FORMER Liverpool Daily Post journalist Brian Reade’s book 43 Years With The Same Bird: A Liverpudlian Love Affair is already top of the Amazon mail order bestsellers list – and it is not even published until this Friday, July 4. Here, however, Daily Post readers can have a preview of what they can expect.
IT IS summer 1975 and at Liverpool FC’s sun-drenched training ground, Melwood, 17- year-old Brian Reade is experiencing the most pivotal moment of his young life: an audience with the man who helped to turn the club into one of the most powerful in the world – Bill Shankly.
Thirty-three years on and an iconic image of that meeting between master and acolyte makes up the front cover for the former Daily Post journalist’s long-awaited homage to the great man and the club which has brought him so much joy – and pain.
Long-awaited because the book, 43 years With The Same Bird: A Liverpudlian Love Affair, is already top of the Amazon mail order best seller list two days before its official publication on Friday.
And in a world awash with books written by football fans about their favourite teams, it is destined to become a defining work written skilfully from the heart, brimful of hilarity and heartbreak in equal measure.
The rollercoaster tale takes us from Brian’s first match at Burnden Park, Bolton on February 20, 1965 – when the seven year-old fledgling watched the match perched on the shoulders of his dad Reg, who consequently slipped a disc in the effort; through Heysel and Hillsborough; to the great comeback in Istanbul and beyond.
"I always wanted to write the book because I thought what a phenomenal, amazing, emotional story the Liverpool FC story was, even if you didn’t experience your own personal thread from 1965 through the glory and the tragedy," said the now 50-year-old award-winning Mirror columnist, City Talk presenter and Kop season ticket holder, who lives in the city with his wife Carol and three children Phil, Christie and Lucy.
We were talking in the back room of the Lion Tavern in Tithebarn Street, the pub where we sat as fellow fans and journalists on Sunday, April 16 1989 to talk about the horrors witnessed first hand at Hillsborough the day before, which led to the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans.
"The Hillsborough disaster was definitely the hardest chapter because of having to make sure all the facts were right," said Brian, "Football is football and there are match statistics but the facts you cannot afford to get wrong are those about someone losing a kid."
Heysel, where 39 Juventus fans died after a wall collapsed following a charge by rioting Liverpool fans at the crumbling Brussels stadium in 1985, also proved to be a difficult subject to address.
"What happened at Heysel I don’t think has ever been properly explained from a Liverpool fan’s perspective. There were a number of reasons which collectively led to what happened, but all I was hearing was people saying it wasn’t my fault which is also what it must have sounded like to the families of those who died at Heysel.
"Basically we were saying it wasn’t really us.
"Well it was, because we ran at them and we were a big factor in what happened that day."
In between there are a lot of other serious issues addressed, mixed with anecdotes delivered in Readie’s inimitable style that will have fans of all clubs – even Evertonians – roaring with laughter.
"I wrote it for Liverpudlians but I’d love it if all fans read it. Statistically it’s about one of the greatest teams that has won 47 trophies in the time since I first went to see them in 1965.
"And I know as a fan I’d read books about other great clubs such as Barcelona if I knew they were well written.
"But, er, maybe I’d have to draw the line with Man United."
43 Years With The Same Bird (Macmillan £12.99)
Read excerpts here >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
