LEE PAYNE

Tag: august

  • 30 for 30 – songs that bring back memories

    My 21st birthday, 2013

    I’ll be 30 on 25th August – despite my protestations about not being done with my 20s yet. Anyway, the other night I made a playlist of songs that hold memories for me in my life so far. These are not necessarily favourites (I haven’t listened to Cher for a while, I have to say), but ones that take me back to a particular time and place. I hope you find a song you really like here, and look out for the links that look like this – clicking on them will give some extra information about what I’m banging on about.

    SNAP! – Rhythm Is A Dancer

    The number one single in the UK on the day I was born, 25th August 1992.

    Scatman John – Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)

    My mum won a hifi system in a radio competition, the kind that would have been way out of our price range, and somehow it ended up in my bedroom. I remember listening to this song on it and being fascinated by it.

    Cher – Believe

    Brings back memories of being driven around Norwich by my mum with this blasting out very loudly.

    Cartoons – Witch Doctor

    Hearing it now, this song is completely ridiculous – but I can definitely remember hearing it at home, where we had it on CD. Some people had Abbey Road… I think it sounds a bit like Scatman John in terms of playing around with mouth sounds, so there could be a link there.

    Dario G – Carnaval de Paris

    Originally released for the 1998 World Cup, though I have no memory of that tournament (2002 was the first one I can recall). This was actually used by Sky Sports as the theme tune to their Premier League coverage in the early 2000s, and that’s where I remember it from.

    Heather Small – Proud

    We all sang in this in the school hall on our last day at Norman First in July 2000. Corny? Yes. Memorable? Definitely.

    U2 – Beautiful Day

    You’ll notice a trend of songs I remember from being theme tunes to TV shows. This was what ITV used for their highlights programme The Premiership, when they briefly held the rights away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in the early 2000s.

    MIKA – Grace Kelly

    A massive hit in 2007, this seemed to be on the radio every morning on the way to school. I was surprised to see MIKA turn up as one of the hosts of this year’s Eurovision – I’d not heard a peep from him for years.

    The Killers – Read My Mind

    I remember listening to this a lot when I was at sixth form – 2008 to 2010. Seeing The Killers perform it live at Carrow Road in June this year was a special moment.

    Arctic Monkeys – Brianstorm

    There will be a lot of Arctic Monkeys on this list – after all, they’re my favourite band. The first album of theirs I actually owned on CD was their second, Favourite Worst Nightmare. This song was track one.

    Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

    Their first single and the Arctic Monkeys song I reckon most people will have heard of.

    Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz

    My Arctic Monkeys obsession led to me discovering Submarine, which is my favourite film. Arctics frontman Alex Turner did the soundtrack and this is my favourite song from it.

    Arctic Monkeys – Black Treacle

    Reminds me of driving backwards and forwards between Norfolk and Essex when I was at university. This is from their 2011 album Suck It and See.

    Pulp – Do You Remember The First Time?

    I can’t remember the first time I heard this song but it always stops me in my tracks when I hear it. Makes me feel nostalgic and sentimental. It’s between this and Babies for my favourite Pulp song.

    Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone

    Probably my favourite of all Arctic Monkeys songs and one that reminds me of an unrequited love.

    Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough

    Was played a lot at Carrow Road during the years Paul Lambert was manager (2009 to 2012). Some of the happiest and most successful times Norwich City have had in my lifetime.

    Grandaddy – A.M. 180

    The theme tune to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, a programme I have seen many, many times over and still go back to now and again.

    Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta

    The theme tune to Peep Show. I first saw the sitcom starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb in a Media Studies lesson at school, oddly enough, but I loved it and have seen every episode more times than is healthy.

    Morning Runner – Gone Up In Flames

    Another TV theme tune – this one is from The Inbetweeners. The sitcom about four lads and their time at sixth form was broadcast exactly when I was at sixth form myself and, I can tell you, it was very realistic.

    The Wombats – Anti-D

    I spent a fair bit of time as a uni student being miserable – this song was released around that time and I can remember listening to it in my more self-indulgent moments in the room I rented in a lady’s house a short walk from the college.

    Cage The Elephant – Shake Me Down

    Another song I can remember hearing a lot during my time at uni.

    Underworld – Caliban’s Dream

    I watched every minute of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and can remember being spellbound by this song. They were a great Olympics and they happened just a month or so after my mum and I moved to a little terraced house in Dereham. Happy times.

    Arctic Monkeys – Do I Wanna Know?

    From the fifth Arctic Monkeys album AM, released in 2013. An absolute banger – I saw them live in their native Sheffield in 2018 and this sounded amazing.

    Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks

    For a little while, I taught my friend to drive in the empty Sainsbury’s car park after work on a Sunday. Our musical tastes were very different. This is one of the only songs we both liked so we played it a lot while she was driving around.

    Arctic Monkeys – One Point Perspective

    Arctic Monkeys finally released a new album in 2018, their first for five years. This masterpiece is my favourite track from it.

    Joe Cocker – With A Little Help From My Friends

    As I mentioned before, I saw Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in 2018. This song was played over the speakers just after the gig had finished and the audience were filing out. It reminds me of the complete euphoria of seeing my favourite band in the flesh for the first time.

    Talking Heads – Take Me to the River

    A more recent memory, I can recall driving around listening to this song, just driving for the hell of it and lost in thought.

    Blossoms – Your Girlfriend

    I first heard Blossoms in 2016, when their single Charlemagne was played a lot on Radio X. I really got into them when I heard this song for the first time, sitting in my car at work during my lunch break a few years ago. They are now one of my favourite bands and I’ve got tickets to see them live in Norwich this November.

    The Rolling Stones – She’s A Rainbow

    During the first Covid lockdown, the Wednesday night trip to the pub was replaced by drinks and music in the living room. This song was one of the highlights.

    The Turtles – Elenore

    Another lockdown discovery, and in my opinion the funniest love song ever written.

    If you’ve got this far, thanks very much! This was just a bit of fun for myself really. If you want to carry these songs around with you, I put them in a Spotify playlist.

  • Norwich hit a bum note on their Carrow Road return

    Norwich City 1-1 Wigan Athletic
    EFL Championship
    Saturday 6th August 2022, Carrow Road

    It’s going to take some time for the relegation hangover to clear for this Norwich City team. The first home game of the new season, with its warm sunshine, fresh kits and sense of optimism, was met with a performance that lacked quality and coherence. Back in my seat in the Barclay for the first time since 23rd April, here are a few thoughts I had from the Wigan game.

    Some of these players have got a lot to prove

    I may get shot down in flames for this but every Ben Gibson error at the back and every failed Milot Rashica cross made me wonder: do these players have a future at Norwich? Gibson, Rashica, Todd Cantwell and Josh Sargent all failed to inspire and they have a lot to prove in the games ahead. Dean Smith will be aware that a poor start to the season would put his job on the line so he can’t afford any passengers.

    We still can’t take a corner

    Back in June, Norwich appointed Allan Russell as the club’s first ever dedicated set piece coach. Whatever he’s been doing at Colney, it has yet to translate onto the pitch. It’s extraordinary how Norwich never look like scoring from a corner, and they don’t look assured when they are defending them either. This is nothing new but with someone in place purely to work on them, it’s something you’d expect to improve going forward.

    Between a rock and a VAR-d place

    No one likes VAR. No one likes the way it takes half an hour out of the game and then they still get the decisions wrong. But then, the referee at Carrow Road was really rather poor and Norwich should have had at least one penalty. If we’d had the dreaded VAR, maybe we’d have got what we deserved.

    Wigan’s behaviour should be seen as a positive for Norwich

    The time wasting from Wigan in the second half, which saw multiple players booked, should be taken as a compliment by Norwich. Clearly, for last season’s League One champions, a point at Carrow Road is a great result. City need to get used to teams that defend deep and waste time like they did today and learn how to break them down.

    Two games down, forty-four to go. Norwich are yet to register a win – they go to Hull next Saturday – but these are very early days. With the new players bedding in, patience is the order of the day.

  • I bought a 58-year-old football magazine

    Garden centres are usually my idea of hell but a few days ago I went to one that was a bit different. It had all the boring things, of course, like pots and plants, but it also had what they called a ‘retro shop’. An eclectic mix of items for sale with the only thing in common with each other being that they had spent years unused in someone’s house/shed/garage. There were old radios, guitars, weird wooden ornaments; it would take hours to go through it all.

    As a former collector of The Beano and The Dandy, my eyes were drawn to a pile of comics and magazines. While neither of those were anywhere to be seen, there were several Marvel and DC Comics titles, including a couple where the ‘new hero’ Doctor Strange – a character first seen in 1963 and recently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a film – was mentioned on the front cover. Eventually, I stumbled upon a copy of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly.

    The August 1964 issue of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly I bought at the retro shop

    I love this sort of thing. Just like the comics, a magazine is like a time capsule. They quite literally document the time they were published. I have to admit, I’d never heard of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. The issue I found in the shop was from August 1964, a full 28 years before I was born.

    The first thing I noticed was that it was in colour. I doubt many people will have seen colour photographs of football matches in 1964. Newspapers were still very much black and white and on the rare occasions a game was televised it would have been in monochrome too, as colour television did not begin broadcasting in Britain until 1967. You can really see this standing out in a newsagent’s.

    I’ve always found something charming about old adverts. They were usually straight to the point and back then there was little regulation of the advertising industry, so the claims made in them were bold to say the least. Look at these two, for example. ‘Actual Tests’ (what actual tests? Who did the tests? What were they testing? How did they do the tests?) prove you can increase your strength 20% in 1 month (how do you measure strength to such degrees?) with astonishing new 6-second exercises! This company even offers to give you your money back if you don’t ‘get the kind of physique girls admire super quick’.

    This one promises to ‘enable to gain up to 6 ins. in height’. I’m pretty sure I get emails about this kind of thing nowadays, but they are usually pledging to help me gain six inches somewhere else.

    I suppose once you had become 20% stronger and 6 inches taller you might then have had the physique that the Manchester City Police were looking for.

    Now for some of the actual football content. As this was a summer issue looking back at the previous season and ahead to the next, the team photographs of the champions of all four English leagues were featured. The Liverpool photo is notable for the presence of both Bill Shankly, who was manager at the time, and Bob Paisley, who was merely ‘trainer’ (first team coach in modern terms) then but would of course go on to take the top job and win six league titles and three European Cups in charge of the Reds.

    Below them are second division champions Leeds, promoted to the top flight under Don Revie. This was the start of a golden period for the club, in which they would be league champions twice and win the FA Cup in 1972. Several of the stars of that side were already present – Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles.

    This might have been my favourite page in the whole magazine. Readers would write in, offering to exchange, for example, ‘Man. Utd. [programmes] for Sunderland and Arsenal’. Charmingly, many would also seek pen pals so they had someone to talk about their interests with by letter. When you think about it, this was an early form of social media. People have always wanted to reach out to others, it’s just that these days you simply write a tweet and can be bombarded with abuse just seconds later. The best one on this page, for me, was from S. Baird of Accrington, who was offering ‘200 First Division Autographs’ in exchange for ‘Screaming Lord Sutch Wig and Top Hat’. So many questions.

    With my beloved Norwich City dropping like a stone towards the Championship once again, I scoured the magazine for mentions of the team in the hope that things might have been going slightly better in 1964. Alas, the second division table has us sixth from bottom.

    Now we come to the letters page. Paul Carter from Liverpool wanted football to do more for charity. The Charity (now Community) Shield had been going for decades by this point, so he can’t claim the credit for that, but football is certainly used for fundraising purposes on a frequent basis now.

    Finally, I give you D. Kilbride, who doubted Bobby Moore’s suitability to be the captain of England and suggested Jimmy Armfield be given the job instead.

    Two years later…

    Thanks for reading.

  • With each VAR decision, a part of football dies | Norwich Nuggets: Leicester (h)

    Some thoughts on Norwich City 1-2 Leicester City, as the Canaries go into the first international break of the season winless and without a goal from open play in the Premier League.

    Trouble getting a pre-match coffee should have been a warning

    I met my mother and her significant other for a coffee and a muffin in the Morrisons café opposite Carrow Road before the match, only to have my dream of a refreshment break having raced down there from work thwarted by mum being told that ‘they had no cups left for hot drinks’. Excuse me? It’s 1.30pm on a Saturday, a matchday, and a big shop like that has run out of cups to have a hot drink in? Mum was furious, but thinking about it now it’s so hilariously rubbish. We left and found refreshment elsewhere but, Morrisons, you really have to plan ahead for when Norwich are at home. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that you’re extra busy when there’s a match on. I guess it should have been a warning of what was to come on the pitch.

    The Morrisons supermarket opposite Carrow Road, who had run out of cups for hot drinks by 1.30pm on a matchday. I didn’t call the police on them – this photo is from when the store was subject to a bomb threat.

    VAR just isn’t worth it

    The dreaded Video Assistant Referee (VAR) played its part in two major incidents in today’s game, having been virtually absent from Norwich’s first two Premier League matches. First, they were awarded a penalty in the first half when Leicester’s Turkish defender Çağlar Söyüncü went to ground clumsily near the byline with Pierre Lees-Melou. The referee gave only a corner, but after a lengthy delay with his hand to his ear was advised by the VAR to go and look at the screen next to the pitch. Teemu Pukki sent the goalkeeper the wrong way to get Norwich back into the match.

    Having gone 2-1 down, the home side looked like they had equalised when Kenny McLean headed in from a corner. The whole of Carrow Road, barring those in blue and white at one end of the South Stand, jumped up in delight and it took some time for the crowd to notice the awful sight of the referee with his hand in the air, disallowing the goal, seemingly based on something seen by his assistant. After what felt like an age, VAR had decided it was indeed offside – 5ft 8in Todd Cantwell was standing in an offside position, apparently blocking the view of 6ft 2in goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel. The mind boggles.

    Both of these, as far as I’m concerned, are further proof that VAR has to go – I’m not just saying this because Norwich were on the rough end of it today. Supporting a football club is about those moments of joy, those roars of delight, that greet a goal. Especially an important equaliser like McLean’s would have been. The VAR took so long to look at it that it surely cannot have been a cut-and-shut decision. Is this really worth destroying the soul of the game for? VAR doesn’t solve an issue, it just creates a new one. Norwich fans are still haunted by the perfectly good goal Pukki had disallowed for offside by VAR against Spurs in 2019 – to this day I cannot fathom how anyone could think he was offside.

    Teemu Pukki was apparently offside here against Spurs in December 2019

    Lees-Melou and Söyüncü came together at the opposite end of the pitch to me in my Barclay seat, but it looked like one of those incidents where everyone shouts for a penalty but no one really expects to get one. If VAR hadn’t been there, and the referee had just given the corner, I would have been fine with it. As it is, the system is ruining the experience of being inside the ground. With each VAR decision cutting short scenes of joyous celebration, a small part of football dies. Get rid of it.

    Williams looks a useful addition

    Brandon Williams is on loan from Manchester United for the season

    I was slightly surprised at the signing of Brandon Williams on loan from Manchester United when it was announced on Monday. I had been impressed with Dimitris Giannoulis at left back in the first game of the season against Liverpool, and thought that a club like United wouldn’t be sending one of their players to us if they didn’t think he’d be playing a lot. I saw him for the first time against Bournemouth in the cup on Tuesday night and he caused plenty of problems down the left, though I found a right-footed left back to be rather odd. On another difficult day for the Norwich defence, I thought he was really good against Leicester. He is able to think quickly, put in the perfect tackle, and has a knack of nipping in just when needed. He could be very handy for the Canaries this season and it shows that there’s quality out there if you look for it in the final days of the transfer window.

    We might be too nice for the Premier League

    It’s fair to say that the step up in class from the Championship to the Premier League is huge, but there’s more to it than pure ability on the pitch. Leicester finished 5th last season, and for all their talent, were still time wasting, diving and getting away with sneaky little fouls all over the pitch today. If Norwich are going to stay up they should think about taking a leaf out of Leicester’s book – they won’t be the only ones who play like that. We’ve got to show more of a nasty side.

    Disappointing to hear the taking of the knee being booed

    There were audible boos when the players took the knee before kick off, and it was incredibly disappointing to hear. I can’t speak for any Leicester fans but I definitely heard jeering coming from the home supporters. What is it about a simple anti-racism stance that gets some people so worked up? The more they boo it, the more it shows that a stance like the knee is needed. If you boo it, you’re not the sort of person we want supporting our club.