Andy Bollen is talking with boyish enthusiasm about his favourite subjects: music, comedy and football.
As a former drummer in a band and a regular contributor to many of the Scottish comedy shows you’ll have watched or listened to over the years, it’s little surprise that the author knows all about timing. Time-management is another concept altogether, however. Filing-cabinet doors fling open and index cards start spitting forth from the drawers when Bollen speaks: the Irish comedian Dave Allen, Father Ted, farts, No.10s, Arthur Montford, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana are all referenced in a conversation which has been primarily organised to promote Bollen’s book A History of European Football in 100 Objects.
In the space of a non-stop hour, he pauses only when he remembers to breathe – which isn’t very often. His is an infectious Glasgow bar-room storytelling style, one that translates seamlessly to the written page. If you haven’t read Bollen’s books before, the likelihood is that you’ll have seen some of his sketches on television or heard some of his jokes on the wireless. His writing career began when a chance meeting with Rab C Nesbitt creator Iain Pattison, while he was at a band session in Airdrie, led to Bollen, 56, submitting some of his work to BBC Scotland.
“I sent three batches of stuff to Off The Ball and I hadn’t heard anything back. The BBC at Queen Margaret Drive had a terrible internal post and the producer Stephen Hollywood phoned me one day to say he’d just got my stuff about three weeks late. The next week I had about four gags on the show and that was me, I was making money – £30 a pop and I was like ‘you beauty’. I wrote for Off The Ball until about 2019 when they stopped doing comedy, Only An Excuse more or less every year and then I started writing books.”
A History of European Football is his fifth of six. It’s a perfect Christmas stocking filler which chops up some of the continent’s more obscure tales into bite-size chunks. But if that description sounds as if it is damning Bollen’s work with faint praise, it is meant as anything but. Bollen’s book is a warm spring afternoon bouncing up the concourse at the San Siro or a steaming mug of gluhwein on a biting winter’s day in the Bundesliga.
In the book we are talking about and, similarly, in his A History of Scottish Football, Bollen situates himself as the curator of his own museum into which he has placed a number of artefacts.
“Remember Frank McAvennie got done for cocaine and all that? He claimed he was going on a diving expedition after £50,000 was found in his boot in a holdall and he was going to look for treasure so I took a diving suit as an item and used it as a cipher to get into talking about it. I would use items to develop ideas: the half-time pie is in there, the magic sponge, the headphones for footballers coming off the bus.
“[In the European book] There was this wee old manager from Ajax, Stefan Kovacs, who used to ride about on a bike, and he won two European Cups back to back but he never gets any credit for it. He was also behind setting up Clairefontaine that [Kylian] Mbappe and [Thierry] Henry came from. There is a famous movie about Ajax where Cryuff and all the old Ajax stars show up in their sports cars and Kovac turns up on his old bike like something out of a Carry On movie.
“There is some really heavy stuff in it, too. Alexandre Villaplane, the first French captain. The item for that is a blindfold. He was shot for treason, took sides with the SS and became a henchman, the wee guy who got shot who played for Lazio. Technically, when writing the book, my comedy background helped. It allowed a different approach – especially with the more harrowing, more serious stories.”
The ambitions of Scottish clubs in Europe may have long since faded this season but the book also details a time when her clubs would regularly bloody the noses of the continent’s elite.
The object for the subject entitled ‘Roma v Dundee United ref bung’ is a restaurant menu and refers to the means by which the Italian club’s directors ensured they escaped a humiliating defeat over two legs at the hands of Jim McLean’s minnows in the European Cup semi-final of 1984. Two-nil up from the first leg, United were subsequently overhauled 3-0 in the second with the goal that sealed the victory coming from a soft penalty. McLean and the United players long suspected that something was afoot with French referee Michel Vautrot. It is a feeling of unease that was later confirmed by the Roma president Riccardo Viola, son of the late Dino Viola (also a Roma president), in a television interview many years later.
Bollen quotes Viola as saying: “Spartaco Landini, the director of football at Genoa, came to see my father [Dino]. He told him Vautrot was a friend of his and that we could get at him via another friend, but he would have to be given 100 million lire [£50,000]. He said a dinner would be organised with the referee on the eve of the game and a signal to show the deal had been done would be demanded. During the dinner, a waiter went up to the referee, saying, “Telephone call for Mr Vautrot.” That was the pre-arranged signal. Vautrot left the table and when he returned, said, “My friend Paolo rang and he sends you his best wishes.” Then I got up, rang my father and told him, “Message received.”’ Why even attempt to cheat? Viola explained they needed help because they were already two down and not making the final, held at their home stadium, would have had serious financial repercussions.”
Ask him which is his favourite story and he ponders his answer in the manner of a vintner selecting a vintage Bordeaux. “I quite like the darker ones,” he says.
Some of Bollen’s own real-life stories are every bit as colourful as those which he details in his 100 Objects series – like how, as a budding young musician he played support to an American grunge legend, a story that sounds as if it could have been dreamt up by Jay from The Inbetweeners.
“Before I got into comedy I was a drummer and I toured with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain – I sound like I’m making this up. My pals were in The Vaselines [who wrote Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam] and I would help them out. I ended up playing drums in this band Captain America and that’s how we toured with Nirvana.
“I was about 24 or 25, I was from Airdrie and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was keeping a diary. I kept on hiding it. Kurt Cobain thought it was hilarious. By the time I got to 2013, I had enough confidence to write about it, I knew by then how to construct a sentence properly.”
Since his book on Nirvana, four others have followed, while a sixth, on football’s No.10s (The No.10. More than a number: more than a shirt), is out on March 27. He says he draws on personal experience and a love affair with the game that dates back to childhood for his inspiration.
“I got into football when I was about six or seven. I remember watching Johan Cruyff at the 1974 World Cup when I was eight. I played football all the time, played in the school team. I remember playing once against this other primary school, we were from Airdrie and they were from Coatbridge; one of the guys taking them was a priest and he was smoking like a chimney and I remember thinking this is like something out of Dave Allen. Football is everything. Drumming, music, comedy and football.”
A History of European Football in 100 Objects: The Alternative Football Museum is published by Pitch Publishing and priced at £9.99.
