10 football-mad guitar heroes
Pete Doherty
Around the world, and certainly within the UK, the only thing capable of inspiring as fanatical a following as music, is football. Here’s our pick of 10 famous guitar players and their club of choice…
Pete Doherty
Team: Queens Park Rangers
As a teenage stoner, the Libertines frontman edited a QPR fanzine called All Quiet On The Western Avenue and treated the team’s ground like his own personal squat:
“I would climb into Loftus Road in the summer when the stadium was empty and sit there with my little book and pen, smoking a spliff behind the goal.”
Serge Pizzorno
For the Kasabian man, the Midlanders’ chilling mediocrity is the whole point.
“The great thing about Leicester City is we’re shit,” he told Four Four Two. “We are absolutely rubbish. But that doesn’t matter, because every so often when we do achieve something, it’s all the sweeter after so much suffering.”
Bryan Adams
The wedding-dance king adopted the Blues when he moved to London.
“It’s easy to walk to,” he reasons. “My first game was in 1985. The fans recognise me, but they don’t hassle me, It’s just [cockney accent] ‘Alwight...?’”
Steve Jones
As a teenage oik, the Sex Pistols guitarist was a face in the Craven Cottage stands.
“I never watched the game,” Jones clarifies. “I used to go for the aggro.”
Slash
“I’m a football fan and I always root for Stoke, because they’re the underdog,” said the guitarist, interviewed at half-time in the 2011 FA Cup Final between Man City and Stoke.
“They’re a great team, but they never quite make it.” [They lost 1-0].
Simon Neil
“I’d rather not say who I support,” squirmed the Biffy Clyro singer, in a 2010 video interview ahead of the Old Firm clash with Celtic.
“It’s a family thing. I don’t go to the games, but that’s my team.”
Ronnie Wood
The Black Country sloggers are the unlikely choice of rock royalty, with Eric Clapton wearing the club scarf on the sleeve of Backless and the Stones’ guitarist admitting a “soft spot” for the Baggies:
“They were very big in the 50s. It’s a bit like my boys now supporting Arsenal and Chelsea.”
James Allan
As a flying teenage winger, the Glasvegas frontman played 105 games in the Scottish Football League, but daydreamed of a place in the double-winning Celtic side of the late-80s:
“I’d love to have been a sub or even just trained with them. The players around that time were as artistic as any painter.”
Paul McCartney
“My family are officially Evertonians,” Macca explained of his dual allegiance.
“But I thought, ‘You know what? I am just going to support them both, because it’s all Liverpool and I don’t have that Catholic-Protestant thing’.”
Noel Gallagher
The former Oasis guvnor is a ‘proper’ fan - he supported City before the 2008 injection of sheikh-dosh that transformed them from whipping boys to champions.
Noel also hates local rivals Man United with such venom that when their defender Gary Neville quoted an Oasis lyric, he threatened to “tie him to a chair, pull his tash out and shit in his manbag”.