THE SARTORIAL ELEGANCE OF SERIE A

It all started to go wrong in and around 1989. Strange details began to permeate the shirts of England’s old First Division: white, triangular, expressionistic flecks on Liverpool’s Candy sponsored jersey, a terrible zigzag effect making a mess of Manchester City’s, and a similar geometric mash-up staining Chelsea's and Everton’s. At least they still fitted.

Meanwhile, on the continent the football kit was reaching its zenith, Italy's Serie A at the epicentre of it all. AC Milan and Internazionale were exploiting stripes in a manner rarely bettered, with away kits that were possibly even smarter still. In Spain, Barcelona were strutting around in a contender for the best football shirt of all time, a svelte little number that Gary Lineker was lucky enough to sport for the entire three years he spent playing for the Catalan giants. Anderlecht, Auxerre, Ajax… You should see the jerseys they were wearing in Brazil.

In fairness, English clubs too had contributed to this wealth of taste. Adidas and Umbro dominated the market, refining classic templates that would flatter the most incongruous of club colours: simple collars, minimal trim, subtle micropatterning, pared-down club crests adorning sensibly sized kits that flattered the physique. Back then it was not unusual for teams to wear the same strip for as many as three consecutive seasons, and so any changes came gradually. Tottenham and Arsenal, for example, were assured sartorial clemency until the summer of 1990, protected from those bizarre experiments introduced a year earlier.

It was during Italia '90 that it became evident that those strange goings-on in England were more than a mere aberration. Ironically, Umbro did quite a good job with England's jersey. Sure, there was a spot of striped, buttoned-up tomfoolery playing about the collar, but it fitted okay and the colour scheme remained as it should (we’ll forget the third kit ever happened). Indeed, the better teams that qualified for that World Cup got off lightly, a slight loosening of fit being the worst crime committed against the shirts of Argentina, Brazil, Holland, West Germany and the hosts, Italy. Instead, it was in the strips of nations like Romania, Columbia, the USA, Cameroon and Czechoslovakia (all manufactured by Adidas, incidentally) that one could see sewn the prophecy of the football shirt gone mad – excessively silky fabrics, ultra-wide V-neck collars, misplaced stripes, a looser fit.

Back to Serie A. What was it about those shirts that resonates to this day? We need to start in the early 1980s when, like with cycling jerseys, football kits were beholden to their material: heavy acrylic with a tendency to stretch and hang. They looked pretty good actually, but on closer inspection, a little cheap. Take Michel Platini decked out in Juventus colours: a flimsy excuse for a collar, plunging neck-line and, except when Juve were reigning champions and wore the scudetto, no shield to speak of. (This does seem to be a Juventus thing: other clubs more normally attached their badge to the upper arm.)

Then for the 1986-87 season S.S.C. Napoli introduced a real game-changer. Manufactured by newly conceived sports’ brand NR (Ennerre), it was the jersey in which Napoli won their first Italian Championship, Diego Maradona at the helm. There was nothing particularly technical about this jersey – it was made from something called lanetta, which was really just acrylic – but it featured the club’s crest on the chest, a classic V-neck collar, was sympathetically proportioned and a pleasing shade of blue.

1987-88: Kappa was the next company to raise their game, tidying up Juventus’s kit (still no badge though) and making a good go of AC Milan’s: a thin, traditional collar with no trim, a satisfying gauge of stripe, the sponsor’s name MEDIOLANUM, replete with minimally obscure symbol, and the Kappa emblem – the silhouette of a man and a woman sat back-to-back – in white. AC Milan won the league that season, and the shirt looked even better the next with the scudetto sewn onto it.

1988-89: Kappa took over Sampdoria from Ennerre, who hadn’t done a bad job. Sampdoria had won the Coppa Italia the previous season and thus bore the coccarda (a roundel in, as with the scudetto, the colours of the Italian flag) upon their breast. Sampdoria’s strip never fails to please. Comprised of blue shirts with a red, black and two white horizontal stripes wrapped around the trunk, with a crossed shield in the middle, it’s one of the most distinctive shirts of any league. Moreover, the club’s crest (now attached to the sleeve to make room for the coccarda) displays the silhouette of a shabby looking sailor smoking a pipe; the club colours bend sinister behind him. Shorts and socks are white so as not to detract (a jersey should never be judged in isolation but appreciated within the context of the entire kit).

At the same time, German firm Uhlsport was providing for Internazionale and Bologna. These shirts were notable for their lack of give, which may or may not have been a deliberate ploy to prevent players from tugging at them. Back then Inter were using their short-lived ‘serpent’ logo, which is a bit more interesting that the montage of letters they’ve employed since. The hue of blue was slightly lighter than now, and the sponsor – Misura, a health food manufacturer – brought with it red dots that, along with the gold star denoting ten title triumphs, added some welcome colour to the otherwise exclusively blue and black mix. The away strip was better still: same black socks, same black shorts, but a white shirt with alternative blue and black diagonal rhomboids in a line across the chest.

[Courtesy: Fotboll.Farg.Form.]

1989-90: When Italian sportswear company ABM took on Fiorentina’s kit the previous season, they’d provided a decent enough shirt, but there was a problem: they matched this with purple shorts. Moreover, these shorts, as is often the case, were made from a different material than the jersey. The effect was that Fiorentina weren’t actually playing in the same colour, but in two shades of the same colour, and two shades of a colour as vivid as purple. Perhaps sensing their error, Fiorentina were now issued with white shorts, giving them maybe the best strip in the division; the sight of Roberto Baggio battling against Juventus in that year’s UEFA Cup final is one of the era’s iconic images.

Inter still had the same strip but as reigning champions wore the scudetto in place of that serpent on a shield, with the circular montage of letters present on the upper arm. And Kappa finally got around to using the same template for Juventus that they’d been using for AC Milan, a lovely looking shirt sponsored by department-store chain Upim.

1990-91: Had the World Cup not been held in Italy might things have remained as they were? Probably not, but if there’s a high water-mark for kit design it can be found here. Torino had just been promoted from Serie B (as champions) and were rewarded with a contract with ABM: maroon shirts, white shorts with black socks, sponsored by white goods manufacturer Indesit. (Sadly for Fiorentina, ABM decided to bring back the purple shorts.)

Ennerre was making similarly good work of Roma and Napoli's shirts. Replacing lanetta with polyester, these kits were micropatterned, creating subtle shifts in the fabric’s texture to make a motif out of the manufacturer’s logo.

        Sampdoria was now supplied by ASICS, but the kit looked very much the same. AC Milan had gone over to Adidas but the kit looked very much the same – a rare triumph for Adidas in this context. Juventus’s stayed with Kappa, but the kit looked very much the same, save for the addition of the coccarda awarded for the previous season's victory in the Coppa Italia. The best shirt of the year was probably Bologna away: white with maroon and navy equilateral triangles arranged in horizontal lines, their number diminishing as they worked their way down the front of the shirt.

Unlike many of my generation, it wasn’t Channel Four’s Football Italia on a Sunday that provoked my interest in Italian football, but a VHS tape entitled 110 Goals Italia Style – 1988-89 (quickly followed by 110 Goals Italia Style 2 – 1989-90). I was certainly grateful for Channel 4’s effort when it came but was a more faithful viewer of Gazzetta Football Italia on a Saturday morning (and Transworld Sport too, which would also round up the previous weekend's Serie A action). The reasons were threefold. First, I preferred playing football to watching it, so on a Sunday I was normally kicking a ball about a park wearing either my Internazionale away top, circa 1989-90, or my Fiorentina home shirt, circa 1990-91. Second, there was James Richardson, who had much more to do hosting Gazzetta than he did introducing Sunday’s games, sitting in front of cafes waving La Gazzeta dello Sport in our faces, bringing us up-to-date with recent events. Third, all of this started off the back of Paul Gascoigne’s move to Lazio in 1992, by which time I was taking my A-levels, shortly to leave for university, which distracted me.

But aside from all that, I’d become disillusioned with what I perceived to be a waning aesthetic. What had begun in the English First Division in the late 1980s was spilling over onto Italian shores in the early-to-mid 1990s. Umbro, who had hitherto made kits for Cagliari, Lazio and Parma, got their hands on Napoli and Inter’s, absolutely destroying them in the process. Italian brand Lotto muscled in on Torino, Fiorentina, AC Milan and Atalanta, dressing them in shirts that resembled fake replicas sold down weekend markets. ASICS started getting inventive with Sampdoria’s jersey, adding drawstrings around the collar. Football fashion was suddenly kitsch.

Football shirts would never be the same, and probably never will be.

LINER NOTES: THE STATE I AM IN [2009-10]

1.     In the Mirror – Field Music

2.     The State I am In – Belle and Sebastian

3.     Inimigo – Mercenarias

4.     Rock Europeu – Fellini

5.     Ilha Urbana - Muzak

6.     Sin in My Heart – Siouxsie and the Banshees

7.     Wax and Wane – Cocteau Twins

8.     Poptones [Peel Session] – Public Image Ltd.

9.     Jack Kerouac – Gang 90

10.   Leave Me Alone – New Order

11.   Vitamin C – Can

12.   Antenna – Sonic Youth

13.   51st Anniversary – The Jimi Hendrix Experience

14.   Harvest Moon – Neil Young

15.   Effortlessly – Field Music

16.   Constellations – Darwin Deez

17.   Chemistry – Semisonic

18.   Intentions – The Whitest Boy Alive

19.   Ivy & Gold – Bombay Bicycle Club

20.   Many of Horror – Biffy Clyro

21.   Whitechapel – The Vaselines

22.   Down from Dover – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

23.   There’s a Ghost in My House – R. Dean Taylor

It was around this period that I came to realise that a spade was no longer called a spade but more likely referred to as a soil redistribution enabler. I knew this because I was now working as a freelance transcript writer/audio typist, which involved the production and delivery of customised transcripts, presentations and summary documents for a broad range of clients. I was given assignments at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Inland Revenue, Ofcom, what was then known as the Competition Commission, Social Services, the Performing Rights Society (PRS), Stringfellows (staff disciplinary hearings), the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), and with various banks (Deutsche Bank, Citibank, UBS, Credit Suisse, etc.) and private investment firms. It was interesting work but badly paid and quite full-on, although for someone adverse to stress I cope well when put under it. I could handle the short notice, the tight deadlines and meticulous nature of the business, but certain jobs – normally the financially orientated ones – brought me into contact with some real burks. You know, the sort who use the verb ‘disconnect’ as a noun to describe nothing more technical than a difference of opinion. More to the point, when you’re being paid by the minute to transcribe the unintelligible rantings of a banker who’s been told they aren’t getting paid their yearly bonus – a dividend that would often amount to more than double my yearly salary – it can do things to your morale.

Some people see no harm in the branding of language, of jargon, discussing top-down strategies, taking helicopter views, of obfuscation. It saves them the trouble of having to construct sentences that actually mean anything, or communicate something approaching an actual idea. I doubt these are the sort of people who listen to Field Music. If that sounds tenuous then consider that Duffy won Best British Album of the Year at the 2009 Brit Awards, Florence and The Machine the same in 2010, Lily Allen was given an Ivor Novello Award, and Robbie Williams was honoured for his ‘outstanding contribution to music’.

'In the Mirror' derives from Field Music’s third album, ostensibly known as Measure, released early in 2010. A slow burner, it begins with a portentous prelude played out on the guitar: then drums, piano, guitar again, this time playing a more measured riff, followed by bass, vocals, harmonies. Was this the moment Field Music’s reviews began alluding to Steely Dan? It has something of that about it.

Push Barman to Open Old Wounds is a two-disc compilation by Belle and Sebastian that gathers together their early EPs and singles. As far as I’m concerned you can do away with disc two: the first four tracks are alright, but if that’s what you’re after you may as well buy the original EP, This Is Just a Modern Rock Song. As for 'The State I Am In', it’s taken from Belle and Sebastian’s first EP, Dog on Wheels, part of a trio released over the course of 2007. I had Lazy Line Painter Jane and 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds of Light but not Dog on Wheels, and so 'The State I Am' In was absent from my collection. It’s a great tune and a reminder of a time when Belle and Sebastian stood outside of the mainstream.

I assume that my Cornish friend wanted his CD back. Why else would I have included 'Inimigo' by Mercenarias, 'Rock Europeu' by Fellini and 'Ilha Urbana' by Muzak lined up in a row. The disc in question is The Sexual Life of the Savages, a compendium of São Paulo post-punk I’d borrowed a year earlier. These three tracks are distinct enough: 'Inimigo' echoes The Slits, 'Rock Europeu' brings to mind The Stranglers, while 'Ilha Urbana' sounds like Magazine jamming with Joy Division, but all sung in Portuguese. I’ve tried to mitigate this disparity by following up with something in the same vein, but sung in English.

I think it was the Roz Childs who played me Siouxsie and the Banshees – 'Happy House', 'Israel', 'Spellbound'. I’m guessing she had The Best of Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was one of those moments when you realise you like an artist without really knowing much about them or the names of their songs or whether there’s a particular record you’re meant to own. I don’t know why I took a chance on the album Juju but I’m glad I did. 'Sin in my Heart' is the standout track. The tempo slowly increases throughout the duration the song, Siouxsie Sioux plays a simple guitar part, which is the tune’s signature, freeing up John McGeoch to add Adrian Belew-style licks over the top.

I wanted to revisit the Cocteau Twins’ record I’d flirted with in my youth, provided by the guy who’d go on to introduce me to Portishead. The album was Garlands, and the tracks that had taken my fancy back then were 'Wax and Wane', 'Blind Dumb Deaf' and 'Shallow Then Halo'. I suppose we have YouTube to thanks for all this retrospective knowledge. I certainly wasn’t going to buy a copy of Garlands to find out – not now, in my financially stretched state – and ended up downloading 'Wax and Wane' after concluding that it was probably my favourite of the three tunes that were the favourite of the eight on the original record.

Post-punk… it was something that I hadn’t really given much thought. Wasn’t it just another word for new wave? No, new wave was poppier and took itself less seriously. Blondie were new wave. The Ramones, Talking Heads and Devo were kind of new wave. In the UK, maybe Buzccocks and The Undertones. You could dance to new wave. You might be able to dance to post-punk too, but there was something about it that felt too earnest or preoccupied with the avantgarde. [Incidentally, I once transcribed an event for the PRS where Feargal Sharkey, formerly of The Undertones, was one of the speakers. Would you believe he opened his panegyric on copyright by quoting the first four lines of 'Teenage Kicks?' To be fair, Feargal didn’t write the song, John O’Neill did, but who in attendance knew?]

I can’t remember where I first heard 'Poptones' by Public Image Ltd. It took a while for Keith Levene’s repetitious groove and Jah Wobble’s undulating bass to persuade me that the song would be worth putting up with Lydon’s howl for, which might be why I don’t recall its origins. On listening more closely to the lyrics – again, more than likely on YouTube, possibly the Old Grey Whistle – I was quite taken aback.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car,

The smell of rubber on country tar.

And hindsight does me no good,

I'm standing naked in this back of the woods.

The cassette played pop tones.

It’s a song concerning abduction and sexual assault, told from the perspective of the victim, inspired by a news' article Lydon had come across in a national newspaper. A girl was bundled into the back of a car and driven out to the woods, violated, and left for dead. All the while the perpetrators played the same tune over and over on the car's cassette player, providing a monotonous and surreal backdrop to the girl’s savage ordeal.

'Jack Kerouac' by Gang 90 is another track taken from The Sexual Life of the Savages, but not quite as 'punk' as the three that featured earlier – sounds more like Talking Heads – so I pushed it back. I’m not sure how much I like this tune but I deemed it worthy back in 2010, and so it remains. 'Leave Me Alone' is taken from New Order's second album, Power, Corruption & Lies, and has little in common with the post-punk of Joy Division. Again, no idea what inspired me to include this track, but I find Bernard Sumner’s guitar to be evocative of Bobby Wratten’s with The Field Mice.

Athens

When I entered into the transcription business, the company I worked for would send me to places like Deutsche Bank in Liverpool Street or Citibank in Canary Wharf, to transcribe redundancy meetings and disciplinary investigations. Occasionally I might be assigned something a little more glamorous: a round table seminar at the Home Office, hosted by the then Secretary of State for International Development, Douglas Alexander; a Barclays’ AGM, chaired by Andrew Neil; a symposium at the Financial Times.

I used to like freelancing at the Competition Commission on Southampton Row in Holborn until some old boy gave me a telling off for being late back from lunch. The buffoon had read the clock wrong, and I received a panicked phone call from my employer asking where I’d got to – what a waste of a cup of coffee. Companies wishing to effect takeovers would plead their case to a panel of adjudicators, very often chaired by someone with the word ‘sir’ before his name. These guys would barely look me in the eye; as a transcriber, I must have been beneath them. I asked to be assigned jobs at the Health and Care Professions Council instead, where you could help yourself to sandwiches and the red-faced legal assessors were more than happy to talk with you, and would make eye contact while doing so.

But the Competition Commission was very well placed, and if I felt I had the time I would make a detour through Covent Garden or Soho, maybe to browse through records I could ill afford, or to look for second hand clothes. This could be how I came across 'Vitamin C' by Can, although I can’t be sure. Can had been on my radar for a while, due to their supposed influence on groups like Stereolab and The Fall. I couldn’t really see it. Perhaps I needed to listen to an album other than Ege Bamyasi, which I procured from the Richmond Library.

I don’t think this was how I came by 'Antenna' by Sonic Youth – that was more likely from The Wilkinsons. I’ll concede to enjoying Sonic Youth’s more tuneful elements, and 'Antenna' is no exception. The stuff that sounds like the free-form breakout in Pink Floyd’s 'Interstellar Overdrive' I don't like so much.

'51st Anniversary' by Jimi Hendrix was certainly a London discovery – in one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road (not Foyles, possibly Borders). '51st Anniversary' was the B-side to 'Purple Haze' and only appears on the CD re-issue of the album Are You Experienced as a bonus track. I’ve never owned any Jimi Hendrix, but during my first year at university the guy who used to room next to me played him a lot. '51st Anniversary' possess a groovier melody than a lot of Hendrix’s work, freed from the psychedelic diversions that normally predominate.

'Harvest Moon' was almost certainly a Wilkinson intervention, played in a car on the way to Pen Y Fan, Wales. 'Harvest Moon', and the album of the same name, was recorded in 1992 as a kind of sequel to Neil Young’s Harvest recorded 20 years prior, to the extent that many of the same musicians appear on both and it was recorded on analogue devices to create the same sort of sound.

One of things I like about Field Music is that they don’t dress much differently now to when I first saw them play live in October 2004. They obviously don’t care for the vagaries of fashion, which is the best way to be. They don’t really do colour; instead, navy blue, grey, olive drab, black, white. A shirt may be accompanied by a suit jacket, a T-shirt with a cardigan. Press shots rarely reveal their feet, but they must surely wear shoes (as opposed to kicks). Haircuts are sensible and don't appear to change much.

My job required a level of smartness. This didn’t bother me for I had enough shirts to be getting on with, wasn’t much into trainers anyway, and my hair was getting progressively shorter. On my days off, I’d walk to Richmond and look in Gap and Limited Offer for cheap clobber that could double up as workwear. ‘Limited Offer’ isn’t really called that: most people know it as Uniqlo. If you pay full price for anything in Gap or Uniqlo then you’re a mug. The French have laws against this sort of thing, but in the UK life is one perpetual sale, and because everyone loves a bargain we‘re constantly buying things we don’t need. The shops know this and budget accordingly. They know that summer jacket isn’t worth £60, but if they pretend to us it is then we’ll snap it up it when they cut the price in half, sometimes after only a matter of weeks.

Despite the cynical marketing ploys and the mediocre merchandise, I did used to like gliding around the aisles of Limited Offer. I don’t so much now but the branch they had in Richmond felt industrial, like a low-rent version of Muji. They would also play good music. I’d listen carefully and try and identify what might be a song’s title, or a phrase distinctive enough that it might bear results if I typed it into a search engine proceeded with the word ‘lyrics’ – the same as if I heard a song playing in Beyond Retro in Soho or Borders on Charing Cross Road.

I have Uniqlo’s music policy to thank for 'Constellations' by Darwin Deez and 'Intentions' by The Whitest Boy Alive. They occupy the same ground, a buoyant sort of easy-listening indie with congenial vocals, conducive to shopping for rudimentary clothes in primary colours. I decided to separate these two tracks with 'Chemistry' by Semisonic. Although it dates back to 2001, it makes the same sort of impression. It’s not my intention to make any of these songs sound unhip by association. If anything, somebody at Uniqlo was doing a good job.

It’s by no means improbable, but I did not discover either 'Ivy & Gold' by Bombay Bicycle Club or 'Many of Horror' by Biffy Clyro while shopping in Uniqlo or Gap. It was probably from the radio that I was drawing much of my inspiration – in the car on the way to and from shopping for food and other things. My partner mocked me for liking 'Many of Horror' – Biffy Clyro was what moody teenage boys listened too, she said. I knew nothing of them so couldn’t really say anything other than I thought it was good tune.

Conversely, my partner liked Bombay Bicycle Club. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but it turned out that their latest material represented something of a departure. Their first album comprised of standard indie fare in the vein of, say, The Mystery Jets or Vampire Weekend. In 2010, they released Flaws, which appeared to be inspired by the burgeoning indie folk scene and groups like Fleet Foxes, Great Lake Swimmers, Beirut. Not that this would have made much difference to me either, because the flip side of all of that was Mumford & Sons, and I had no time for Mumford & Sons. And for the first 53 seconds, I didn’t have much time for 'Ivy & Gold'. Then the chorus arrives, shifting abruptly, and only momentarily, from G to D minor. Normal service resumes and then there it is again, that brief shift to D minor, before the verse carries on as if nothing had ever happened.

Sofia

The Vaselines are an alternative rock band from Glasgow, once beloved by Kurt Cobain. They had only ever released one album, but in 2010 they reformed and put out another. Guess what: I came across it in a record shop in central London, propped up on the counter behind a sign saying ‘Now Playing’. 'I Hate The 80's caught my ear, but I hung around long enough to hear 'Whitechapel', which is reminiscent of their song 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam', which Kurt Cobain performed in tribute for the album MTV Unplugged in New York.

I doubt very much it was the same day, but I discovered 'Down from Dover' playing in Beyond Retro in Soho while looking for checked shirts. It’s a Dolly Parton number, but the version playing was by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. The song tells the sad story of a girl that gets knocked up by a guy from Dover who promises to return for the birth of their child. He doesn’t, and the baby’s stillborn anyhow, almost as is if, ‘she knew she'd never have a father's arms to hold her.’ Lee Hazlewood’s baritone seems especially deep, and Sinatra’s voice trembles with emotion. It’s incredible.

'Down from Dover' featured on the 1972 album Nancy & Lee Again and allows me to reach further back in time and finish off with the Motown soul of 'There’s a Ghost in My House' by R. Dean Taylor. I knew the song by way of The Fall and their version of it. I have no idea why I chose now to incorporate it, but like many of these odds-and-sods, I downloaded it from iTunes.

In 2009, I managed a trip to Athens with my partner. In early 2010, we ventured to Sofia (a very cheap holiday). Later that year, I secured future employment working for a small engineering firm in Brentford. It provided the time, and afforded me the money, to attend a friend's wedding in Thailand in August, before starting employment in October. It snowed heavily for the first time in years. My brother got married (the one who recorded Orbital for me, not the Beastie Boys). A Fullers' pub crawl, trip to Brighton, camping in Wales. What does The State I Am In bring to mind? Shopping.

[Listen to here.]