of the whole New Lad phenomenon?
Well, I ve yet to meet anyone who could explain properly to me what it is. It s as if someone s only just discovered that great numbers of men are interested in beer and football. But, y know, once people invent something, then it exists.
What s your reaction to the proliferation of decent football writing since the success of Fever Pitch?
I m happy that there s more of it than there was . . . well, there never used to be any football books at all, really, except crappy ghosted autobiographies by players who could barely talk properly, never mind write. So I was worried that Fever Pitch wouldn t sell, because football books just didn t sell unless they had a star on the front cover with his autograph. But I knew there was a market for well-written football stuff. Outside the daily broadsheets, it had always struck me that football was really under-exploited by writers. So I wouldn t say there s too much of it all, really, it s just the way it should be. But if you re going to write about it now, people ll say you re just jumping on the bandwagon.
For all that, there is, without doubt, a disturbingly trendy football bandwagon rolling at the moment, with celebrities who know nothing about the game (and care even less) falling over one another in the rush to declare allegiance to whatever team they like the look (or the league position) of. Given that these people can hardly be trusted to stick around, does Nick Hornby think the game s profile is in danger of falling as rapidly as it soared a few years ago?
That s an interesting point, he muses, I dunno, I can t answer that. Don t really care, I mean it won t stop me following it.
Do you think some of the excitement has gone from the game?
Yeah, definitely, quite a lot of it has. The football s a lot better now, there s no comparison, but since the Premiership and Sky TV and the Taylor Report . . . that s taken a lot of the passion out of the crowds, the crowds are just a lot quieter now. But without that, we wouldn t have Bergkamp and Zola and Ravanelli and all those people. And I just love watching Bergkamp the last two years, it s been fantastic.
You mentioned your distaste for Sky TV. Is there an element of reluctance to put money in Rupert Murdoch s pocket?
No, well I have Sky now, I didn t even want to get it, but they cabled our street. It s just that I see too much football now, in a way that I didn t before. I mean, I didn t see Arsenal on TV until I was about 25, and now there s a game on nearly every other night. It just irritates me when they try and tell you that Southampton versus West Ham is a crunch game, they hype it up like a heavyweight title fight, it s ridiculous. Then during the game, it s nil-nil, it s pissing rain and no-one looks remotely likely to score, and Andy Gray is going on as if this was the most thrilling roller-coaster event in the history of televised entertainment: (affects hyperactive Weedjie accent) WHAT A TREMENDOUS DEFENSIVE HEADER!!
Even the other channels do it. Did you see Man United versus Porto there? First of all, they were assuming that we all wanted Man United to win because it was for the good of the country, which is obviously untrue, everyone despises them except their fans. And then once they went three-up, they were saying . . . and Porto only need one goal to throw this tie wide open!!! then they went four-up and it was Now can Man United keep a clean sheet??? . Then Ron Atkinson said United are home and dry, this tie is over , and then there was this deafening silence and he said But it ll still be a GREAT GAME in two weeks time!!! you could tell Brian Moore had just elbowed him in the ribs. And they do it all the time, they try and tell you black s white, I mean people know when they re being lied to.
It s time to take Mr. Hornby to task: in 1979, he made a Faustian pact that he d accept a Tory victory in the General Election if Arsenal won the Cup Final the same week. And now?
I d do the same again, I m ashamed to say.
But is he remotely as interested now as he would have been in 79, given the almost total lack of policy differences between the two parties?
I ll still be glad that the Tories have gone.
But do you really think they will be?
Yeah, they haven t a prayer. I mean, I know nothing s really going to change, but the all-out assault on single mothers and the homeless, that ll stop. I ve no enthusiasm for New Labour but I m just really looking forward to putting the boot into people like David Evans (Tory MP for Luton with an antipathy to black bastards ), Cecil Parkinson, Michael Howard, Portillo, all these disgusting human beings. I m not malicious, but I really want to see those people humiliated, I hope it s as ugly and humiliating as possible when it happens.
When you were writing the screenplay for Fever Pitch, what persuaded you to set the whole thing during the 88/ 89 season?
Well, it was just crying out to be done that way. I mean, that season was like all the great epic movies, it had everything, the full complete range of emotions in one year. And that game . . . the last minute of the last game, and it was against the one team that you wouldn t feel at all sorry for (Liverpool), they d won the League for about five years running.
Looking back, though, they didn t make themselves as obnoxious to neutrals as Manchester United do now . . .
Well, part of that is that you knew half their fans were on the dole, there wasn t the same queue of fair-weather, glory-hunting, bandwagon-jumping idiots that have latched onto United.
Was there any difference at all between Paul (the lead character in the film, based on Nick) and yourself?
I think the difference between Paul in the film and me in the book is that I have an insight into my own condition, otherwise I couldn t have written the book, it was sort of a prerequisite.
Was Sarah (Paul s girlfriend in the film) based on anyone in particular?
Nah. She was sort of a mix-and-match of a few people. And a lot of those lines were directly taken from experience, girlfriends being completely unsympathetic when Arsenal had lost . . .
What s worse is when they pretend to give a fuck about the whole thing . . .
Yeah, it is worse, cause you know that their sympathy is going to evaporate at a certain point. It s like aww, I know you must be feeling awful cause your team lost then they give you five minutes and it s right, what shall we do now? and you re like you don t understand, life s not worth living any more .
Does the pain of a bad defeat compares to the pain that accompanies the break-up of a relationship?
(Hesitantly) Well, no, not really, cause with football the relationship always goes on in one sense or another, that s the terrible thing about it, there s never any finality, you know you re going to be back for more, you re in this for life.
Can I take you back for a minute to that moment when Michael Thomas won the League for Arsenal with the last kick of the season . . .
Yes, please, do, go ahead, by all means . . .
. . . Would that still rank as the single most joyous moment of your entire existence to date?
Yeah. Easily. A moment of pure ecstatic primal joy that can never, ever be beaten.
You enjoyed it, then?
It was incredible. And something that s so kind of uncomplicatedly brilliant. I mean, I wrote about this in the book, about all the things you could compare it to (sex, childbirth, career acclaim, winning the pools) but none of them come close to a situation where you re plunged from purgatory into paradise with one kick of a ball. (Pause) I mean, seeing your book do really well is obviously brilliant, but a book is a really slow process, you know, it takes ages to write, then you give it to your editor and he says this is quite good then there s a couple of reviews and they say it s quite good . . . but it s nothing near as immediate. The only way you could get that sort of thrill is if you got an idea for a book, and then you opened the paper the next day to see it at number one in the bestseller lists . . . which is impossible really . . . no, that moment will never be beaten.
Do you get a buzz out of the esteem in which you re held by other really good writers?
Yeah, I get an immense amount of pleasure out of that, y know; to know that someone you like likes your book is a brilliant feeling. But what s even better is . . . you know, there s great books and there s great books. Like, I ve read books that struck me as absolutely brilliant, but that I haven t felt any personal connection with. But when you open a book and it makes you go God, this is me, this is incredible, this is saying things to me personally , you know, that sense of absolute connection and identity. I know it happens with Irvine Welsh s stuff, it happens with Roddy s books, and sometimes it happens with me; somebody ll write you a letter saying that was me totally and that s pretty incredible, when you think about it. n