375: Paul McGregor, Nottingham Forest, Merlin's Premier League 97 Official Sticker Collection

Richard Allinson delves once again into the close relationship between the beautiful game and music with today’s post. It was pretty cool when Olof Mellberg got the lads from In Flames round to visit his Aston Villa team-mates and the multi-talented TV presenter/percussionist/striker Dion Dublin famously joined Ocean Colour Scene on stage with his Dube but neither of them can claim to have fronted their own Britpop ensemble. Over to Rich with a man who did.

Recently, whilst taking a break between hand-sanitising and blog writing, I completed a quiz on the BBC website called ‘which footballer shares your taste in music?’ I have often wondered if there are any footballers out there who also had a taste for emo tinged punk rock played by bearded American men in their thirties and so I was intrigued to see the results of the quiz. Was Raheem Sterling actually a massive Spanish Love Songs fan? Was Jesse Lingard secretly doing his woeful dancing to I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral by The Wonder Years? And were Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood’s international indiscretions actually a direct result of listening to Killer Parties by The Hold Steady too often? 

The quiz was pretty much the hardest thing I have done since GCSE Maths in 1999, mainly because I didn’t understand most of it. J.Cole turned out not to be Joe Cole of Chelsea and West Ham United fame; 21 Savage was apparently not Robbie’s squad number; and Aya Nakamura wasn’t the Japanese lad that played for Arsenal, Fulham and West Bromwich Albion in the early 2000s. Despite all this confusion I muddled my way to the end to be told my ‘football music match’ was, rather surprisingly, Dele Alli. I never knew he was a massive fan of The Menzingers. 

This did get me thinking about footballers that had an association with music. I knew that Joey Barton in a (now rather unwise) bid to sound intelligent declared his love for Morrissey; that Marcus Hanehmann had presented Five Finger Death Punch with a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt emblazoned with a Remembrance Day poppy; and that David de Gea was a massive Slipknot fan - maybe he thought People = Shit was a reference to Manchester United’s defence. However, my mind eventually worked it’s way back to someone I haven’t thought about in almost 20 years: former Nottingham Forest striker and lead singer of Merc and Ulterior Paul ‘Honey’ McGregor. 

Much like a lot of Britpop bands, McGregor started out in 1991 to little acclaim, finding a modicum of success in 1995, before calling it a day in the early 2000s. His breakthrough season came in 1995/96 when he scored two goals in 14 games for Forest. Despite this early promise, the 1996/97 season didn’t take off as a lot of people expected with McGregor only appearing six times and failing to find the back of the net. Clearly aware that he was experiencing his Be Here Now moment, Forest moved McGregor on and initial loan spells to Carlisle United and Preston North End were followed by a permanent move to Plymouth Argyle in 1999. Obviously buoyed by the sea air, McGregor hit the ground running with the Pilgrims and he banged in 16 goals and claimed the club’s Player of the Year in 2000. However, curiously this was as good as it got and after only scoring eight goals in 2000/01 he was packed off to Northampton Town for the 2001/02 season. He stayed with the Cobblers for a couple of years scoring seven goals in 71 games before hanging up his boots in 2003, presumably to “concentrate on the music, man.”

Paul McGregor then. He wasn’t as successful at music or football as he would probably have hoped and some people might choose to deride him because of this. These people would be wrong of course. After all, he scored against Manchester United, played in the UEFA Cup, supported Sisters of Mercy and played the NME tour. And there aren’t a lot of people who can claim all that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

N/A: Chris Kamara, Sheffield United, Chris Kamara’s Street Soccer, Midas Games

Image
In November 1972 the arcade game Pong made its debut and the gaming industry was born. While not the first attempt to make some computer pixels do not very much for the amusement of the masses it was by far the most commercially successful and, by the end of the decade, the first ever football game was unleashed on the world in the form of NASL Soccer. Judging by the YouTube footage it seemed to involve lots of brightly coloured stick men over hitting through balls and running in the opposite direction to oncoming forwards which may well be what the likes of Trevor Francis , Johan Cruyff and Gerd Muller were getting up to over in the US at the time. Throughout the 1980s the games became more realistic and a host of star players and managers put their names on products of variable quality. Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona (not that he is anyway bitter about being out jumped by a midget) gave youngsters the opportunity to fulfil their goalkeeping fantasies in a range of scenarios with r
Read more

269: Trifon Ivanov, Bulgaria, USA ’94 World Cup, UK and Eire Edition

Image
The 1994 FIFA World Cup in the USA was my introduction to football and, nearly thirty years later, probably the international tournament I remember most fondly despite the fact that I realistically don’t remember too much about it. I can attest to having witnessed Ray Houghton’s wonder goal/flukey lob in the Republic of Ireland’s shock victory over Italy as it was the centrepiece of a First Holy Communion celebration my family was attending. The joy and shock experienced by the predominantly Irish and Italian guests crowded around what seemed like the world’s biggest telly spilled over into the garden for all of us kids present and led to an inevitable kickabout. A few weeks later the quarter finals coincided with a primary school barbecue which, again, saw lots of people crowded around a telly watching Italy take on Spain . I remember very little about the game as my primary focus was the kickabout in the school playground and trying to digest ropey veggie burgers but one parent said
Read more

44: Savo Milosevic, Aston Villa, Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection

Image
Nearly a quarter of a century ago The Guardian published an article entitled ‘The 10 Worst Foreign Signings in History’. Focusing almost exclusively on British football in the 1990s the list is hardly exhaustive and mentions many names that will not come as a shock to any football nostalgic or reader of these pages over the last three years. Serie A imports Tomas Brolin , Andrea Silenzi and Marco Negri featured with particular disdain reserved for the latter’s regular take home of £18,000 per week for contributing about as much as Winston Bogarde did for Chelsea which seems harsh for a man who actually lit up Ibrox with 23 goals in his first ten games. George Weah’s “cousin” (not his actual cousin ) Ali Dia is of course included alongside Marco Boogers and Michele Padovano who managed just one goal in his twelve games for Crystal Palace and returned to the club a year after leaving demanding £1m in unpaid wages. The common denominator between the article’s inhabitants was the posit
Read more