Howay the Lads is a print unlike any other I’ve made. It’s important to me that, far from being an accurate representation of a place or an event, it represents a feeling, a noise, a surging of excitement, a passion. It depicts that moment before the team runs on to the pitch, when the flags are flying and the fans are singing – the anticipation of what’s to come.
Rather than following the process of making the print, this is the story of how I became a Newcastle United fan. Serious printmaking nerds can look away now.
Although I grew up in a football city, I didn’t have the slightest interest in the sport until I met my future husband, a lifelong Newcastle fan, when I was 18. In a failed attempt to woo me, he took me to a godforsaken junction of the A1 outside Edinburgh, where we were to hitchhike to Newcastle and buy tickets to the match. Unfortunately, when we arrived, the tickets were unsurprisingly sold out, which, coupled with spending the night on the airport floor and miraculously making it back to Edinburgh alive the following day having hitched a lift with 2 very high surfers, did nothing to encourage my interest.
A few years later we were living in London and started to go to away matches, at Craven Cottage, White Hart Lane, Stamford Bridge. I was immediately hooked. While the home fans sat on their little plastic seats, we could only rest our feet at half time – the Geordies would be jumping and singing non-stop for 90 minutes. The atmosphere in our away section was always electric, the camaraderie contagious. These were the years of Rob Lee, Alan Shearer and Gary Speed, led by the late, great Bobby Robson.
When we’d had enough of London, there was only one city we wanted to move to. We packed up our flat and moved to Newcastle, where I’d been only once since the fated hitchhiking trip, and immediately felt at home (and bought our season tickets). When our girls were born, we took them to their first matches as soon as they could walk (and sing the songs). And so following the team became part of our family routine, our tradition. Walking to the match across the Town Moor, buying our programme (they now fill a bookcase), rating the players on the way home. We made it through the depressing times (and they lasted forever) and share in the euphoria at the good times – and in a city like Newcastle, that euphoria doesn’t just live in the ground, you can feel it everywhere you go.
So that’s why I’ve mixed things up a bit and made a print of something I wouldn’t normally choose. Because it’s a celebration of our city. And because, as Ted Lasso fans everywhere know, Football Is Life.
