No Nonsense
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: The Visit
Chapter 2: Family
Chapter 3: Jolly Boys and the Bisto Kid
Chapter 4: Ticking
Chapter 5: Making It
Chapter 6: Carpe Diem
Chapter 7: No Smoke without Fire
Chapter 8: Horror and Hope
Chapter 9: Book Club
Chapter 10: Crime and Punishment
Chapter 11: Inside Out
Chapter 12: Hero
Chapter 13: The People’s Game
Chapter 14: The Medium is the Message
Chapter 15: Sweet and Tender Hooligan
Chapter 16: Love and Loss
Chapter 17: This Matters, Now
Chapter 18: No Nonsense
Chapter 19: Bubble of Strength
Chapter 20: Call Me Joe
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
CHAPTER ONE
THE VISIT
The smackhead in the corner is silently enduring the agonies of withdrawal. Hollow-eyed, sallow-skinned and sweating profusely, he constantly mops his face with rough paper towels taken from the waiting-room toilet. His plight is hypnotic and faintly heroic because, like me, he is here to visit a friend.
A young woman sits six feet away, clutching a pack of baby wipes. She has the pallor of permanent tiredness and carries the weight of too many cheap takeaways. Her toddler, absentmindedly playing with a plastic toy, has been dressed for the occasion in a polo shirt, offset by a gold neck chain, cargo pants and pristine Nike trainers.
I’m back in a familiar place, prison, for a reality check on who I was, who I have become, and who I want to be. The victims are not necessarily those on the other side of the security scanners, the inmates who wear orange bibs and have the expectant eyes of children arriving at a birthday party.
The air is stale and the sights are stark. It smells of decay and enforced abandonment. The memories are personal and paper-cut painful. An unfulfilled threat from another time, another jail, filters through my brain: ‘You’re getting stabbed, Barton . . . you’re going to die, you maggot.’
This is HMP Preston, a Victorian relic designed for 750 men which is consistently overcrowded. It feels like a run-down NHS hospital and is set, incongruously, in an industrial estate. We are ushered through an entrance framed by a sign that reads: ‘Challenging and changing offender attitudes to reduce crime in our communities.’
Even as visitors, we surrender a little of our humanity. No keys, symbols of possession. No wallets, with their dog-eared photographs and scraps of individualism. No books, in case the pages are invisibly laced with hallucinogenic drugs. No chewing gum or rail tickets, other everyday items viewed with suspicion.
Everything, apart from a small amount of loose change to buy the inmates sweets and soft drinks, is locked away, awaiting our return to normality. We are identified by a numbered ticket and a fluorescent wristband, which must be ripped off on departure.
There is a strange kind of energy, created by the trade-off between people who are locked up and those who are free to walk away when they choose. One group is desperately upbeat about the limitations of their life, and the other deliberately downplays the attractions of the outside world.
Everyone is putting on a front. The bravado is a little too close to bullshit to be entirely convincing. There’s that frisson of uncertainty you feel when you know someone is lying to you, but you can’t quite put your finger on how big the lie is.
I know what some of you are thinking. I’m in my element behind bars. I’m a thug, a Neanderthal, a stain on society. I’m back where I belong, with the dregs and the druggies. I am The Man Who Shamed Our Great Game, Football.
Nice try. I am desensitised to the slurs, because they form the soundtrack to my life. My past screams at me from half-forgotten headlines, crusty leader columns and ill-tempered Twitter rants, so that my hearing has become selective. If you want to understand me, my weaknesses are as important as my strengths.
It has been a long road, with more than a few speed humps to negotiate, but I finally accept myself for who I am. I couldn’t be prouder of what I have achieved. Good people have given me the time and room to understand why, and how, I was out of control for so long, for most of my twenties. One of them happens to be here, serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for manslaughter.
Andy Taylor, Tagger to use his childhood nickname, is my closest friend outside my family. We grew up together in adjoining council estates, though he was deemed posh because he lived in a semi-detached house rather than the traditional terraced two up, two down. When he gained his sociology degree in the United States, he began to build a successful career as a football agent.
He must live with the fact that his role in a brawl in Liverpool city centre in the early hours of Friday, 19 December 2014 resulted in the death of a fellow human being. It was impossible to prove who delivered the fatal blow, but off-duty policeman Neil Doyle, recently married, did not return home.
It could so easily have been me in Tagger’s position. He was the smartest of us all. I was more capable of violence. There was so much ferocity, so much anger, inside me. My behaviour was occasionally psychotic. I was involved in so many similar incidents that I look at him and think, ‘Fuck me, I got so lucky there, so, so lucky.’
I was capable of serious, serious stuff. I’ve contemplated that on so many levels, and tried to deconstruct my actions. Without that dangerous energy, I probably wouldn’t be here to tell my tale. I’d be working on a building site, or I might be dead. My intensity is the greatest gift I’ve been given, but equally it is the most destructive force imaginable.
I’ve done some bad things, but I’ve never killed anyone. I lost as many fights as I won, and, by chance, never caused anyone serious harm beyond superficial cuts and bruises. We all think we are immune to bad things, but events can spiral out of control and conspire against you. It scares me to realise how fragile life can be.
Do I feel guilty as I turn to go after a couple of hours, and Tagger rises from his plastic chair, which is embedded in concrete, for a farewell embrace? Not really. I never thought he would end up in jail, because of what he stands for. No one did. I care about him, since he is one of an extremely small circle of friends to whom I reach out for advice, but he has his own journey to make.
That phrase has been cheapened by the schmaltz that passes as Saturday night TV entertainment, but I’m talking about dealing with the reality that, however sorry we feel for him as a mate, another family has lost their loved one. Society dictates there is a price to be paid for that. Some will argue that such a debt can never be met.
Tagger doesn’t fit the traditional prisoner profile; he is set on proving he can be a positive influence, a stronger individual through adversity. He has earned the trust of the authorities and works on the front desk, preparing inmates for court appearances. He processes newcomers, gives them their prison-issue clothing and talks them through the formalities of incarceration.
Prison is a terrifying place, with no shortage of people who will slash your face for £20 worth of weed, the hardest currency of all. Tagger is a ‘listener’, a mentor trained by the Samaritans. He has a single-bedded cell, or pad to use the old lag’s slang, to enable him to privately counsel those who have been traumatised, mentally or physically.
He has prevented several suicides. The alternative to talking down unstable inmates is the dreaded ‘Tornado roll’, in which the potential victim is overwhelmed by force, trussed into a straitjacket and bundled into a holding cell for his own safety. Tagger is held in respect, on both sides of the divide.
Where we come from, we learn to be adaptable. We have an ability to operate in differ
ent worlds. Tagger plugs into emotion. He knows instinctively how to deal with people. He always reminds me of one of the favourite sayings of one of my other great mentors, Steve Black: ‘People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.’
Prison worked for me, following my conviction for assault in 2008, because I had something to lose. You shouldn’t need a degree in criminal justice and criminology to realise that’s the key. If you’re a kid on a council estate, with no education and no career prospects, and you have the opportunity to make a few quid by selling drugs, prison isn’t going to be a deterrent.
It is a flawed, ancient system which needs reviewing. It may not be as obscene as the American model, where they put people down like animals, but there has to be a different way. Society has surely moved on from the era in which judicial revenge was taken by throwing an offender into jail and throwing away the key.
I’m a creature of habit. I can have a conversation with anybody, about anything, at any time. Given literally a captive audience, here was my opportunity to determine what makes people tick. I spoke to killers, blaggers, career criminals and petty thieves. They taught me that individuals aren’t born evil, but things happen that make them behave in a certain way.
Fear, for me, was rocket fuel. It was me against the world. I had that little voice inside, telling me, ‘No one likes you. No one thinks you’ve got a chance.’ I might as well have been walking around with ‘Fuck Off’ stamped across my forehead. It was no wonder I alienated people.
Peter Kay, the counsellor who enabled me to make sense of my life before his death, used to talk about me as a self-saboteur. He took me through the process of understanding the importance of environment, whether that’s a prison cell or a council estate on which no one is going to give you anything.
St John’s estate, in Huyton, has a frontier feel, geographically and spiritually. It was earmarked as a social dustbin, following Liverpool’s slum clearance programme, and has its own micro-climate. It’s a daunting place for strangers, with its own set of predetermined yet unwritten rules. Survival instincts are deeply ingrained.
You cannot be seen as a soft touch in a school playground or on a football pitch. Show weakness on the streets, and they will steal the shirt from your back if you let them. The dynamics haven’t really changed as I’ve progressed through my football career. Whenever I enter a dressing room for the first time, the deflector shields are up. I’m sensitive to threats, real or imagined.
I burned from rejection by Everton, my boyhood club, and learned that ignorance doesn’t excuse failure. If you don’t know something, find out about it, quickly. My self-protective mechanisms are almost automatic. I prepared for jail, once it became clear I would be going inside, by consciously cutting myself off from the outside world. I wanted to know what isolation felt like.
It gave me an overwhelming determination that I would never again allow anyone to take my liberty from me. I would never give them another chance to dehumanise me, by locking me behind a grey metal door. I would never again be known as a number.
I thought, ‘This isn’t how it is meant to be. This isn’t what my life is going to be. I am going to dictate my future.’ I knew it would be difficult, but I was going to do this on my own. I didn’t want anyone to visit me, even going so far as to ban two of the people I hold most dear, my partner Georgia and my grandmother. I wanted to protect them from the experience.
I’ve always been thrown in at the deep end, and swum. Let’s park the social obstacles, for a moment. Genetics were against me. They told me at Everton I was too small to make it as a footballer. I didn’t have pace, lacked a trick, and wasn’t overly big or strong. You need most of those five traits to make it as a pro, never mind a Premier League player, but they didn’t feature in my skill set.
Throughout my life I’ve had self-appointed experts, coaches and schoolteachers, telling me that I won’t amount to much, that my ambitions are ridiculous. They expected me to fuck everything up at some stage. I had a good go at that, by the way, but the thing that got me through was an insatiable hunger, an unadulterated love of the game. That can spill over into dangerous areas, but I found a way of competing, of coping.
I gave myself a puncher’s chance by fighting and fighting, with a ‘fuck you, world’ attitude. I knew I was way behind my contemporaries, and was just trying to keep my head above water. I needed someone to believe in me. Jim Cassell, Manchester City’s academy director, was that man. He was that rarity – a football man who possessed the sensitivity and imagination to get what I was all about.
He had a simple ethos: he treated each of his young players as unique. He offered support, up to the breaking point, and allowed us the freedom to fail on our own terms. He recognised I lacked that supposedly critical yard of pace, and doubted whether I would develop sufficiently to play at the highest level.
But, luckily for me, he identified passion as a principal asset in both his coaches and his kids. He detected the depth of my devotion. He sensed, correctly, that I would have played pub football if I didn’t make it as a pro. He had the specialist knowledge and the moral courage to give me time to progress.
Kevin Keegan wanted me to be more respectful of my peers, to show some humility. That was never going to happen, because they were in my way. My dad once told me, ‘If you want to be a first-teamer’s mate, you’ll never be a first-teamer.’ I looked at the lads around me, playing for England at youth level, coming in from Ireland and abroad on pro contracts, and knew I was scrambling for employment.
I’m thinking, ‘Dad has got a point.’ I had to be ruthless, and develop an advantage they were not prepared for. That was fitness. I couldn’t control the rate at which I grew, but I could out-work them, out-think them. I could turn each training session into a war, to make up the difference. I could stay on in the afternoons, to close the gap.
I’d play out of position, even as a senior player. I was thrown into right midfield at Newcastle, made the position my own by thinking on my feet, and helped Andy Carroll get his big move to Liverpool. I made the most of what I had. I was as comfortable as a Premier League footballer as I was a prisoner in Strangeways; that ability to adapt took me from the ducking stool, provided by the red-top tabloids and the cyber warriors, to the Question Time studio.
If someone throws a challenge at me, I get after it. So what if I fail? Far worse to cower at the chance to take a chance, and learn nothing. Far better to disregard the ridicule and fail gloriously. My logic is that even if I fall flat on my face, I’ll have something to file away for future reference. I’m comfortable swimming in deep and dangerous waters.
Prison gave me space, allowed me to be alone with my thoughts. You interact with the outside world as and when you choose. I’m not advising anyone to go there, but it is the one place you are guaranteed to find solitude, whether you want it or not.
You must submit the telephone numbers of people you want to speak to, so they can be cleared. The bullshit around you melts away. You ask yourself, ‘Who is really worth my time?’ Suddenly, you realise you’ve got so little in common with so many people you thought were focal points of your life.
Human contact comes on your terms. I went to AA meetings in prison, primarily to interact with people instead of being in my cell, staring at four walls. I discovered a level of honesty and integrity I never experienced on a day-to-day basis in what passes as the real world. Paying others the respect of listening got me through. It made me realise I wasn’t the only one in the room who felt vulnerable.
Many of the guys were trapped, rejected by society because they stole or dealt to put food on the family table. They were resigned to their fate, and had used alcohol as an anaesthetic as much as a stimulant, but they were not bad people. They merely made bad choices, and lacked the economic and emotional wherewithal to cope.
It’s a complex issue, but their involvement in crime tended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since many came from abusive backgrounds. How c
ould I judge them? One was a Manchester City fan, who had not been visited by his wife and kids for two years. She had moved abroad with a new man; his children would be strangers by the time he was paroled. His depression was dark and deeply affecting.
That made me realise I needed to like myself. I seized the chance to reconnect, to understand why I had such a deep-rooted dislike of what I had become. I read anything I could get my hands on, from books on Buddhist principles to brilliant insights into the institutionalised drug culture of the Tour de France.
The irony, black and bitter, was that I spoke to Tagger about making the time work for me, instead of me counting down the days and being its dutiful slave. His own fall from grace was simply unthinkable at the time. We concluded there was no point in me sitting there, feeling resentful or sorry for myself. It had to be a productive experience.
I realised I’d been living for years in a jail constructed in my own head. I had the trappings of freedom, and felt unrestrained, but it was an illusion, a falsehood. I’d closed down spiritually, emotionally and even physically in some ways. My cell was between my ears, because I felt I couldn’t fit in.
I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be light-hearted, to laugh and joke with those around me, but everything I did had the opposite effect. I wanted to be a good team-mate, and yet I ended up fighting with them. I wanted to be successful, but everything I did conspired against that. I wanted to behave, to assimilate myself into society, and I couldn’t. It didn’t agree with me.
That frustrated me, because I wanted to conform. I was alienated to the point where I wondered whether I could handle it. It was like living in an endless anxiety dream: I was chasing something that, no matter how fast I ran or how hard I tried, I could never catch. In the end I admitted defeat. I just let it all go.
Weirdly, just by being true to myself, I found fulfilment edged closer, within reach. There is still a side of me conditioned to challenge convention, but I’ve learned there is a time and a place for defiance. There are still days when I feel I’m wasting energy, but I’m more at ease. I let things go because I can see the marker posts, stretching towards the horizon. I know where I want to go.