Cast on the Kop

Alex Dunn met up with Cast and La's legend John Power to discuss a life-long love of all things Liverpool.

Kenny's back in the dugout at Anfield, Cast are back together. Is there a sense things have come circle? It's funny you've said that, I've never really thought of it like that. Kenny being back in the dugout certainly is. I guess in a way my life has come full circle too. Football-wise, I think Liverpool have been going a little askew for a few years now and I think Kenny's the man to put us back on track. He's trying to rediscover a spirit level that will take us back to the point where we want to be. I think spirit is what Liverpool has always been built on and it's that sense of knowing what we're about, having a clear identity, that has been lost a little. In football you can't build a great team on shifting sands. Those players need to know exactly what it means to play for Liverpool FC and I think Dalglish is the man to instil that belief. It's not been a bad week to be a Liverpool fan to be fair though... It's been a great week. I was actually back in Liverpool for the Bolton game and was watching it with my dad. I actually said to him, although it kills me to say it, 'we are just a very mediocre team'. There was just no substance there and I think what Kenny said after the game was dead right. It was an awakening for a number of the players. You can't just turn up and expect to win without applying yourself. Every game needs to be massive, that's what playing for Liverpool is all about. They've shown what they can do in winning through to the Carling Cup final and then beating Manchester United. It looks as though we could have a run in the FA Cup too but you need to show the same commitment in every single game, not just the 'big' ones. Doing it week in, week out is the key difference between sides that win things and those that just raise their game when the occasion is grander than a mundane league game. A lot of players on the pitch may never have previously experienced an Anfield occasion like that game against City. The place was electric and I hope that some of the players new to the sensation, having now had a taste, will think, 'that's where we want to be every week'. Will you be going to Wembley for the Carling Cup final? It's only just across town so I'd hope so. I've started to put the feelers out. I'm out of the loop a bit, I'm not a networking kind of guy. I tend to get my tickets from mates, I don't have an automatic route where I can get my hands on whatever I want. I'll get mine off a tout or friend. You're living in North London these days - any closet Arsenal tendencies? Ha, no I haven't. There's a lot of Arsenal supporters around here and Tottenham too. Where I live in Stoke Newington, the local boozer is full of people from all over the place but there's a group who I end up watching the matches with who are Liverpool fans. It's a real melting pot of cultures though and there's some good banter that goes on. Do you still go to the match regularly? Up to a season or two ago I was going a lot. I've been to the odd one this season, Fulham away was one. If I'm up in Liverpool to see the kids, it's a full day so it's difficult. With a seven-month old daughter and getting the band back together, I haven't been as much as I have in the past. I've got a 12-year lad who's a Liverpool fan. I've taken him to the match but he's not mad into it. He keeps tabs on it but he's not a fanatic or anything. I think with kids it comes and goes. There was a time with myself where I just followed from afar for a season or two because there were things in my life that I had to take care of. What are your earliest memories of going to Anfield? My dad took me first. He took me on the Kop. The first game I went to was a reserve game. I would have been about seven or eight when he took me to a proper match. I remember people like Alex Livesy through to Shankly, Toshack and Keegan, all the way through to Kenny. There was a little wall you could stand on and through the gaps who could just about see the match. It was great, he used to take me all the time. He'd come home from a night shift and we'd queue up outside the Kop. I remember the St Etienne game was like that. People finishing work and then queuing outside, doesn't happen now, does it? My dad says my party piece when I first started going in the seventies was reciting team-sheets to his mates, while stood on a table. How did the matchday experience back then compare to now? I remember joining a queue at 12pm on a Saturday to make sure you got in. Now people seem to dawdle in five minutes before kick-off. It was a magical place, I used to watch the crowd as much as I'd watch the football. It was just unbelievable the amount of people they'd squeeze into the Kop. All the scarves and people writhing around, the folk songs too. When you're a teenager you started to go with your mates but it was different back then. If you wanted to go, you just went. It was a case of someone saying, 'you want to go to the match, John' and you'd set off. It was a social event. Nowadays you're applying for a ticket six weeks in advance. Would you say in this sense football has become sanitised? After the tragedies happened it all changed with the terraces going. It's a cliché but it was a working-class game. But then I think the working-class element has been lost full stop in the cities in any case. I was walking around town the other day and I was thinking the centre is just rampant consumerism. It used to be about the docks and people working. In Manchester it would have been textiles or whatever. People used to work in the city centres. Football has changed in that it has mirrored society. Football is a massive industry, an exercise in marketing. You just have to hope when the whistle blows it's about what happens on the pitch. If you want to go to the game with your family it's £30-40 a ticket and then you're going to end up buying some food. It's a lot of money, especially given the economic situation as it stands, with people getting squeezed left, right and centre. The hard core fan base, the local fan base, I suspect especially in the Premier League, struggle at times to get to the game. Can supporters really be expected to relate to modern day players given the amount of money in the game today? Given there's such a gulf between the earnings of the players and the fans, what the club's earn from TV rights, it's difficult to see how that'll happen. There's bound to be some sort of struggle to reach across, as the players have so much money. I suppose it doesn't matter as much if your team plays the type of football you like to see. I'm sure after the United or City game there weren't many Liverpool fans talking about the players' wages. It's nice to go home on a smile rather than discussing the politics of the game.Can we glean any positives from the state of the modern game? In one way it's a good thing that 'outsiders' enjoy coming to the match. It's a diverse set of people and cultures that attend matches these days. That threatening element of going to the football seems to have evaporated too. Has it lost something? I guess if you're a young lad then your match-day experience has always been the same and you don't know any different. From my perspective, maybe from a nostalgic perspective, I think some of the magic has gone, definitely. But things change and no man can stand in front of time. It may change back to embrace a certain element of what we used to love one day, you never know. How much is being a Liverpool supporter ingrained in the identify of being a Scouser? Liverpool is a team built on great values, from Shankly to Paisley all the way through. Some people might shoot me down for harping back to yesteryear but that's still a core principle to the football club. It's been a bit sad over the past few months with what has been going on and there are times when clubs have to look at themselves. But as an institution, and as a city, Liverpool has had a hell of an effect on me. Growing up as an impressionable boy it seemed like Liverpool had the best football team and the best band in The Beatles. The red army tide that seemed to sweep across teams on the field, was replicated on the terraces. Call me biased but those days when the Kop used to be in full voice, it was a show in itself. I can't imagine it being the same, and apologies for sound patronising, for any other city. I'd say Mancunians would make similar claims... For all the vitriol between the two cities, certainly on my behalf, you're talking about two good teams built upon sound ideals. (Sir Alex) Ferguson, you have to take your hat off to him for what he instils in his teams. And also his politics. Where he came from and what he stands for, I think most fair-minded supporters would share with me a certain respect. Do you think tribalism has become too vitriolic in football today? Short-sighted football fans are a blight on the game but they'd be full of hatred whatever. Football just reflects society and that hatred manifests itself in whatever way it can. There's a lot more putting down of your own team these days. That's not something I remember. It's this silly sort of X-Factor mentality that is prevalent. You've bought your ticket so you can say whatever you want. The idea that you've bought the right to be abusive is a load of rubbish. I think it's more cynical and bitter now but I think that's because we've been pounding generations with the wrong messages. This shop to you're to drop mentality, I think people are shallower than ever. That's crept not just into football stadiums but our society as a whole. Moving into the Eighties, were you part of the casual scene that was so influential at the time? I think the fashion was certainly part of growing up in the times and the city I came from. Liverpool lads went on European trips and came back with these new trainers and brands you'd never heard of. It became the fashion and it felt like it was forced. People were wearing Trimm Trab trainers, Ellesee, Fila, whatever. You'd get your hair cut into a wedge; it was a mini-movement when I was growing up. I would have been about 15 and we'd go to away games and it was a bit Quadrophenia for our generation. I was a kid and you're going through changes in your life where everything is different. It was an exciting time. The moment you're old enough to get in the pubs, meet girls and get out of school is a time when you're attracted to the crowd. Peter Hooton of The Farm documented the time perfectly in his brilliant fanzine The End. Is he someone you came across on away days? I know Peter better now than I ever knew him. I do remember The End and all that though. When I joined The La's, I stopped going to the games as much. I was in a different world then. I was daydreaming musically and all that. I've done quite a lot of things with Peter recently. The Spirit of Shankly and the Justice Tour and the anniversary of Hillsborough song were all things we did together. We see each other quite a bit now, certainly more so in the last seven years than when he was in The Farm. Ironically, when you're in a band you become closed off. You check other bands out but you're locked into your own enclave of people. Most musicians I've spoken to seem to have a period when they fall out of love with football when they start a band, and then often get back into it. Has that been your experience? You might have a point there. When you join your first band it's all consuming. It's a 24-hour thing, you're rehearsing, you're gigging, and you live in and out of each other's pockets. You bed down on the floor and football does fall by the wayside. You'd listen to the radio or catch Match of the Day but often you wouldn't have time to go to the game. In terms of coming back, I've definitely rediscovered my love for it. It's going back to your childhood in a sense. Certainly Liverpool means something different to me, than for someone falling for them now. I can't help but always think about what it was built upon, Shankley's socialism. That red kit, St Etienne, Dalglish, the songs of the Kop, the games I went to and the memories they left, it seems to stand for something significant. Talking of being in a band, I guess in some sense it's not all that dissimilar to being a footballer? Closeted away with other men for an abnormal amount of time and being expected to perform on cue... A band goes on stage and you all play in different positions, without going too analytical, and you have to rely on each other. You spend a lot of time with the same people. The band doesn't exist without each individual and what they bring to a collective whole. You have to put the time in to bring the basic sketch of a song to life. What people hear is the finished product; they don't see the training ground version. When you were in The La's was there inter-band conflict given Lee Mavers is an Evertonian? When I was in The La's, Lee wasn't an Everton supporter, certainly not in the early days. It was only when I left that he became an Evertonian. We never had any football banter, as he wasn't into it at all. It's only the last 10, 15 years that he's shown an interest. I'm sure he'd tell you that himself. I can't break a journalistic tradition and not ask about The La's... It's all about Cast at the moment, with the album and tour coming up. When I first left The La's, I pulled away from it all but I love The La's and I love Cast. I've only good things in my heart for the bands I've been in. 'Troubled Times', your first Cast album since 2001, is released on March 5th. How did it come about and how did the rest of the band react when you mooted it? The whole mood has changed for the better. The energy is still there but it's more controlled. The egos have been left at the door. We've all grown up a bit but that doesn't mean we've lost our edge. I think we're playing better than ever and I'm sure that's a view shared by the other band members. We're a lot happier in ourselves and in a good place. It was strange and it took a long while for me personally to accept I was going to write a new Cast album. Before I'd even spoken to any of the other lads about it, I had to accept what I was doing. Was I ready to put myself on the line to come up with the goods? Was what I was doing fresh enough to be current? Did they have an inkling of what you were planning? I don't think they would have seen it coming, put it that way. I started to write and it began to take over. For a year-and-a-half I was camped in my bedroom with a little four-track in my pyjamas with a guitar in my hand. I rang the lads up when I felt I had enough material, it was only then that I said, 'let's get in a room together'. There were a couple of things to iron out, inevitably. When you spend so much time together, on the road and in the studio, with different personalities there's a lot of toing and froing going on. I guess everybody wanted to make sure we were all okay with each other. Are you looking forward to going back on the road again? We did a tour a year ago when we first got back together in between recording this new album and I fell back in love with songs I'd fallen out with. Before that I just didn't want to play the likes of Sandstorm, Fine Time, etc. I'd do them as a favour down the boozer but the Cast stuff was something I'd put to one side while I did my solo stuff. My heart wasn't in it. But now I'm really enjoying singing the old hits, because I've got some new stuff I'm feeling just as good about. The band are feeling it as well. It wasn't a case of walking back into the room and immediately it was the same as old times but the dynamic is definitely back. It was amazing how quickly we all started to feel fresh and excited in rehearsals. When did you get the germ of the idea to get Cast back together? I did three solo albums that were folk orientated and through doing that I started to rediscover song-writing again and the fuse was lit. It was a period of 18-months or more that I needed to write this Cast album. I picked up on this rhythm I had and that perpetuated everything. The melodies started coming, then the lyrics. Looking out of the window, reading the news spurned this frustration about the injustice of what's going on. It's not a political album but an album of the politics of the heart. I had to do a lot of self-reflection. It's all consuming. You've got to put yourself on the line, find the energy, because it's hard work. I wouldn't do it again tomorrow! Like anything when you come out of something that burns fiercely you have to let it die down before you let it go again. I'm always dancing around the flame though. Let's see what happens, I'm looking forward to it. I don't want to be a superstar or anything stupid like that, just play the tunes... 15 years after the release of their million-selling debut 'All Change', Cast will release their new album 'Troubled Times' on 5th March 2012