PAT NEVIN
IT'S GOOD TO BE DIFFERENT
Student, music critic, activist… footballer? Pat Nevin spent the early 1980s trying to define his life by everything other than his exploits on the pitch, leading the Chelsea favourite down some alternative roads featuring knife attacks, The Proclaimers and Saddam Hussein’s secret police
Words Matt Barker
There was a time, back in the early ’80s, when footballers and the sport they played were widely seen as fantastically naff. If you were into music – the good, alternative kind – then a love of the game was an unlikely bedfellow.
Things would change later in the decade with the fanzine movement – whose typewriter-and-Tippex publications were frequently sold in independent record stores – Italia 90 and World In Motion. They then hit overdrive in the Britpop-drenched ’90s, but in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain 40 years ago, you tended to keep quiet even about watching Match of the Day.
The main problem was a lack of visible, like-minded souls on the pitch. Footballers had the worst taste in music. Certainly, you never expected to find one in the pages of the NME: that hallowed bastion of the weekly music papers, home to notoriously caustic articles and referential reviews that would apply deconstructivist theory to the latest Crispy Ambulance album.
So, when Chelsea’s newest signing – a young, Scottish winger who joined from Clyde for £95,000 in the summer of 1983 – was interviewed by the music journalist Adrian Thrills, it felt like a genuine moment.
Blues adored Nevin’s silky wing play
KEEP IT QUIET
Chelsea had approached Pat Nevin one year earlier, but the Glaswegian politely declined. Instead, he was intent on finishing a degree, studying part-time while turning out for the Scottish Second Division side.
He couldn’t hold off in the end, however: Nevin was named the division’s player of the year and then invited to the 1982 European Under-18 Championship in Finland. Scotland won with their speedster voted player of the tournament. Word soon spread about his obvious talent – not that he did the talking.
“I’d kind of told nobody, including my own girlfriend,” Nevin admits to FourFourTwo now. “I wanted people to like me for who I was and not what I did. And that was a big part of it – what I did was not who I was.”
Nevin was never overly bothered about all the other stuff that went with playing. Press interviews were a particular bugbear, even if he enjoyed chatting with Thrills in the NME to such an extent the pair went on to share a flat. Dubbed “the first post-punk footballer”, Nevin namechecked his favourite bands (Joy Division, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Clock DVA, the Associates and The Smiths, among them), before touching on everything from the working-class Tory vote to nights out in his native Glasgow. Everything, that is, apart from football – although he readily admitted to being “humbled” by the dedication of Chelsea’s travelling away support.