United Road Take Me Home

Build a Rocket Boys!

In case you haven’t noticed, Elbow have a new album due in the next weeks or two. Hard to miss really. There’s Guy Garvey glowering from the cover of Q. There he is again in the Observer magazine. Going off the four tracks I’ve heard so far, and judging by the early reviews, it sounds like a more than worthy follow-up to The Seldom Seen Kid, consolidating Garvey’s status as the laureate of middle-age blokedom, and knocking Mozzer of his perch as the rainy city’s reigning lyricist supreme.


And in a stunning publicity coup, Guy and co and have recruited none other than Wayne Rooney himself to ensure that Elbow were the talk of Match of the Day, Sunday Supplement, and all the back-pages as well. Some going.

In truth when I got around to seeing the incident for myself – wasn’t there, wasn’t down the pub, wasn’t chasing glitchy streams on the laptop – I was expecting something far more innocuous than what I actually saw. I’ve got the tweets of United fans blubbing about media bias to blame for this. All over my timeline it was Caldwell...blah...Gerrard...blub...FA conspiracy...blah...and very little acknowledgment of quite how dickish and indefensible Wayne’s behaviour was.

A stray elbow in the thick of a tussle is one thing, but veering deliberately in a lad’s direction to give him a none too surreptitious dig is quite another. What surprised me most about the red-tinted view, was the fact that to my mind myopia in the face of Wayne’s misdemeanours was something else that perished along with the notion that he was ‘one of us’ when Stretford decided that the club’s ambitions for the size of his client’s salary didn’t match his own.

So when the FA decide they can retrospectively punish him, don’t start bleating about Stevie G, thank the stars that it means more starts for the effervescent Hernandez, and less time spent wincing at Wayne’s gruesome first-touch.

Oh, and buy ‘Build a Rocket Boys!’.

posted by Royton Red @ 9:45 PM