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Andy Swallow, born in 1960, Stratford - East London.
Had no option but to be a West Ham fan.
You was a West Ham fan.
It was the East End thing, you know what I mean?
The ICF was pretty unique.
We are talking about one of the most important firms in England.
Andy had that kind of general mentality,
like a lot of the top boys do, every firm needs its generals.
We don't care what the government thinks about us.
We was driving through,
town to town, picking up a few goods.
But we didn't fancy it, and as we was walking out,
we was arrested.
Danny was in the prison and I was in the tower.
Roll on to the acid house scene.
We're going to set up a radio station,
and that's when it started, 24 hour, Centreforce began.
We were the first 24 hour house music station.
What about making a record? We could do this.
We went off to a studio, and we made a record.
I had Craig David, I'd put out Ms. Dynamite, Artful Dodger.
It was only inevitable, even though decades later
that we came back.
This is everybody's story, this is my story,
it's Danny's story and Centreforce is the family.
Yeah. Nobody wanted them to succeed,
there was nobody giving them handouts.
There was nobody helping them along their way.
There's only one real, true underdog...
If you grow up kind of working class, tenement, council house
in the '60s or '70s, there's not really a lot going for you,
even more so in London than in Edinburgh.
You're in a place where there's a lot of poverty,
but amidst plenty.
You can look basically around the corner
and see there's all this stuff around,
there's all this money, you're in kind of a low status,
low paid employment.
So I think there's a culture.
The whole dockland culture is about chorie.
It's about, if we can't make it, we take it type of thing
and the idea that nicking something from your employer,
you know, the docks or wherever it is,
it's not really theft, it's a kind of tax
a redistribution of wealth,
a justified redistribution of wealth.
I think that kind of hustling culture permeates dock areas,
it permeates all working class culture.
Andy's from this area, from across the road there basically
and worked in that market over there.
And you look even now, everything has changed in this area,
the ethnicity's changed
but the hustle and bustle is just the very same,
there's no way you can be different,
you're shaped by the environment you live in
and there is no way anybody can grow up
differently from that environment basically,
that makes you the person that you are.
No fencing here, this was where we used to put all the barrows.
So, from 7, 8, 9 years old, we've come around here
through the, you can still see the doors
even though the doors weren't there, but it's a path down.
We used to pull the barrows out here into the market,
around about 6-7 in the morning, and then we'd pull 'em
5-6 o'clock after the game back into there.
And it's funny enough, I just looked through there
and there's still barrows.
I lived here literally Waghorn Road, and used to cut through,
my little cut through to my school was there.
And this is where I spent my life as my first job was a barrow boy,
pulling out barrows from this actual place,
which is quite amazing, really.
My mum, bless us, you know my dad left when I was 8,
so my family behind there, they were all fruit & veg
and then my cousin and that, they were broken biscuits.
And then on the corner shop, Mr. Candies or Candies,
whichever one most I say, possibly the other.
We were broken biscuits, sweets,
and my mum used to box the sweets for Appleton's.
And this is where I started my trade of...
I was doing fruit & veg and then I ended up
working on the food stall, cheap food,
cheap & nice - as the price
'Don't walk past these, walk past your own mother.'
I ended up doing market trading.
When I left school, I ended up...
I was a trainee accountant,
but later years I was a market trader.
And then from that, I was doing T-shirts.
I was doing the printed T-shirts at football.
I did the Inter City ones.
So, sort of like, from that,
you was always ducking and diving, hustling.
If you look at Dickens who kind of wrote about the East End
and his characters are based in the East End.
Whether Dickens actually knew an Oliver Twist
or a Fagin or an Artful Dodger or a Bill Sykes
is kind of beside the point in some ways
because they are archetypes and they are recognisable
to a greater or lesser extent,
not just in every community, but in every one of us.
Maybe Andy has a bit of all these characters in him.
You can have the sticky fingers of the Artful Dodger,
the organisational skills of Fagin,
the aggro of Bill Sykes and maybe even that plaintive,
romantic kind of urge of the Oliver Twist character himself.
I moved here when I was round about 18 months, two years old.
This is 30 Waghorn Road. This is my home.
I spent it here until I was nearly 17.
My mates were here, this is where I always say that
the Inter City Firm sort of was born out of,
and the original Essex East London Firm,
we all lived, we all stayed in here.
My sister was born here.
She was eight years younger than me, Mandy.
Me, my mum, and my sister lived here.
Don't know if you remember back in the days
that you always was in the kitchen or in the smaller room.
That front room there was the sweet shop.
That's where all the sweets were made.
Later on, down the line, my mum didn't... it was our posh room.
You had your blue carpet where I'd laugh,
and the back room was where we sat,
and we all had food and watched telly.
I remember when the first colour telly was delivered around '71.
This was where I was born and brought up till '76.
Yeah. Fond memories.
It's really weird. It seems so small.
From when I was here, it seemed so big.
This was a cricket pitch. Yeah.
Yeah. Good memories. Good memories.
Even though I think things have changed. Yeah.
Good memories. Yeah, I'm glad we came here.
My name's Gardner. Bill Gardner.
Cass Pennant.
Carlton Leach.
I first started going to West Ham in 19...
the last two games of the 1957-58 season.
I went with my dad who was a Spurs fan.
He used to take me to Spurs one week, and West Ham another
for a while and then I drifted off and done my own thing.
First game at West Ham, I was eight years old.
The year the World Cup winners, Hurst, Moore, Peters,
just magical years once you've gone to your first ground.
For me, you know, I've got a different background.
I was a Dr Barnardo's kid from Barkingside
but ended up on the other side.
So going to West Ham and the only colour that mattered
was claret and blue, you know what I mean?
I was always going to come back to West Ham.
West Ham was my home, more than my home was.
I was born five minutes from where we are now,
East End Maternity.
So, I'm on my own stomping ground.
What made me decide to go, was my dad was born in Dagenham,
West Ham fan and being on his shoulders in 1964
when we won the FA Cup and the bus going past
and the wooden rattle with the scarf
and I drove him insane in 1965,
'Dad, dad, dad, I wanna go West Ham, I wanna go West Ham!'
And I remember going to the old fruit and veg shop
getting a wooden crate and then we walk in
the whole length of Green Street up to Upton Park,
he'd slip me in through the turnstiles,
give the geezer a drink
or whatever, two bob or whatever it was in them days
and him putting me down the front of the west side
standing on the box.
So, 1965, I was six years old,
and it was in me from that day on.
I lived in Upton Park.
A stone's throw from West Ham football ground,
had no option but to be a West Ham fan.
You was a West Ham fan.
So, I was brought up in the area.
If you said to me, your first memories of West Ham,
it's the brick wall at the North bank.
Because I come up the stairs at the brick wall
and I used to sit on that brick...
I used to balance on the wall and then I got,
from about 9-10
and then for me the biggest memory
is doing the Knees Up Mother Brown
in the middle of the North bank
and ending up behind the goal
and they'd all back up again, they'd all surge up,
and the old songs of, they weren't really football songs,
Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner, Knees Up Mother Brown,
Drove A Wheelbarrow,
they're all traditional cockney songs
and you took that with you wherever you went.
And you know, when I talk about football,
my smells of football are totally different.
Do you know what I smell?
I smell standing on Mile End station at 14:15
and the smell of the underground train coming in
that you could never smell anything like.
It's like burning rubber, wind of the old Metropolitan Line
coming through that used to whistle through
before the train came in.
I remember that smell more than...
probably anything else at football.
If you said to me, football, Mile End station,
500 of you and that smell of that train,
and trying to get those black knob things off.
Tried to smuggle them but just couldn't get them.
My mates used to come out and go, you want one of them?
I used to swing on 'em.
But yeah, and being...
wanting to be a part of it.
Wanting to be part of that culture.
It was always going to be West Ham for me.
The people, I loved the people and I still do now.
Real people like these two here, real people.
Everything about West Ham was different.
Football, when you're working class and it was Great Britain
then before it was UK so it's a different nation,
you know what I mean?
And West Ham was different to all the others.
Fans were different, the ground, everything about West Ham,
I felt like I was stepping in a new world where basically
everyone was different instead of just me.
You know what I mean? I can't explain it.
You've got to look at the times.
We was kicking off when we was 13, 14.
It was skinhead boot boy era.
We wear boots and braces to school back then,
but we've known each other since we're 14.
And then Bill, I've come across in '72
and the kind of older guy took me under his wing.
I was abused as a kid, and I left home when I was 14
and lived in a church, in a graveyard,
and I used to love football.
My dad used to love football.
He played for London Schoolboys when he was a kid,
and he knew loads of people that played for Tottenham,
that's why he used to take me there.
I was looking for a family,
I was looking for people that I can look after.
That's how I would describe it.
I dunno how it sounds to anyone listening,
but I took myself as I've never had nothing.
I would never have nothing,
but I want to give something, and that was loyalty.
So, I wanted to give loyalty to the people that stood by me.
And I think that there's not a man on this planet
that can say I haven't done that.
If Bill, I say Bill because he's one of the most well-known,
if he said we was doing this, we was doing that.
But by the time we got to sort of 18,
we was doing our own thing and I think Bill
and all of them were quite confident in...
we was quite good at doing what we was doing,
if that makes sense.
So... But if we got a message that you ain't going there,
we weren't going there. That was a fact.
But we started to push boundaries and do it our own way.
I went to my first away game when I was 11.
I travelled the country.
Some of my friends are still friends and still talk to now.
Moose. I've known him since I was 9.
Grant Fleming, I've known Grant since I was 15.
Grant Fleming was a very good friend of mine.
Very, very clever person.
I'm actually going to just sum him up as I would sum it.
He's strange in a nice way.
He's the one that's travelled the world.
He's the one that's been up and took pictures.
He's the one that if he could go live with people
up in the mountains, he'd do it.
He's the ultimate character.
He'll always be one of my best friends
but we don't see each other purely based because you move apart.
But he's a big, big character
and a massive character in football,
massive character in the music industry.
All the boys pretty much lived at my house every weekend.
My house was like, my mum looked after...
she pretty much started the Inter City Firm.
She looked after all of us.
This is number 30 and I can remember coming here
as a kid and dropping off shopping for Auntie Pam
as we used to call her, Mrs. Swallow
and I think only on one or two occasions
I actually went in the house,
but generally through the market,
if I did ever help her with the shopping,
I'd sort of leave it here and she used to take it in.
Came out with a little bag of sweets for you.
Give me a couple of sweets from... as Andy says,
from the front room, but because she...
I remember she used to carry a lot of sweets
in her coat, a long coat.
My house became the hub, so we're 15, 16,
we'd end up in the Boleyn and if we wasn't home by half 11,
my mum would be marching up that road, whacking us.
Now, don't forget, we'd become later on
to be the most feared gang in the field as we would say.
She would get on and whack us all the way home.
We must have had, if I said there was 15, 20 of us,
there was 30.
My front room, it was covered with people.
Everyone would stay every game.
We used to go from here and this was our hub.
This was our Boleyn, Chinese,
make sure we was in by 11:30 because she would whack us.
My parents did not want me to go football,
they didn't want me to play football,
they didn't want me to go West Ham,
they didn't want me involved in anything.
So, I used to have to lie the whole time
to actually go to West Ham.
And even when I was 17, 18 and old enough,
I still couldn't face my dad and tell him I was going West Ham.
He knew where I was going, and he knew
I was going to go in the pubs and whatever.
It's quite weird. It's all like a crossing period, this,
because '76, '77 is a massive period for music.
Punk. Punk rock kicks in, we're rebelling.
It's another rebel isn't it? Football is rebellion.
All of a sudden something else kicked off.
So, we was punks and I quickly come out of that.
Everyone was sort of switching.
There was Madness and all that was coming through.
The Two-Tone was coming through, and I became a mod.
My ears were too big to be a skinhead.
I looked at it and I thought, I can't have big ears.
We used to laugh, we used to go down the Brit,
you'd have a Gabicci, a gold chain,
a pair of Farahs or Waxmans and a round glass.
We started to drink out of round glasses,
not the jug, round glass, a bowl.
So, it was all fashion consciousness.
So then that was a big part for us.
The music, then Oi came in.
Massive, yeah, one of the best bands around, Cockney Rejects.
Andy: London's finest...
Hello, Micky.
How we doing, Ed? All good.
Well basically, it was a bit of the East End.
There wasn't a lot music wise from around there.
We had the Small Faces from Leytonstone and Bethnal Green.
Couple of other bits and pieces, but, you know,
we decided we'd take our love of football
and our love of rock and roll and meld them together
and become what we thought was the world's
first terrace band because we love West Ham.
My grandad played for West Ham, you know what I mean?
So, we had a vested interest, lived a mile from the ground,
and basically, we all just met up and we all moved as one.
It was our firm and that was what we did.
We all moved as one. We went to all the gigs.
We caused chaos, we had chaos, you know what I mean?
We lived in the fast lane, and I don't regret any of it.
It was mad, but it was great.
You've got to remember as well though,
if you look at the history of the bands,
I don't think there's many bands that would actually take
full football songs on the road and not even alter 'em.
Running Through The Back Streets,
War On The Terraces, Bubbles.
And I know Jimmy Percy and them got
sort of hoodwinked into putting the West Ham thing,
but these boys actually went into Liverpool and played Bubbles,
War On The Terraces, Running Through The Back Streets.
You can name them, you know, really hardcore football songs.
If you imagine a band from Liverpool or Leeds
or something like coming to London and doing that,
then there'd be consequences.
When you look at it though, Mick
you took the hardcore of songs
that were football related to other...
And the hardcore of West Ham as well.
I'm a lot older so... we used to go on the train in them days
and we'd get off the train and you'd look around with people.
You always know the people that ain't going to be there
and I've got nothing against them people at all
because it takes all types to make the world.
They'd be the ones that'd be laying back a bit, you know?
They'd be hanging back and then the ones at the front
you used to look around and it'd be these;
Cass, Carlton, Andy, myself, Ted, my mate, Big Ted,
loyal people that are loyal to this day.
I met Andy when he was at school.
He went to school with me sister at Brampton Manor.
He was a young Andy
and obviously he knew my mum and dad.
He grew up within that environment and Cass, everybody did.
Our house was open house, wasn't it, for the football fans!
But yeah, so I've known Andy all these years and like I said
he's always been there, at the front, with everything.
If you look back at us going to away games,
it was the year of the football special.
So, you used to get the football special
and what you're finding with a football special,
they were slow trains home,
they were the worst trains you could get on
and they were slow trains home.
So, what we used to note is that we could get...
Let's just say Saturday, going to Manchester
and we pulled in part way home,
we see the Inter City trains on the opposite.
We'd all jump off, get on the Inter City train
and we'd be back home probably an hour and a half quicker.
So that led us to think we might as well
try going on these trains.
I'm just remembering you get the label off
the Persil soap packet, right?
And it worked out for us to go
cheaper that way than going on these shuttle trains.
I think it was, if I'm right, it was two kids
could travel free with one adult over 16.
So that's how we was all travelling in groups of three.
Get someone who's over 16, they'd buy a ticket, and we go,
I think it went for £1, I think it was £1.
I'm pretty certain that's how it started.
And then me and Grant, and that became a big thing.
I don't think there's not many people didn't get on that.
Hooliganism was just very haphazard
in the '60s or '70s, it was all about
it all took place inside the ground basically,
it was all about charging, British Bulldogs and all that
and it was great fun and you could be a mug like myself,
and you could get involved in all that and spill around
and flip around in the terraces.
But then it moved outside.
When it moved outside the grounds
it needed a bit more organisation,
you needed someone to kind of... to basically...
you needed generals to emerge, people who could actually
give it a bit of thought and how you got to these places,
how you got to stadiums is important and who you met
and how you organised and all that sort of stuff
and it was all based that Andy had that general mentality,
like a lot of the top boys do.
Every firm needs its generals,
needed it at the time.
There's three of us that came up with a name.
There's me, Grant, and there's Mick Morgan, Ramsgate,
and we've got three different stories.
I could tell my story. Grant would tell his story
and I've heard recently Micky tell his story.
And it's funny because we was involved in something that we
I suppose we set up, but we didn't realise we set up,
we never had no history of how we set it up.
You know what I mean? If that makes sense,
I didn't turn up and say we're going to sign a bit of paper,
and our first bit was signing that paper.
We all have our recollections of
how we became the Inter City Firm.
My recollection of being the Inter City Firm
is standing in the corner of the south bank, 20 or 30 of us,
singing ICF all game. All game for a year.
That was the inter-city days when it was...
And obviously because Inter City Firm,
I dunno, it just caught on, Inter City travel.
We would've been called the Inter City Jibbers.
That's what our first name was, because what we used to do,
we used to jump off the train halfway home and jib home.
So then from that there was a little rail sign
and we used to call ourselves the Inter City Jibbers.
Now people in the know will know, before we was the ICF,
it was the Beret Boys.
All West Ham had the bomber jacket and the beret,
which is all the Brit lot, which is a little bit older than me.
The Gary Dickles, the Vince Riordans, Johnny Butlers,
they were all the Beret Boys.
So, they're the Beret Boys.
I've come from the EELF.
And then all of a sudden, we've now got the Inter City Jibbers.
Now we've got, this is where my side of it comes.
Grant nicks this bag
and it's got British Rail, Inter-City on it.
And then we said come on, we'll be the Inter City Firm
and from there we become the ICF.
The Beret Boys became the Good-Looking Firm.
They used to put these notes in and batter us,
because we were the younger ones.
Then we had a little, few younger ones come in with us,
which would be the Abrahams, the Rogers,
Lee Downers, Parker, Bacon, and they were the Under-Fives.
So, they never had a name and they become the Under-Fives.
So, we would fight them.
We would, not you know, coming home on trains,
we would have a fight with them.
We would then get beat up by the Good-Looking Firm
and then all of a sudden, we just evolved to be one big firm,
which was the ICF.
And then the Under-Fives had their own,
which become a little bit more unique down the line.
But I'd say when we stepped into the game, we was all one firm.
You can go anywhere in the country, any small town,
anywhere, and you'll find people there that are game for it.
I used to enjoy going, I used to enjoy going to Millwall
because one thing I thought was
they were very much like us in those times.
There wasn't no stabbings and none of that nonsense
that goes on, now, we'd go there and we'd have a fight
and it'd be all over and nobody innocent would get hit,
it'd only be the people that wanted to fight would fight,
but that don't sell newspapers so people put it out
that all these people, innocent people are getting hurt
absolute nonsense.
There might've been one or two that got in the way.
I don't know that, but all I know is what I saw
and what I experienced.
The only people I used to fight
were the ones who used to want to fight me.
The first of it stems from Villa away.
We had this thing about taking ends.
This is why we say about the Under-Fives.
That's why we're coming into it.
This is pre-ICF.
When we travelled away,
we had such a reputation by then, it was getting harder.
So we didn't want kids with us.
You went up north and you know what I mean,
monsters, some of em.
So we'd always try and lose the kids.
We felt it weakened the firm and we got in Villa one day
and there's one end we've not taken
and Chelsea had done a little go of it so we thought
we've got to have a part here,
but we got thwarted and it's kicking off in the Villa end,
I remember everyone was looking around, what firm is it?
And we looked around, every firm was in away that day
and we were baffled why is it kicking off in the Villa end
and all of a sudden they were marched out by the police
and frog-marched along the pitch and it was the Under-Fives.
We'd be at Euston, Kings Cross, wherever it was
and then you'd have all the older lot go to the front,
get the money and two young ones would be with you.
So it looked like you had the two adults and two young ones.
And so we started travelling Inter-City.
That's the way we got to travel now.
And that's when Persil came out because
how can you get the whole firm on an Inter-City train?
It's first class, different price. Persil was a godsend.
We found something a little bit different.
By around about 17, my mum moved me out of East London
to get me out of trouble.
So, she moved me to Southend,
which got me in probably more trouble.
So, and Grant was only two stops away.
So, I used to get on at Southend, all Chelsea, quite lively for me.
One day we got into the ticket inspector's box.
They used to have their own little box, we rummaged through.
We found his ticket, his thing.
So, we worked out how to write 'em out.
So, we used to write a ticket.
When you look at it now, our crew, we used to write a ticket,
Benfleet in pen to Newcastle and it's like £11.60
and we used to tear it and when we used to get pulled,
we used to show that, and it worked,
and we just started writing tickets.
We used to write our own book every game.
There was no stamp, there was nothing.
The ticket inspector didn't know what they was,
no one knew what they was.
And we travelled probably two or three seasons.
And then we started selling them.
We took on a new role as a job.
I can actually talk about it now because my mum
can't tell me off because I'm sure she would've told me off.
I think even to the day she wouldn't have
believed what we was doing.
So basically, what we did, fashion had come in
and jumpers and that were through the roof.
He was supplying me t-shirts.
He was a bit of a market boy, a bit of a barrow boy,
but he was always on the next move.
And I remember the funniest thing
looking at the older guard, we was picking up on this early,
the casual thing really started late '70s
with the Scousers and the Mancs.
But the London boys, they take it a little bit further.
You're a size 8, so we know we need an 8,
we know we need a 10.
We know that we need an extra-large track suit.
Lacoste, didn't matter what it was, they were buying it.
So the Lacoste thing, 'What's all this with the crocodile?'
You know what I mean?
West Ham still had that hard man image
because the Krays of the '60s going into the late '70s.
So they're still wearing the old DMs and maybe swapped
for the trainers and sort of mako look
and all of a sudden these boys looking like pop stars
with the polo tops
and Andy was already on that
because he's flogging me these double crocs
and suddenly at Green Street, walking down Green Street,
the older guard are wearing them in their 70s, quite proud.
And I think, I see them, and Andy, I said 'What's these?'
And he's always on the next move like,
'No Cass, this is the next thing,
everyone's wearing the one croc, we're West Ham,
we've got the two crocs, double croc.'
I bought a shirt off him, it had 6 legs.
Snide. Know what I mean, snide.
Like I said, he was a funny man.
He was having a chuckle because the older crew,
everyone's kind of looking up to
thought they were like bang top boys
all wearing double crocs without even realising.
It's one of Andy's moves again.
You know what I mean? It's sell anybody anything.
I didn't know till I went to the zoo
that a crocodile only had four legs.
He was always funny.
I used to call him, 'my naughty big boy',
because he were a wolf in sheep's clothing.
That's how I regarded him.
We found a unique way of doing it.
We started leaving... We get a train,
we go Clacton on a Saturday, Sunday night.
We spend the night in a caravan at Clacton.
We then go to Harwich; we'd get the boat across
to Hook of Holland and then we'd get trains.
We'd all split up.
There'd be say three or four of us, we'd go off
and we'd go around thieving from shops.
So, everybody would go off Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday,
thieving, and we'd all meet at Wendy's in Cologne
8 o'clock and then we'd all come back together on Thursday.
Back to the pub on Friday to the Brit with all your gear,
sell it all, football on the Saturday,
you didn't have Friday night games, you didn't have Sunday,
you'd have a midweek game every now and then.
It was predominantly Saturday, 3 o'clock.
So, all back for the football, back off on the Sunday.
That's what I did for a job until one day,
me, Danny, and Dave, we decided to take a car.
It seems strange,
a lot different to when I was here around about '84.
Well we know '84, I had my old Mark 4 Red Cortina,
me, Danny and the Lud and we was driving through,
town to town picking up a few goods
and we didn't come home.
We used to go around mainly on trains and boats.
We used to... it was in the highlight of if you like,
when all the fashion of the clothes came up and about.
So basically we would go from town to town through Germany,
up to Switzerland, Austria, going in, looking at shops,
looking for Ellesse, Fila, Sergio Tacchini.
And we used to have a list of people's sizes.
And on this particular three day excursion,
we came over and we was making our way
up to the Swiss ski resorts, trying to pick off some Ellesse jackets.
When we got a bit further up, they wanted to put chains
on our wheels, but on route we'd already found a place.
We were reading it as 'Bad-un' and it's actually 'Bar-den'.
So we thought let's have a look around.
We see some lovely leather jackets.
So we sort of sized them up,
said we'd get 'em on the way back.
We came back to Baden quicker than we thought.
We were looking at the leathers and whatever.
We didn't fancy it and as we was walking out, we was arrested.
The Lud was in a police station.
Danny was in a prison and I was in the tower,
which is famous, which I've read up...
witches, robbers and murderers.
So I'm not sure what category I fell into.
Hopefully not the witches.
So we're going to drive to Baden.
We're going to go and have a look at my cell, I believe,
that I stayed in.
Wow. There she is. Wow, look at that.
I'm not sure if I was 1, 2, 3, 4...
1 below the bell and 1 down.
That's mad. That's unbelievable.
It actually looks a lovely place. It's a lovely place.
I must have been taken up them back stairs there.
Look, wow, 40 years ago, eh?
How mad is that?
We going to look for somewhere to park?
I want to go and have a look.
It's quite strange pulling up here today,
looking at this lovely tower behind me.
I was here around about April '84.
I was led up these stairs to something that
thinking back now, when I look at it, it looks daunting now,
but coming back in '84, where probably
things look a little bleaker.
And I spent three months, three and a half months,
solitary confinement in this tower.
This courtyard, as you can see, this is dated,
well, back to the...
what's it, 1445 century?
There's the bells used to wake me up, bang on time,
that was above my cell.
Every day, every hour I'd get these bells.
What's it? 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock now?
I think they put me in there to come out like Quasimodo!
Look at that! Imagine that every day for four months.
Every hour, you got that.
I think they put me in here
to teach me a lesson, not to come back to Baden.
Wow, look at that.
So I finally get to go in on my own accord.
Wow, unbelievable!
Mate, look at that.
As I said, my light was on my wall.
This light was on four in the morning.
I had my table, my chair here, my bed was here.
And this is where I used to put my chair just by this window
and I could open that window.
I'm not sure if I could now, but,
so I could possibly open that window with my arm.
Little locks...
Look. Lock these, open it and then
we used to get the bucket, boom it against here
and you get it out there.
Yeah, look at these.
Look at this. Wow.
Four months in here. Where's my little sign of...
is that gone now?
I had my chart on there somewhere of my...
how many days I was here.
I wonder if many people came here after me.
Forget that.
I reckon someone else done that. It was a fake.
And as I said, I've got that on my arm.
Look at that.
Taken from my arm.
To a picture on the wall, wow.
Daunting.
Yeah. Look at that.
Ah, here. This would be where I start to do my days.
Someone did theirs. This is mine here.
'Andy Swallow, April.'
It's soaking wet innit?
Yeah. Here somewhere would be my chart
because here's my, 'Andy Swallow, March-April 84.'
Look at that. Wow.
I don't remember this one.
Don't remember this.
Just still can remember my bed.
So I used to do my walk. I said 20 steps.
I used to do my steps.
So I used to do 1, 2, 3... It's 12 isn't it?
7, 8, 9, 10, Turn.
And then one, two...
That was my exercise for the day was walking up and down here
about a hundred times.
In the end, I said, 'Just try and do it like that.'
To see if I can work out how many it was, I think it was 12.
6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Oh, 10, 11, 12.
It's got bigger. 14 steps. Yeah.
As I say, that would be my exercise path
would be up and down here.
My press ups and sit ups. I might have to do a few.
Wow.
I don't know what to say.
Takes me back.
Good evening, the headlines at 6 o'clock.
Britain's football hooligans have started their season early
with a riot on a North Sea ferry.
Knives were used, bottles and glasses thrown,
behaviour which could prolong the ban
on English teams playing abroad.
We decided to meet in the Brit and get the last ferry
to the Hook of Holland, we was going to Den Haag.
That was it.
So, we get to the station, to Liverpool Street, walked in.
Looked around and thought, 'Who are all these?'
There was loads, I'm talking a lot.
Especially I think, these ain't West Ham
because all our lot are gone, we know they're gone.
All of a sudden, I'm looking and thinking, 'Who's this lot?'
Man United, came to London,
you've got a lot of cockney red, they've come to London,
they're on the same train as us at Liverpool Street,
they're going to the Hook of Holland,
they're going... to somewhere like Rotterdam.
Somewhere like that. They was off.
So, I think, 'Oh no, what we going to do?'
So, we go up, spoke to the fellow and he said,
'You get this boat, or you don't.'
So, there was an upper-class ticket and, mad,
the actual room we bought the ticket for,
was called the Inter City suite, how mad is that?
So, we bought first class tickets, 14 of us,
we go upstairs on the ferry now.
The ferry goes out and a few drinks, there's got to be...
in my estimation I'd say it's a good 300+, maybe 400,
their estimation of the story, whether it makes much difference,
there was 200 of them, didn't make a lot of difference.
We were still really outnumbered.
BBC News: "The Dutch-owned Koningin Beatrix
packed with 2,000 holidaymakers left Harwich on schedule
late last night but two hours into her journey,
the ferry, the pride of Sealink's fleet,
was turned into a battle ground."
And then had a few beers, ferry's gone off.
I said, 'Oh come on, let's go down and have a chat.'
So, me and three of my mates went downstairs
but they ended up getting big lumps of bird.
We was talking to 'em alright at first,
but there'd been a major incident where one of theirs
had been stabbed at Plaistow
and someone had sent him a get well card from all the West Ham,
and they took in some flowers and didn't go down too well.
So, as I'm talking to them, they're all getting around me
and I was saying to them,
'Any of you from Manchester?
You're from Wolves, you're from... any Manchester here?'
A geezer's gone, 'I'm from Manchester.'
And all of a sudden, I could see he was coming up with a bottle.
So, I said, 'Well it's time to go.'
'They're here, they're here.'
Next minute it was carnage. It was...
Joe, bless his soul, he saved us really because he got the hose
from the seat and blocked off one staircase.
They were trying to get up, but he was hosing them down
and then we held off the others.
There was me, Taffy, Danny, it went on 30, 40 minutes.
It went on that long, they turned the boat round
and took us back. I thought we was there.
But anyway, I was lucky.
We've all sort of made out it's nothing to do with us.
For some reason I took my shoes off for some reason.
Changed my shoes, changed my coat, sat down,
went up and got my jacket, sat there
and the thing they was doing was coming up testing your feet,
where they were wet.
BBC Reporter: Fans arriving back in London
gave a grim catalogue of the running battle.
There's a lot of slashing and things.
BBC Reporter: What, knives?
Yeah, blades and bottles and things.
When the boat pulled in, they started pulling...
first of all they started taking off the casualties,
I think it was something like 22 taken off, went to hospital,
they were taking people off in chairs and it's all documented.
So, we still ain't really thought about what's gone on.
It's just been a fight.
So, I'm off, I'm the only one who's off, I can't see no one.
I only walk onto a platform, don't I?
It's full of Man United on the train.
'Oi, oi, get him on here.' And someone said, 'No mate',
'No, officer, he's with us. He's Man U!'
They go, 'You Man United?' 'No, I'm not!'
He's going, 'Get on that train, come on.'
They're trying to pull me on the train.
I'm thinking no way am I getting on that train.
So, I went across the road and I bumped into a few of the boys,
and we worked out, there was only eight of us left.
I think, no six of us left, eight got nicked.
Massive court trial.
A lot of them all got 8's and 10's, yeah, got done for piracy.
I didn't get done on that one, but I got done on the next one.
I think they probably didn't do me on that one
because they'd already built a case for me,
and I think it would've jeopardised what they was
trying to get me for which was the bigger... I say the bigger,
but they got 10 years, how much bigger do you want it to be?
But them boys who got the 10 ended up on my trial, as well.
Yeah. So yeah, that was the old famous ferry.
It was the January, around about January '87.
I remember going to Arsenal
and I remember getting to the station,
there was all the Arsenal around and the coppers singled...
they don't usually single me out, they do,
but not the away old bill, if that makes sense.
The local old bill used to whack us every week,
I didn't mind that.
And they've got hold of me and the copper said something
to me, really always stuck in my mind.
He went to me; 'We'll see you on Monday.'
Always stuck in my mind, 'See you on Monday.'
Didn't think nothing of it, went off home.
Monday morning, boom, door went through,
6 in the morning.
Operation Full Time was the result of detailed
surveillance by special cameras,
undercover and uniformed officers on so-called ringleaders.
There'd been a big clamp down
and by then, everyone knew
the football situation and names and ICF and all that
and to show they'd got the right people, certain people,
me, Bill, Andy ended up in court
and we knew we was in shit
because the year before, they'd done the Chelsea lot
and gave 'em 10 years and they wanted the same for us.
We'd had an infiltration by police.
We was the next big trot.
So, they done us and at the same day they done us,
they done Millwall.
It's quite funny, say they done Millwall,
it was six clowns.
And I say six clowns because they were proper clowns,
they weren't Millwall... They might be Millwall.
But they weren't Millwall.
It's quite mad because we go... we get put up;
we get banged up in prison.
I was with Cass. I was banged up with Cass. Bill was there.
Those arrested are being charged tonight
with conspiracy to cause affrays.
For such offences, there are no limits to the penalties.
I don't have a police record as an adult.
Done a few naughty things when I was a kid,
but I've got no police record as an adult.
And that's what comes as the biggest shock
for me when I was arrested.
I mean, I don't mind saying I had a nervous breakdown
because it shocked me.
I had my dad dying.
I had a broken leg, my second one in a year playing football
and it just all come on top of me and I couldn't handle it.
You know what I mean? And don't mind admitting it.
I knew how serious the trial was,
1) because the Chelsea fan had already got 10 years,
2) my name for football violence was well known to the old bill.
In fact, it's gone on record that I was the first football fan
to be given a lengthy jail sentence way back in the '70s.
So I knew how serious it was for me,
but my one saving grace was I'd been long retired then
and stopped going to football.
And when I did, it was only used to use the pubs
to play cards and then wouldn't go in the match.
We ended up on trial six and a half months, I think it was,
six and a half months. It was a complete fit-up.
And to prove how political it was,
Andy was down as a market trader
and he was on £100,000 bail. Right?
The only people on £100,000 bail was the highest criminals
in the land at the time, was Brink's-Mat.
They were on the same.
So going to football, you know what I mean?
Football fans? Tell me it's not political.
I think that we'd found out down the line
that a lot of the officers had been involved in grassing
and cutting up someone in...
Bethnal Green way, Stepney Green,
and we got the information of it
and then we kept asking for testing.
We could see it was a fit up.
You could see that he would wrote yours and you wrote yours
and it was a complete fit-up.
Somebody comes up;
'I wasn't even there. I wasn't even in the country.'
So everyone knew I was never involved.
I couldn't see how... I knew it was a fit up,
but I couldn't see how they was doing it.
I knew why I was in the frame because I knew it's political
and they wanted to show they could nick any fans,
but they wanted names to show to the press and the media,
they're getting their house in order.
I was 14, Cass was 14,
coming down the line, it would've been 10s.
There was... probably the lowest sentence on that day
would've been 14 years for football, for things I ain't done?
Crikey! Anyway, they did this thing called enzyme testing.
They put this charcoal in it and they shake it
a million miles an hour.
And if somebody's written into something on the page above it,
it comes through.
So they'd added it.
There was no evidence that to add it,
to make it look like we was guilty.
What I didn't realise with enzyme testing,
it's the form of lead pencil I suppose,
in a way it's like tracing and you get it and you shake.
What we noticed with the evidence, there was gaps,
and the writing was different.
So, if I was writing, me or you would write,
if you was writing your scripts, you'd have a free flow
of how you'd write, you wouldn't write, gap,
write and then come back
and then let's say November, imprinted in November
would've been, it's got to be the right way round.
So, November would have December, printed in November.
Well, November should be filed.
Yeah? So how can you have December's notes
across your recollection,
it's physically impossible. Yeah?
So, they found that they'd been falsifying, putting the words
in the names who was there.
And when they was coming back from late games,
one was doing it and they was doctoring all of them.
We come in one day, because we had to get locked up
every morning and every night before...
we had to let the jury go before they let us out.
And went in the morning,
didn't lock us up, didn't lock us up.
I said, 'Something's not right here,
they must have the results of the enzyme.'
They said, 'Would you come out?'
We come out, they said, 'You're free.'
Police were lying. Case collapsed.
After our trial, which we was the pioneers of it,
all the miscarriage of justice cases over that decade
were all back on.
Every famous case you can think of
you knew didn't sit right with you,
they'd all had the retrials and the appeals,
all the appeals are exhausted
because you can't find new evidence as time goes on,
evidence gets worse, don't it?
People's memories, everything. So they're not going nowhere.
Through the ESDA, these cases got a conclusion,
they could reopen them because they examined evidence
that was there and proved it had been tampered with
and fitted up in like they did in our case.
Tonight the men were out celebrating
in their local pub, toasting the end of a 14 month ordeal.
What do they think of the court's decision
that some evidence had been falsified?
Falsify? It's total lies because what had happened,
right, they sent out thugs
to get thugs
and when they find there's no thugs performing
over football matches, they decided anybody would do.
As far as the police, I'd like to see them prosecuted.
If not, take it further as far as we can take it
to prove our innocence so that everybody knows
and hopefully compensation our way.
And it'll take many, many years to restore the police
like we've got going on there today with the Met
to restore their reputation.
So they held their hands up and these cases
over the next five years after our trial collapsed
all happened on the back of the football thing.
But they never talk about our case.
The football case is a result of that because it's a taboo word.
You can't mention football hooligans.
No one ever really sees about...
when they interview people like us
it's how we're perceived is
we don't care what the government thinks about us,
society, politicians, whoever you are, laws,
whether you are the monarchy, whoever.
We care about what we think about each other,
that is from the heart.
What we think about each other, that's what makes us tick.
And if the rest of the world don't like us, well so be it.
Well as you know, West Ham's firm probably had an influence
on lots of other firms in different countries
around the world over the years.
But, probably, our only friendship
that is worth talking about is with Lazio.
They're very close to us, similar sort of people
and they've become very good friends.
So as I say, there's only really for us,
other people might say they've been to Milan and whatever,
but for us as a firm and West Ham, Lazio.
So I get to travel abroad and meet other fans by invitation
to see what it is for them, particularly the Ultras.
We did Spain and Italy, yeah,
and I always find it interesting because
there is political influence.
The ICF is pretty unique because it started off
this whole organised mob culture basically.
The one name that you always think of that
when it comes to the ICF
is Andy Swallow
because he was kind of the figurehead for this
and he was the one who was...
whose name was so well known, not just in London
but in England and beyond, into the rest of the UK,
and into Europe as well.
1, 2, 3.
Hey, you!
How you been?
Yeah, not bad.
Yeah, I'm really good, you?
Good.
That's good!
All the new places, now.
The new places, yeah.
Fuckin' brilliant, that looks brilliant, don't it?
If someone like...
people, members of Inter-City Firm come to you, to...
to talk about friendship, a relationship
is going to be proud
because we are not talking about a normal firm.
We are talking about one of the most important firm in England.
Probably...
In the world, also.
In this world.
I mean...
So first of all,
I mean, it's not the first firm came and say,
'Okay, we can be friends.'
It was Inter-City Firm.
So of course it's normal
that you want to talk with them.
You want to understand if you have something
in common.
And then we knew each other, we had a great time together.
Yes!
The English style in our group?
Yeah, very.
Because, when in the stadium during the years, 80 years,
many fans in the stadium were folkloristic.
We decide to take the English style, Lazio, and Verona too.
Inter start too with the English style.
Yeah.
And it's one of the reasons that we are very close now.
And I think in your mindset, and the way you are,
you're very...
very West Ham, very English.
Lazio and Verona.
Yeah.
The first was Verona.
Verona the first, yeah.
Was Verona.
And then Lazio.
So it's very early.
The English style.
In the 80 years,
many Ultras also are very folkloristic in many stadiums
above all in the south of Italy, but not only.
I would like just to talk, just also...
to another point
because this is just because we want to say
how good and how beautiful is this friendship.
So this relationship grow up
and now is going to
be a real friendship.
I mean, we are really friends.
We are not just friends for Lazio or West Ham.
And I said that before, we're not just football friends,
I've said that before because I've probably not
been for two years,
but if I see you and you, it's like I'm not...
'I saw you last week.'
You know, and to see them all getting...
Like this one, getting older.
I'm getting older!
He's always young, this one.
That's brilliant.
In East London, we are pretty much in our side of London.
We're lucky in London
as such as East London is West Ham.
North London, there's two.
So, we can be proud to be of us.
But in London we're not the biggest,
well I'm going to say,
I'll get slaughtered in fact, we are the biggest!
We're massive.
Gotta watch what I say!
We're massive.
You are massive!
You understand what we're saying. Don't wanna get in trouble.
We'll move on from that one.
You know why, because many people make mistake
that Rome, because the name of the other
is Rome, Roma.
So...
They automatically think Rome.
Is the first team of Rome, but it's not like that.
No, it's not.
So, because also for the colours, Lazio choose.
That's why they start with many sports.
The colour of Greece, because...
The Olympic games.
Where they started, Olympic games.
So, the colours from there.
The eagle is the symbol of Rome.
The colours are from Greece.
And this is why Lazio have this kind of
component on the symbol.
In our story, we like to go against whole.
We are less, because it's easy to be...
'I'm fan of Roma because every immigrants.'
Anyone can be Roma.
'Every people arrive here, we name Roma, Roma.'
It's easier, okay?
For us, it's a sense of proud to go against whole.
And this thing made us stronger than the other part of Rome.
OK? It's in our...
It's the same as West Ham, we were always the underdogs.
And made it, and now Lazio firm
is known in all the world.
Yeah, everybody.
Because we made...
we made troubles everywhere!
In Rome and everywhere, because we have
a political way of mind, way of living.
And all the people that are part of...
all right people in Europe
want to be close with us, for our way of living,
for our way of fighting,
for our mind, and for us is a sense of pride.
Of course. No...
The best thing with...
If this happen, we made the good things.
I've seen it.
Andy, it's simple.
I think... we think, that it's very simple
that to be a supporter of Lazio is a choice.
Yes.
It's a choice. You have to make your choice in your life.
Because when you grow up in school, you are alone.
It's strange, when... like, I'm 63.
And I come from East London,
and I know you say you have a choice,
but your choice is made for you from birth.
My family were West Ham. So, I had no choice.
I had no Man United shirt put on me.
I would've been slapped.
So, from us... your children will be Lazio,
my children are West Ham.
So, I know what you say as a choice,
but the choice is - no choice.
You are West Ham!
That's the choice, the choice is no choice.
No choice.
You have no choice. My Danny? West Ham.
Beau? West Ham.
Your family? West Ham.
The choice was made for us.
The choice is easy for...
My daughter, is there, she said, 'I like a guy.
He is a Roma fan.' No!
Not in my house, not in my house,
No!
We prefer Lazio.
Choose another...
Choose again!
I like that!
I've come back now for... probably been two years maybe
since I've been to Rome maybe.
And I now notice, and if you don't mind me saying,
there's a lovely sign up there that says Ultras Lazio.
And I've seen from the picture coming in, now
you have the banner with Ultras Lazio, a name change.
A few things have changed over a period,
which you know we know.
And why have you changed?
We are forever Irriducibili.
Irriducibili is...
Is in your heart, I understand.
It's in our mind. It's in our soul.
Yes, I understand.
But for this time, in these times,
we decided to give to the story
the name 'Irriducibili'.
Irriducibili now is the legend.
Okay? And we started, we restarted.
We decide to give to the legend the name Irriducibili.
But all of us are Irriducibili.
Irriducibili never die.
But if you see, everything is about Irriducibili.
This is part of the stadium, the banner inside the stadium.
When we have the name Irriducibili,
when we have the name Irriducibili.
Irriducibili never die.
But now we are Ultras Lazio.
Yes. Okay, that's brilliant.
And it's like, in England,
when we was going, we was hooligans,
we was West Ham hooligans and Ultras...
lots of people don't understand the word Ultra is a way of life.
Yeah.
And is that the meaning of the word of Ultra?
Because a lot of people in England don't understand
what an Ultra is.
It's... Is it a way of life? Is it...
It's a way of life. It's not just in the stadium atmosphere.
In the way you live the life extremely - in everything.
And to be...
with a lot of courage, you know?
And you beat life like that.
Yeah, yeah.
And it is strange because if we went around in England
and said we was hooligans,
people look at us and they think we want to fight.
But Ultras is not necessarily mean the fighting.
It means togetherness.
Roll onto the acid house scene.
I suppose I'd come out the football trial.
I'd spent quite a few years out of football on trial
and acid house had arrived, '87, '88.
So here we are, 1988 I went to...
it was one of our mate's stag-dos
just before that for about two or three months
I see a few of our lot Gus, Chrissy, Danny come back
and I see a change in them, a smiley face.
I know it seems mad, you know, the little bandanas
or a smiley face t-shirt.
I was thinking 'Oh, what are these idiots? What are these?'
And 'Come on, we're all going to Future'
on a Tuesday night and then we go in the club
and someone said, 'Oh, you've got to have one of these'
and the next minute, I took an ecstasy tablet
and I see music and clubbing in a totally different world,
and I never looked back, I suppose
and been involved in the scene.
And he said, this is a new scene
and he's trying to tell me about this rave scene.
And the lads amongst us were kind of dismissive with it,
you know what I mean? It sounded like the firm's going soft
and people actually said that behind his back,
you know what I mean? I was doing security for Andy,
and it was just me
and it was over at East Ham, and he said
him and his mate said, 'Cass, need a word with you.'
I said, 'Yeah, what's happening? What do you want?'
He said, 'We've got maybe 50 to 100 Millwall coming over.'
I said 'What? East Ham?' he said, No.'
He said 'During the week we was over the Dunham Tavern,
about 20 of us and they treated us with utmost respect.'
And they said we've got to return the favour.
He said, 'So we've invited them to our rave.'
'Are you sure? You're telling me Millwall's coming here,
East Ham and you ain't told me earlier, we ain't prepared?
Let me get on the phone and call a few people.'
He said, 'No, no Cass, we knew you'd go like that.
This is what we're trying to tell you.'
Basically he's telling me I'm old guard,
he's the new kid on the block in tune with everything.
I'm old hat. I'm just there for security.
Don't say nothing, don't do nothing.
So, we had a little bit of a disagreement over it,
in the end, I said, 'Well it's your show, alright.'
And I said, 'You're telling me don't put in a call,
alright, it's down to you two if anything...'
'Trust me, Cass, nothing will happen.'
I thought, alright, we're on.
We've got a personal bet here.
And they come in and give me a little look,
walk past me one by one.
Yeah, they give a little look like... you know?
All walked in, and I thought
'This is going to go tits up.' And it's on you.
They kept coming up to me, having a good time
and they weren't no trouble.
I looked, I said, 'What's going on here, Andy?'
I said 'You're onto something here ain't ya?'
I've never seen this. That was their firm.
He said, 'Cass, liven up, liven up. It's all changed now.'
He's already on the next move.
It broke a lot of barriers.
The rave scene broke a lot of barriers racially
and especially the football terraces
where you now could put Millwall and West Ham
in the same room, or Arsenal, Chelsea,
everybody was there for the music and the drugs
and everything else and what was going on.
You know, the rave scene and the fact that you could have
20,000 kids dancing in a field somewhere in the home counties
and there's not a lot that the police or the military
or anything the establishment can do about that.
If you can do that within an hour basically,
if you have that reach,
I think the whole power
of that house music scene, that whole collective power
was very worrying to the establishment.
And I dunno if that has sort of added appeal or added bonus,
but I think that the worthwhile things to do in life
are things that involve upsetting the establishment.
By '89 I was working in Stratford
on the Stratford & Newham Express.
During '88 and '89, I got kind of embroiled
in the acid house scenario, shall we say,
and had started going clubbing a lot, mainly kind of West End,
every now and then, some kind of moody rave
somewhere in the East End.
It's almost become cliché to say that
acid house ended football hooliganism,
but it kind of felt like that at the time.
And yeah, there were probably more complex reasons
than that for what was happening at the time,
but it's hard to explain
how things seemed to change almost overnight.
And it grew so quick.
It was so quick and there was no boundaries,
it was like there was no football.
For the first time, it was party, music,
it broke down the football.
Eventually it kicked back when the house scene
sort of evolved to clubs and the football thing came back.
I'm not saying that the football rivalry didn't happen,
just I wasn't involved in it. I was at parties.
My name's Terry Stone. I'm an actor and a film producer.
Lots of people will know me with a dodgy syrup
playing Tony Tucker in Rise Of The Footsoldier
or Jack Spot in Once Upon A Time In London.
But I've been in obviously a host of crime films.
I've produced a host of crime films
and before I become Terry Stone,
I was called Terry Turbo
and, you know, I sort of run most of the big dance music events
back in the day from the early nineties with One Nation,
which was a drum and bass event, jungle event, to Garage Nation,
which was obviously a UK garage that then went into grime event.
We lived on a council estate in Camberley in Surrey,
and we'd all go down into the High Street,
there was a pub called the Brown Jug,
and the landlord of that pub
was friends with Andy Swallow.
Andy was doing, I think it was in Bow,
there was like a flyover,
so it was some sort of weird club that was under the flyover
and he said we're going to Bow in East London,
my mate Andy Swallow, and he obviously mentioned
the Inter-City Firm and so on, and they're doing raves.
And we went to this rave,
I met Jimmy Labello, as he's called
on the night,
and that was my first sort of taste of the rave scene.
Echoes was kind of right next to the Bow flyover,
tucked away almost.
We still drive past it every now and then
just for old time's sake
and it was very much...
it was a nice venue,
but it was what I'd call at the time an ultra-disco.
It was very flash
and in 1988, what essentially had happened
is those clubs almost became redundant overnight
because no one wanted to go somewhere
that was flash-looking.
There was a lovely club built,
you've got to think now, acid house has taken over.
The discos, dancing, the girls dancing around
with their white handbags and their white shoes are gone.
Girls dancing, looking... that had gone in the club scene.
You've got all these lovely clubs with these lovely disco lights
empty, didn't know what to do.
So, Echoes up the road, they started doing a Friday night.
I think we shut at two o'clock I believe, which is late for...
And they smashed it.
It was packed.
My name's Keith Mac. I'm a DJ, record producer
and all-round fun guy.
I started off DJing at a pub in Dagenham called the Fiddlers.
I was only like... Well I was 15.
We used to be able to get in there, it was like the only pub.
My mates used to hassle the manager, 'Let Keith...'
Because I always had a pack of records,
they used to have a Friday night thing there and it was rubbish.
So, all my mates bullied the manager,
and they gave me a Wednesday night.
Obviously, Andy was doing all the warehouse parties,
I didn't know Andy at the time, and then he come down
one Wednesday and said, 'Look, we've got this new club,
do you want to jump on board?'
And that was Echoes on the first night.
So that Friday he picked me up and that was it.
30 odd years later, I'm still here.
We started going to Echoes on a Friday night
because there was one DJ, Tony Wilson,
who we were all...
me and a couple of mates, were fans of
and we started going there regularly and kind of
so pretty much every Friday really,
we knocked the West End on the head for a while
and we're doing that every Friday.
And then I did a Saturday night, Pasha's House
about 800-900 because not many people went on a Saturday,
because there'd be raves but they'd come to us,
so Echoes on a Friday night was the one.
Echoes would be absolutely rammed.
There'd be dry ice everywhere.
You could hardly see in front of you,
there'd be sweat on the walls.
The place would be absolutely heaving.
Right where I'm sitting now was my first party.
I'd say if I had to pinpoint it, I reckon I would've been
about 200 yards over that way there.
Broke into a warehouse, got a bit of paper,
and I still see this flyer now.
You know the Bow flyover, we drew a line, a bridge,
a line, little people in cars, and a man with a stick
with like a little smiley face and that was our flyer.
Acid house party this way.
We had someone on the corner guiding them in.
We put something like 3000, 4000 in a warehouse down there
from 10 o'clock at night till 11, 12 o'clock the next day.
The acid house scene was brilliant because
you'd just have two lights, a strobe and a smoke machine
and a set of decks and that was it.
I think at the time, that was the Wild West era
of the rave scene, where anything went.
And I'm sure there was probably some fisticuffs between
promoters and aggravation, but I sort of looked at
what they were doing and I loved it.
People hang around people and they go,
'I'm going to do this.' And people go,
'Yeah, you should have a go.'
And most people don't. But I was the one that did.
Couple of fellas come up to us and said
'Do you fancy doing a radio station?'
He said, 'Do you know much about it?'
I said, 'I know you turn it on and off.'
And it's on a bandwidth. That's about it.
Started explaining, I said, 'Look...
Don't explain. How much is it going to cost?'
I think it was about £1,000, £1,500 quid.
And we set it up and we had an all-dayer in Echoes,
and this was on the 7th or 8th of May '89 and I said,
'Tell you what we'll do, we'll do the all-dayer,
we'll go off.'
Which was now... while I'm looking around me would be
Stoke Newington just there.
We had a flat and I said we'll go and announce at the party
at 8 o'clock, we are coming on live
and as you leave the party, the all-dayer,
which was at 10 I believe, tune your cars in.
And from that it started,
and that's how Centreforce was launched.
Centreforce? From day one.
Day one, we was doing an all-dayer at Echoes.
I'd finished and Andy said to me,
'Come on, we're going to go,
we're going to set up a radio station.'
I was like, 'I ain't got a clue.'
He said, 'Come and jump in the car.'
So, we drove to Shoreditch behind the fire station.
He said, 'Come, we'll go down.' So, we went down there.
'Bring some records.' So, I brought some records
and at the time, it was in a little flat,
little radio thing like that, which would be monitors
and it was just like, alright, go on.
I was like, 'I don't know, we're testing it, just testing it.'
And it literally was that, and then that night
after the party, that's more or less when Centreforce began,
you know, and that's when it started - 24 hour.
My name's Eric. Psychedelic Eric, and I MC and host on the radio.
I'd met Andy, well, I didn't actually meet him.
He knocked on my door when I was about eight,
up to mischief like he always was
and sort of saw him for the first time then.
But he did go football with my brother
and all that West Ham stuff a little later on.
And I think that's where I probably got the link
to get into Centreforce from my brother Roger.
Centreforce just sprung up out of nowhere one morning
and I was listening and I was like,
'What is this?'
I made a couple of phone calls
and the next thing I was talking to that guy over there.
My name's Wayne Seaton,
better known as DJ Seeker or Seeker.
And I'm a DJ.
I used to work for an estate agents called Seekers
and yeah, that's how I got my name.
I just thought I'd be a little bit different, and I went out
and bought, instead of everybody was using two turntables,
went and bought three, just a bit different
and just a bedroom DJ.
And then there was a couple of contacts
in terms of how we ended up going on Centreforce.
I was with a little syndicate.
'Corporation'.
We was known as the Corporation Boys or the Corporation.
Corporation Dave, DJ Hugs, MC Scotty, and myself,
and we went to the station.
I just thought to myself, wow,
I've got an opportunity here.
Went up and done a show, never done anything like it.
I thought, 'I love this.'
And then I had the opportunity and unfortunately
the estate agents found out because there was somebody
who kind of grassed me up in the office and told them
what I'd done, and they gave me the ultimatum: station or job?
I didn't tell my mum at first, but now she knows,
but I chose the station.
I started music and that was it.
There was no turning back.
We actually started out where I just told you.
Dennison Point always comes up as Dennison Point.
We're literally facing Dennison Point behind us.
We were on a six-month observation.
So we thought we'd cracked it, we thought we're untouchable
24 hours, and that's what we become.
No, we were on a police observation.
They wanted to see who was coming in and out
and observated us for 24
and what they wanted to do every now and then,
they broke... because we know because the court case.
They raided our station to see where we moved the equipment
so they got us actually moving the equipment.
Hence the story of where Seeker and them was with us.
We was given an address to go and put up for a new,
basically to set up a new studio.
So, we was given an address and we went up to the door
and listen, kind of thing,
thought, right, okay, then this must be it.
And we've kicked the door, kicked the door off,
and there's a family eating dinner,
and they were none too pleased, but we were sort of...
just looked at each other and we was on our toes.
She threw everything at us.
She chased us down front the gallery, she chased us...
you know you're talking about a typical East London woman;
she wasn't having it, we'd ruined her Sunday lunch,
she threw crockery at us and everything chasing us
all the way down, that was in Dennison Point.
My name's Danielle Montana.
I'm a DJ producer and an original DJ from Centreforce.
I'd heard of Andy, yeah.
At the time, who didn't?
He was quite a known individual. Yeah.
My memory's got a bit wavy as time has gone on,
but we met because someone saw me and my sister playing,
and they invited us to the radio station in its early days,
early weeks, they took us up to the radio station, that was it.
We got a slot on the radio, and we've been there ever since
so yeah, that's Centreforce.
It's quite difficult to explain how big Centreforce was.
How it was going all the way down to North West Kent,
South East London and beyond,
it seemed like to the wilds of Essex,
kind of everyone seemed to be
tuned in to Centreforce.
Initially, there was a certain amount of,
we didn't really know where it was coming from, who it was,
but suddenly during '89,
it seemed to be absolutely everywhere
and if it went off the air,
even briefly, even for a few hours,
people would be phoning each other up saying,
'What happened to Centreforce, what are you listening to now?'
And it had a massive impact and it was the way
people would find out what was going on,
even if something was on or off that night
and various elements like that so it was absolutely huge.
Woodstock 30,000.
We did three days in a field, 30-odd thousand people.
We hit so many people's lives in that short period
that we didn't realise that people were coming to London
taking cassette tapes up to Scotland.
And if I talk to everybody now, they listened to Centreforce Radio.
I must've been the most listened to radio station.
We couldn't get no more than five miles.
But it's a cult thing that everybody at some point
in that scene was touched by Centreforce.
Those days were great, I have to say,
even though we were inflicted by the law,
but we had a massive following at the time.
For at the time that we were in the birth of house
in this country, Centreforce was definitely at the forefront.
We were the first 24-hour house music station,
and it was pirate, so you always looked over your shoulder
it's not like carrying two sticks and running from the old bill.
It's carrying cases of vinyl. You know?
So yeah, I have to give them a props for what they did.
Can you remember when we was doing a show
and we got a call again saying that
someone's going to come to the studio.
We packed up all the gear, put it in the lift,
got it all in the car.
We got an address for a new studio.
We've gone to the new studio, before we left the old one,
we said, 'London, we'll be back in about 10 minutes' didn't we?
And within 15 minutes the studio was packed away in the car.
We was gone off to the next address,
we got to the next address, set all the music up.
'Hello, London, how you doing?' What did we do?
We went downstairs, to get the last few bits out the car.
There was a bobby on the beat standing there,
'Hello.'
'So, this is where Centreforce is then.'
Like that. We looked at each other, didn't we?
Yeah, so...
Yeah, they got to know us. The thing is they got to know...
Especially I used to drive a distinctive vehicle
because it was a Q Reg Fiesta.
So, I used to get pulled up and they used to be like,
'Hello, Seeker.' sort of thing.
And I used to be like, my name's not Seeker, my name's Seaton.
And they'd be like, 'Well, your name's Seeker,
and what's the records in the back for?'
Turned around, 'Told you I'd gone round my mates.
I was playing music.' 'No, no, no, no.'
But they never ever, caught or arrested
in terms of that side.
Near misses.
Yeah, no it was good times, good times there.
And then obviously when the police...
shut it down, it was shut down.
The government wanted to clamp down again, so...
our boys had to... so all of a sudden Seeker was the one,
Seeker was the next DJ on, as he's gone to go to the studio,
he's listening in the car, that's how you...
and Hill Street Blues come on and the DTI come on,
and said, 'All you Centreforce listeners,
this is the last time...
This is the last record from Centreforce,'
and they played Hill Street Blues, cheeky gits,
and they played that and they shut us down,
took all our equipment and then we all got arrested.
I was arrested at the Pink Toothbrush.
I come out three days later, I went to a block of flats
and came on and put the Dixon of Dock Green on
and said we're back.
And that didn't go down well.
And then they just come down again,
they ripped our station down again
and after about the 5th attempt we just thought,
we can't go nowhere.
So, all that hard work to be kicked back
and now, which is weird when I do this...
It's quite sentimental because when I look at it,
I think we left such an impact.
What could we have done if they'd left us alone?
We might have been dead now,
we might not have been a radio station.
But we had the same again, which is sad.
I might just say it; They can't do me anymore.
The government, the bodies above
just never wanted us to do anything. That's it.
You know, the funny thing about the Tory government
of the time being so anti-acid house
is that in some respects
it was kind of quite Thatcherite
in its celebration of entrepreneurial characters
and individuals who managed to essentially do
what Thatcher had been telling them,
and the Tories had been telling them to do,
which was to get off their arse, go and do something,
go set up your own business and make a success of it
and that's what these people did.
Yeah, I think when you come from a working class background,
you move into any kind of activity,
any industry like the music industry,
they are businesses and they have a kind of hierarchy
and expectation of how you behave and how you negotiate.
They don't really like people making their own rules
and doing it in their terms.
So it is a very difficult environment to break into.
I think Britain's a very class dominated society
and it is run by a certain class of people who
went to certain schools and have these connections
and have the wealth and money behind them
that makes the consequences of their failure
less drastic than it does for someone
from a working class background.
So it is a whole different thing to break into that
when you don't come from that kind of elite background.
'What about making a record? We could do this.'
And we went off to a studio and we made a record.
And from that I ended up
meeting Jimmy Low and we ended up...
they a massive track called Made In Two Minutes.
I had a group which was with Danny's mum and Keith Mac,
and we was New Class A.
We PA'd with The Prodigy, Shades Of Rhythm, M People.
We was all on the scene together and I set up a record label.
Put out 56 records in the first year,
which just over one a week.
We're one of the top dance labels out there.
The name in the square, Labello Blanco Recordings.
The reason we've got the name:
Labello meaning label, Blanco: white.
It was supposed to be Italian meaning white label,
that's what we are, we're a white label independent company
and we put the square to box it off
and it's been really effective for us.
My name's David Low.
I'm a DJ producer for Artful Dodger and Platinum Breaks.
I met Andy through my brother.
My brother was a rapper Jimmy with Bug Kann & The Plastic Jam.
Andy was New Class A.
They used to do the gigs together
and they started the record label, Labello Blanco.
And I thought I was a bit of a rapper, 12 years old.
So I met Andy back then as long ago as that.
Jimmy used to take me to his house and stuff in Dagenham
back in the day.
They was doing all the big raves, illegal raves together.
They met getting the studio together
and then I think they started the label.
Andy started Labello Blanco and Jimmy joined.
Andy at the time, he would obviously do his records,
white labels, or dub plates,
and then people would play them out
and then obviously people would record them, they'd put them out
and then people would go into record shops
with a tape or the CD and go, what is that track?
Oh, it's Labello Blanco.
And then Andy would be like, 'Fucking hell,
we just released that, we've sold 50,000 fucking records.'
Me and Andy, we had a band called New Class A back in '91
then we started setting up the record label Labello.
Labello Dance... I had Labello Dance,
which was more house sort of stuff.
And then we had the 'Public Demand.'
And then I found the real crooks.
Oh mate.
If I have to lie, I'm not going to call him a crook
because I'm going to tell you about the industry's crooked.
But if you want to meet someone who is so...
how can I say it? I'm not going to say...
I actually like him,
so I don't want to make him sound bad.
Let's just say that someone who took your business
quite quickly was Pete Waterman.
I did two and a half years with Pete.
He taught me everything.
I did work experience at the label when they was at PWL.
A good two weeks of my life, that was.
Eventful, then when I was 17, left school, Andy and Jimmy
gave me a job at the label at Labello Blanco - Public Demand.
Keith Mac will say I was tea-boy at the record label
when I first started.
But yeah, Andy and Jimmy gave me the chance
at the record label
and I've been in the music game ever since.
Yeah, I just learned the business as I was there.
I mean, I started there when I was 17
all the way up to 24, 25, 26.
So, a good 10 years, 11, 12 years at the record company.
You just learn how the business works,
what better people to learn from than Andy and my brother?
Love to hate him.
He's brilliant and I learned from the best.
I did a few months with Simon Cowell,
but I did two and a half years me, Keith and him.
Unbelievable at what he did and done.
So he kicked his managing director out of his office.
Gave us that, gave us recording studios, gave us free rent,
he gave us advanced money to do music.
He gave us free studio... Well, he gave us studio time,
nothing's free with Pete, which we work out down the line
and he guided us a lot.
Yeah, I had a lot of arguments with him
but what a character, what a person to learn off of.
Well, we signed Artful Dodger's first record,
What You Going To Do with Craig David,
which was a big UK... it was a big underground hit.
Then they brought us Rewind, but no DJs would play it.
You have these things cut called dub plates
and we got 'em cut for DJs and was giving 'em out
to DJs and Mikey B from the Dream Team come back and said,
there's too many Rewind parts in the track.
So we took the middle one out
and then Rewind then become a massive underground
and then obviously a massive chart success,
went number two in the national charts and it was amazing
to be around that and a part of that at the time,
we'd never obviously had...
the record label never had a number two record before.
We'd had a couple of tunes that had charted back in the day,
but nothing of this magnitude.
I had Craig David, and put out Ms Dynamite 'Booo!'
Artful Dodger is still mine, well,
I say mine it's still under our umbrella as such.
At the time, because I loved music,
obviously I was hearing about this garage movement,
and that's obviously when Andy and Jimmy was obviously
building up their record label
and they were doing some
big things with Artful Dodger and people like that.
And I think at that time when you...
I just remember people saying, 'Have you heard this garage?'
Yeah we had some... it was some good times.
Went to some good events, had some good parties from it.
And then we had some other successful hits after that
from Woman Trouble to Miss Dynamite - Booo!
and then the whole Artful Dodger album came,
I think there was seven top 10 hits from the one album.
Done 1.5 million, and then we did Artful Dodger.
We done three of Craig's tracks, Jungle Massive albums.
Yeah, and become a force within...
become one of the biggest drum & bass labels,
which is Labello Blanco.
And we've become one of the biggest in the top five
of big garage labels, which was Public Demand.
I did the music from 1992,
'91, '92,
right through to the 2000s,
2002, 2003,
lost my love for the music.
Just become too political, too dark,
too moody, too many fights.
I could do that at football let alone going to a nightclub.
I'm Danny Swallow,
Master Pasha, some people might know me as
I'm one of the owners of Centreforce Radio,
I'm Andy's son, Mr Pasha's son,
the original, the founder of Centreforce,
and I'm the one that's in control today.
December '17, we'd been running...
a friend of mine's daughter,
she has cancer so we was trying to raise money for her,
we thought we'd do a party.
Bring back all the... How that came about,
I don't know, but we had the Centreforce Facebook page
so we was like let's run a Facebook live video'
and Majestic, another good friend of ours,
he was like, 'Look, I know how to set it up on Facebook live.'
So, we ran it every day for a week
and in that week, we did over a million views.
And I was like, 'Wow!'
There are still people my age and older going out
and doing the same thing they were doing in 1988, '89, '90,
maybe not as late or as heavily, but they're still doing it.
And it's never really left people, it's always stayed there.
That feeling, the idea of the joyous nature
of an uplifting nature of house music,
bringing people together,
that's had a real impact on people,
and they've never forgotten that.
So, when it came back,
it just felt as if,
yeah, everyone would say Centreforce, 88.3.
There was this idea
and I think that's never left people.
So, we were like, 'Look, let's keep the ball rolling
and keep the momentum flowing,'
and when we did that
it just became, slowly but surely, the interaction was mad,
we had 32,000 likes, 12,000 shares and comments.
It was ridiculous, it was like pirate on Facebook.
That's exactly what it was like.
Like with the old pager days.
And when...
I remember, we was doing it for a long time,
a good couple of months, and when we did it,
we never got cut off, never got any interruptions,
never got any copyright issues
it was almost like we was ahead of the game.
When Facebook came knocking,
I don't think he would've been shy about that one
because it's just like...
you have to have the good sense to realise what's there.
You don't want to be some sort of
curator of your own existence.
You can't be kind of mired in that kind of nostalgia.
Things do move on irrespective of what you believe
or how you want them to.
And I think that you have to try to be sort of conversant
with opportunities as they actually exist.
We were streaming via Facebook, it was video,
it was just us with music playing,
don't get me wrong, we had good sound quality,
we always have, always will.
And we were just interacting with the people
because the messages would come up live,
so we were just shouting them out and it was great,
my dad said it was as close to pirate as we will ever get,
as close to the good old days as we'll ever get.
And that led to something crazy happening,
my dad was out in Tenerife,
we'd just finished a live stream with Keith Mac
funnily enough, we did our one millionth view show.
It blew up. We broke a million in the first 10 minutes
and it was just incredible.
He's roped me back into it after I left it all.
I was like, 'No, no!'
And he started doing the Facebook thing again.
'Oh come on.' I'm like, 'No, I don't want to do it.'
'I've done my thing with you.'
And then he slowly gets hold of ya and then bang,
you're back into it all. The chaos again.
Centreforce finished, you saw all this emergence
of all these other radio stations, pirate stations popping up.
So, they did lead the way.
They were the forerunners.
So, it was only inevitable, even though decades later,
that we came back.
Daniel Bunter and them, they do his thing where you go down
and you do a talk, do a seminar, so I'm sitting on stage
and there was someone who's got a real frequency FM,
they've done really well, and they started talking about DAB.
I was like, 'What's that?'
So, I turned around to him, 'What's DAB?'
'Digital Auto Band.' It's a new form of FM
but it ain't so hard to get on it.
I come out and I said, so I've answered all these questions,
everybody wants to know about Centreforce,
they want to know about Centreforce,
so I came out and I said to Danny,
'DAB, what's DAB? Have a look at it.'
Not many people knew about it so,
we applied for a license...
We applied for a space first of all with the DAB body.
And we got in touch with the people who run Essex Multiplex.
We got in touch and got chatting and we was ready to go.
They were like, 'One final thing,
you need to get your license from Ofcom.'
I was like, 'Oh here we go.'
So, I literally spent 3 months filling out the application
getting everything set, getting it right, making sure
I was on point as a person applying for a license
because at the end of the day, I'm the license holder,
Centreforce has the license but I'm the license holder.
I'm the one responsible.
You swear on air?
Comes down to me.
Or you break the rules, it's my fault
because I'm the license holder, I'm the person responsible.
So I made sure everything was right,
but during that 3 month period,
it was like I was sitting there one day
with my dad and I was like,
'Why don't we try and get on the London one, let's see.'
Probably one of the best things that happened is
I went to Tenerife,
and I said,
'You go and get a licence and we'll do it.' And he did.
And people say to me, 'Oh, you know...'
You got to remember, he's 27...
26, 27.
And he's got the whole of a radio station on his shoulders.
That's some achievement.
People do look at me and go, it's your radio station.
Historically, it's my radio station. Not today.
No.
Yeah, it's a big thing to do. Yeah.
I'll let you off on that one, Dan.
It was the wait that felt like 3 years
but it was like 6 weeks really,
for Ofcom to come back with their decision
regarding our license
and the day they gave me my license
I remember crying for about an hour.
It was five years ago, he went off and got a licence.
I don't know how he done it. He did.
And I remember meeting the DAB people
and they looked at me and went, 'You can't have one.'
They were laughing, he went, 'You can't have one, you can.'
And they took a chance with us, and it just flew.
I was like, 'We got our DAB license!'
And literally from that day
I said, 'I can't believe what we've done.'
He was like, 'You can't believe what you've done?'
'You ain't done nothing yet, you've got a license,
now the real work starts.'
I was like - yeah, you're right.
I've got 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
equipment, I've got shows to fill, DJs, presenters.
Every single thing, I had to go and get,
and I had a go live date in 6 months.
They called me and said,
'Do you want to go live in 2 weeks?'
And I was like, 'Yeah go on then.'
And then phoned my dad, I said, 'We're going live in 2 weeks.'
He was like, 'I'm on holiday, I'm in Tenerife for 6 weeks.
What are you talking about?'
I was like, 'No you got to come back, we're going live.'
Just as Centreforce was about to come back,
I'd realised I couldn't really earn any money here anymore.
You're ducking and diving for so...
you can only duck and dive for so long.
I come out of the music industry that I didn't like.
I've done the Craig David stuff and that
and I just, I've always had affiliation with Tenerife.
I've always had businesses there, and we already had a bar there.
I'm Donna and I'm from London, Chingford.
Me and Andy met at The Academy
in Langston Road in Loughton.
He started hitting on me straight away.
Oh it was a few years before I turned to Mrs. Swallow.
We got married in 2016. I met him in 2007.
So marriage wasn't really on the cards,
but then when we had Amelia, kind of changed things
and I thought - I wanted her to be the same name as me.
So just one family.
She's 12 now, Amelia. Yes, going on 21.
It's all pros coming out here. It's great for Amelia.
She can go to the beach every day.
She's horse-riding.
We're in the sun constantly,
you wake up happy when you're in the sun, don't you?
With us, we've boomed.
We started off with one business, now we've got four.
So yeah, we just keep going and see how we get.
He started from what most people start with, not a lot
and he's worked his way up, but he's struggled to do that.
He's been knocked down quite a few times,
but he's always come back up on top.
So he's come a long way and he's done well.
I went there to retire.
As soon as I arrived, I got an opportunity
to open up another bar with some backers from the UK,
which was Joyce, which we did.
And then we got the radio station there
and we've now opened up Rejoyce
and we've now opened up Centreforce FM on the Canaries.
So, we've got Centreforce out there as well,
which plays the music from here and from Canaries.
To get the licence was one thing,
but then to open the doors and broadcast
and still be on now
six years later, it's nothing short of incredible.
And the way that we did it in such a destructive manner,
I mean we never even did a marketing campaign.
We was like, we're here.
And I think the way that the brand's grown so naturally
through word of mouth and through people just getting
back in touch, that was out raving back in the day,
I think that it's a real positive story and it's a real story
that you can't help but fall in love with.
That was the major thing for me was grounding the business
and making sure that we stay true to our roots.
I mean we say it all the time - from the streets of East London,
we don't get much more real than that. You know what I mean?
They always had shoutouts back in the day
and it was via a pager and I can't imagine.
So, I think now the fact that modern technology's evolved,
we're able to access the messaging system
anywhere in the world.
When we're broadcasting from Australia or New York
or Chicago or right here in Tenerife.
Being able to take that Centreforce family around the world with me
is the most important thing.
This is all fantastic, but if we couldn't
bring the Centreforce family here
and couldn't have the messages live,
we wouldn't be doing the shows from here.
I think that's why Centreforce will stay and will forever be
the biggest station
is because we are by the people
and we are for the people. That's it.
Like everything we do, I'm always
my first concern is our Centreforce family.
Before making money and before making
the business successful, the family have got to be happy,
if they're not happy then we've got nothing.
I've got an extremely talented roster of DJs,
some of the biggest names in the industry,
and without those guys, we wouldn't be what it is.
I'm Micky Moore. Tenerife and Essex, London originally.
My name's Benno, I'm from Manchester originally,
but lived in Tenerife most my life.
I was a product of the care system, I was in care in Essex,
so in the '60s, been in schools and all that.
And then '75, a friend of mine, Andy's friend Grant,
moved to Essex and we had a little gang
used to muck around, football, causing havoc.
So about 1976, Grant introduced us to Andy.
Andy moved to Southend.
So we ended up going to Southend, meet up with Andy.
I found a family in my football club, my mates,
we're like companions.
It was always there.
Know what I mean, doing things together, weren't just football.
We'd go youth clubs, we'd go parties and we'd be in music.
I hadn't seen Andy for a few years, you know what I mean?
Not since Echoes days.
He said, 'The radio's back on again, we're doing the radio.
Got this studio, got this...' He was selling me it.
You know? And I'm like, what?
It was pirate before, you know what I mean?
Used to listen to this and...
'No, no, we've got this, we've got this, we've got that.'
He said, 'Come down.' I'm always welcome.
So I'll give a mooch, I'll have a look, see what's going on.
And then after that we just met again for the party.
Went to that, started going to the studio.
We used to go down just to see Andy
go and see him, everyone come down to his show.
So we used to go down there, muck around, 20 of us.
And then one day he was like, 'Just help us out, Micky.'
I went, 'What?'
He went, 'Just write this down, these messages.'
Done it once, got the job.
I met Andy through my old man who introduced me to him.
And at the time I was only DJing in another club over here
one or two days a week, trying to get my break.
It was more a bit of fun to be honest.
And then Andy gave me a few shifts early on in Joyce's,
his club on the Las Americas Strip.
As time went on, he slowly started giving me more nights
and then eventually he made me the resident DJ
and I've been there now two years.
And obviously you meet all the Centreforce lot in there.
They come in a lot.
And I've done a few shows with the likes of Max Fernandez.
They are like a family.
You can't call 'em a community. Everyone's so nice.
I've not met anyone that's like... yeah, it's good, it's great.
Shout outs is all what he's about on Centreforce.
It's never going to change. That's how we started.
Shout outs is how it is.
No playlist, play what we want.
And that's how it is.
It just makes people feel part of, it's like a family thing.
It's not like mainstream radio. We interact with the people.
There's so many people just sending in every two seconds.
So it's massive and I think to them as a community
as well, it's such a big thing.
They listen to it, some people like 12, 13 hours a day.
So to hear their names shouted out I think
is such a big thing from them, from their favourite DJs.
See some of the DJs on there were massive in the '90s,
like the biggest names you could.
So to them I think it's a really big thing and important.
And I think me leaving the country and coming here,
he had to flourish because with me being there,
it probably wouldn't have grown as big as it would've been because
it's either my way or no way.
Yeah? And they ignored me.
He's taken some convincing.
We nearly had fights. Don't worry about that.
We've nearly had stand up fights with each other.
The thing is that we're father and son, but we're best mates.
So we argue, we fight, but at the end of the day,
we do it for the right reasons.
We're not just standing there and arguing for no reason.
It's both because we care so much.
Seeing what I've done with his legacy
and it's now being able to pass our legacy to my son.
And then if we can, like you said, if Centreforce
is still around in 60 years' time and he's still popping in
and doing his Monday show,
then nothing would make me happier than to have my son,
me and my dad all on a radio station together.
I mean, who wouldn't want that?
The radio brings everybody together and I think
as long as we can always keep that passion,
keep that - we are the same as you.
If you do feel down and a little bit lonely, talk to somebody,
talk to the radio, send a message in.
We'll always get back to you.
That's the difference with Centreforce is that
we set up with a mission to become the station,
to provide information to people.
We took that one step beyond them, when now
that voice in the room where that little person
that when you're feeling low, you flick on the radio
and you get greeted with a welcoming voice,
a load of good music...
And Justin Childs.
And sometimes Justin Childs and Micky Moore, sometimes!
Forgot about him too!
Yeah, definitely having a family and having that.
That's the reason why we're doing this now.
And Centreforce is the family.
Yeah, that's it.
You're our family.
Welcome to the family.
That's it.
Last year we took the brand to Liverpool,
we took the brand to Stoke, all around the UK,
to get as much love when you go to a new city, new town,
it's just mad, I mean, this year, by the time this comes out,
we'll have announced all the plans
taking the brand to Dubai this year,
we're taking the brand to Ibiza, around the world.
And when we go to these places,
the reception is no different.
You get welcomed with open arms
and everybody's just buzzing to have a bit of time.
But how about here? We've set up Centreforce Canarias.
We've been on something like four months and we're now
going to be playing main stage 100,000+.
There'll be about 400,000 people there,
but the main stage about 100,000 Centreforce takeover,
that's never happened.
We've now come to a point where we feel we are ready
to come back into the record label in a different format
and Danny and them have now set up a whole way of
doing music, record labels, and we will be back.
Dan. You've got it.
This year, launching in May.
So by the time this is out, all going to be ready.
883 Records, Centreforce Records.
We've got five subdivisions underneath that.
One of 'em, which taking heritage, taking inspiration
from something that my dad created, 883 Rewind.
It's going to be taking you on a journey through everything
house, garage, and really reviving
giving that scene the kick up the arse like it needs.
If you look at a lot of the people that
around my dad's generation and look at 'em now,
they was all underdogs in their own right.
Nobody wanted them to succeed.
There was nobody giving them handouts.
There was nobody helping them along their way
or showing them a direction like I've had.
Him, for me, he's the biggest inspiration,
the biggest reason that I do what I do,
it's because of him.
There's only one real true underdog.
That's my old man.
We're just happy here in the sun, pop down to the beach,
pop to the bars, have a couple of drinks,
have some nice dinner, tapas, and it's just a nice life.
I think the interesting thing about, as opposed to
most of the top guys from all kinds of clubs
from that era
is that he made it about what he did
rather than about who he was, he kept himself away
from the limelight basically, as an individual,
but publicised everything that he was involved in that he did.
He was probably one of the last great analogue influencers.
There's a great organisational intelligence at work
because he basically changed football hooliganism
and the way it was organised.
He was certainly one of the main guys that did that.
But he also took these kind of skills,
these organisational skills, into setting up the radio station
into organising raves.
And it always seemed to me that
he was more than about football.
One of the things that I really love in working class people
is a sense of entitlement.
Anybody that's working class,
you've got to have a massive sense of entitlement.
If you've not got that, you're going to be shat on.
For people like Andy, it was never an option
not to have that sense of entitlement.
And I think it's important.
I think it's absolutely crucial that you have,
if you're working class,
you have the biggest sense of entitlement possible.
Well, Andy was like us.
He would stay with you, he would be your friend
and he would be loyal and he would help you
if you was in trouble.
We have always been underdogs in every way
as West Ham supporters, West Ham as a club,
and us as kids, we was always underdogs.
We was the forgotten class, and still are in many respects
and we wanted our day in the sun.
And Andy's gone on to do what he's done with Centreforce
and built this wonderful thing out of nothing.
I don't think for two old East End Boys,
we've done bad between us.
He's old school, he's old school East End, ain't he?
So he's got them morals, them old school morals
so he'd always help people out.
He's got to somewhere in his life and he's helping people up.
If it wasn't for him,
then I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now.
And he does that throughout his life
I've seen him take people under his wing
and give them an opportunity to do something
with their life or make something of themselves.
He's got a reputation because of the football, basically.
As I said, if you work for someone for that long,
you're going to have rows, you know what I mean?
But he's alright. I call him 'The old man.'
He's such a kind person, he's so caring
and anybody that really knows him
and anybody that is friends with him
and is lucky enough to call him a friend,
I think they'll tell you as much as I do,
he's not this big scary monster, deep down he's a big softie,
but he's a product of his environment ultimately.
And now I really see
he actually ain't a product of his environment.
His environment's now a product of him
because he has set the mould and he's set the way of life,
I think for anybody from that background
because he ain't ever let it hold him back.
And I think his personality and the fight and desire
that he really has is unmatchable.
This is everybody's story, this is my story,
this is Danny's story, this will be Beau's story
Danny's boy too.
But to do the music, the DJing
and then to pass that down to Beau,
which is the next generation, that's massively important.
And for Amelia as well.
I know she laughs, Amelia, at 12,
but she has a little look at the music that we do,
and in her little sense, she's always up there with me.
She said to me yesterday, I'm having my birthday party
but I'm not having your old music, Dan.
I'm having some new stuff.
And I was like, 'I play new music, Amelia. That's what I do.'
It is for the generations, it's for Danny,
it's for Beau and it is for Amelia.
And I think that's the thing as well.
It is a family thing.
It's a family business and I want to pass it down to my boy
and I hope that he passes it down to his,
if we can keep it going for another 40, 50, 60 years
then Centreforce really did stand the test of time.
Yeah. Especially if I'm still DJing.
I'll tell you what, mate, stranger things have happened.
Watch this space!
You never know.