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Paul Gascoigne has been plying the club circuit for years - MGE Photos/Mick Ellison
“I had no money growing up,” says Paul Gascoigne, in one of his many soliloquies about life and loss. “I haven’t got any now either. That’s why I’m doing these events for you lot.” His audience roars with laughter, as if sensing it is just another wind-up. Except this is one remark in his ***** with the uncomfortable ring of truth. Why else would one of the most naturally gifted players England has ever produced have dragged himself 270 miles from his Bournemouth home to the outskirts of Preston on a Sunday?Yes, he craves the company, with his gratitude to those who have come frequently bringing him to tears. But he also needs the cash.
We are at Lostock Hall Conservative Club, where the ambience is straight out of Phoenix Nights: £4 jacket potatoes, adverts for the latest South Ribble concert evening, plus garish disco lighting that feels incongruous on this bright spring afternoon. A blue comedian, whose repertoire of Seventies sexism would make Bernard Manning look like Michael McIntyre, bounces on stage for the warm-up, making sure the 200-strong crowd are all razzed up for Gazza. “Anything goes today, right?” he shouts. A boy in the front row, who cannot be any older than 10, listens nonplussed to a barrage of innuendo. His family look as if they are fast reconsidering their choice of wholesome weekend entertainment.
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Being up close and personal with Gazza did not come cheap at £200 for a ‘platinum’ package - MGE Photos/Mick Ellison
Gascoigne has been plying this circuit for years. The premise is straightforward enough: a rambling romp through his chaotic life, a few well-worn one-liners, and an obligatory retelling of the episode when, out of his mind on cocaine, he mistook the homicidal fugitive Raoul Moat for his brother. By rights, there should be nothing comic about any reference to Moat, who, in 2010, murdered a man, blinded a police officer and left a woman fighting for her life. But Gascoigne has the room in hysterics whenever he recalls the night he turned up in Rothbury, Northumberland, then the site of the largest manhunt in modern British history, to announce: “Moaty, it’s Gazza. I’ve got you a fishing rod and some fried chicken.”
Even by his standards, this appearance in Lancashire feels loose. As the stand-up leads the punters, apropos of nothing, in a beery singalong to Sweet Caroline, Gascoigne shambles to the microphone and promptly disappears. He returns a few minutes later, not to begin his reminiscences but to play darts. “Gazza once beat Eric Bristow, everybody!” announces the master of ceremonies. His first practice arrow misses the board altogether. When eventually he challenges a fan to a match, his darts hit 7, 7, 5. But the rule today is that his three opponents must equal his exact total to win. Naturally, they all fail. And so the blushes of Gazza, a fragile soul at the best of times, are spared.
He looks haggard. A black jacket with epaulettes hanging baggily over his frame. With his skinny checked trousers riding up over brightly-coloured plimsolls, you can see that his ankles seem swollen. At 57, the ravages of his former lifestyle – so extreme that he was once sinking four bottles of whisky a day – have not been kind. Gascoigne, not unreasonably, is paranoid about his appearance being critiqued. He has loathed journalists ever since The Sun ran a “Disgracefool” headline above a picture of him emerging, shirt torn and face bright red, from a Hong Kong bar in 1996, having had cocktails mainlined down his throat in the now-notorious “dentist’s chair” incident. “Look at Gazza,” the sub-deck read. “A drunk oaf with no pride.” “That’s water,” he says, pointing at the two bottles provided for him here. “So if you take a picture of that you’ll make f--- all from the newspapers.”
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Gascoigne remained glued to his chair, rather than roaming the stage - MGE Photos/Mick Ellison
As a piece of performance art, Gascoigne’s act is largely static. Rather than roaming the stage, he stays glued to his chair, gently rocking back and forth as a million different expressions flicker across his features. Being up close and personal with him does not come cheap, even today. A “platinum” package is £200 if you want to sit on a pub table at the front and have your picture taken with him, ready to be mounted alongside a montage of his finest hour, when he flicked the ball past a stricken Colin Hendry en route to that wondrous volley at Euro ’96.
What the ticket neglects to convey is how acutely vulnerable he is, or how often he starts to cry. “We’re all here because we love you to bits,” the MC reassures him, as he faces his public. “You’re safe here, mate. You’re among friends.” “There’s only one Paul Gascoigne,” chant a couple of young men in retro Newcastle United shirts. “Thank f--- for that,” he mutters in that inimitable Geordie brogue, so strong that in his first weeks at Tottenham he had to enlist Chris Waddle as a translator.
It is when he contemplates the void left by match days that the pain surfaces. The change is visible, and painful to watch. Whether he is describing dribbling his first leather ball to school, or the sense of absence he feels at 3pm every Saturday, he cannot help himself sobbing. “If it wasn’t for you guys coming to watch me play football, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the holidays, the cars, the jewellery,” he says, his voice quavering. “It’s true. Too many players today don’t respect the fans. I hate it. Sometimes I think I’d like to play against them and snap them in half. I treat you as one of me. I’m not like a f------ Gary Lineker, thinking I’m bigger than you. I’m just one of you. I still miss it on a Saturday… really badly.” He is on the verge of dissolving. “Seeing you guys gives me that lift again.”
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Gascoigne could not help himself sobbing when he contemplated the past - MGE Photos/Mick Ellison
The warmth in return is overwhelming. For all the precariousness of Gascoigne’s existence, one certainty is that wherever he turns up, he encounters a reaction of near-universal love. He is at a loss to explain it: the scenes at his local Sainsbury’s, for example, where fathers have been known to fall to their knees in appreciation of his feats.
It is more than 20 years since he last kicked a ball in anger, but his mystique has endured through the mayhem. As he puts it: “I’ve snorted cocaine off toilet seats, I’ve been in more nightclubs than I’ve had football clubs. And still the Football Association wanted me to be an ambassador for my country. I’ve had a bit of a life, to be fair.”
He crowbars all the most lurid tales into this theatre of the absurd. The greatest hits are reeled off: borrowing an ostrich from London zoo to take to Tottenham training, being caught by Bobby Robson playing late-night tennis before a World Cup semi-final, hijacking Middlesbrough’s team bus and crashing it on a country lane. So, too, are the deeper cuts: putting a snake into Roberto Di Matteo’s pocket as a prank, being led by 22 bodyguards through the madness of Rome airport when he joined Lazio (watch video below), tricking Nayim – a teetotal Muslim team-mate – into drinking a Long Island iced tea.
“Daft as a brush” was the label Robson famously attached to Gascoigne, and it has stuck. It is as if he is hellbent on justifying that billing, recounting the time he sneaked off to Disneyland Paris before an exhibition against Diego Maradona in Seville, drinking so much on the flight to the match that he could barely run. “I said to Diego in the tunnel, ‘I’m p----d’. ‘It’s OK, Gazza, so am I’.” Few before or since have combined this fecklessness off the pitch with such flourishes with the ball at their feet. It was Dino Zoff, his first manager at Lazio, who conveyed the dichotomy best. “He was a lovely boy, such a heart. But a troubled boy. He ate ice cream for breakfast, he drank beer for lunch. But a player? Oh beautiful, beautiful.”
Gascoigne blazed relatively briefly as a player, like a comet streaking across the game before darkness descended. But the highlights were so luminous that he remains in the collective consciousness as if frozen in time, leaving Hendry on his back at Wembley with that deft little chip or drawing “Oh, I say!” raptures from Barry Davies with his Exocet of a free-kick against Arsenal (watch video below). “That is Schoolboys’ Own stuff,” Davies purred that day in 1991. “I bet even he can’t believe it.” Undoubtedly, he struggles to understand why he is still being lauded for it. “Cheers for turning up on a Sunday,” he says. “I’m sure there are better things you could be doing.”
His Preston disciples acclaim him as if there is nowhere else they would rather be. They clap when he remembers his old geography teacher in Gateshead warning him that only “one in a million” aspiring professional footballers would make it – and his response that “I’m going to be that one”. They give him a sustained ovation when he tries rationalising his tears in Turin at Italia ’90, beyond the yellow card that would have ruled him out of a final. “The crying wasn’t about not reaching the final. It was just that I had the best six weeks of my life. I was only 22.” He pauses, his thoughts drifting back to a lost age. “I made some money off it, mind. I should have cried every f------ game.”
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Gascoigne’s tears at Italia ‘90 became embedded into the national consciousness - Getty Images/Billy Stickland
These lurches from pathos to drollery are the hallmarks of Gascoigne’s performance. One minute he is wobbling with emotion at the turns life has taken, the next he is using his anguish as a gag at his own expense. “I saw Gareth Southgate recently,” he says. “I said, ‘Gareth, I’ve got a problem with you’. I scored my penalty and I ended up in rehab. You missed yours and you get a £30,000 pizza advert and the England manager’s job.”
There are, true to form, much crasser interludes. Anecdotes about Les Ferdinand and Margaret Thatcher are best endured in person, rather than repeated in a family publication. Fans of Burnley, for whom he played six games in 2002, are unlikely to enjoy hearing their town branded “in-bred”. Perhaps the most distasteful and wince-inducing moment comes when he talks of putting two trout in Gordon Durie’s car at Rangers, only for one of the fish to be left rotting, creating an unholy stench. “‘You’ve got to get me a new car’, Gordon said. At 17 grand? An expensive trout. But cheaper than the trout I divorced.”
That would be his ex-wife Sheryl, whom he admitted beating on a regular basis for two years. It is debatable as to whether he has ever shown adequate remorse for this. He only obliquely acknowledged it in a 2022 BBC documentary, saying: “There are definitely lots of things I look back on with sadness.” The programme’s closing credits noted he was “living alone in the south of England”. Although the couple split in 1998, Gascoigne is still consumed by bitterness. Alluding to the infamous photograph of Vinnie Jones grabbing what he calls his “family allowance”, he says: “I wish he had grabbed it harder. It would have saved me two million quid in the divorce. Bitch.”
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Vinnie Jones infamously grabbed Gascoigne in the ‘family allowance’ - Monte Fresco
You will hear no further mentions of his family. He says nothing of his three children, Bianca, Mason and Regan, now 38, 35 and 29. All of them went to live with Sheryl after the marriage disintegrated. The relationships have not always run smoothly: he lamented how he had ordered them not to use the Gascoigne name as a trophy, only for Bianca to become a Big Brother contestant. Their omission from his show leaves an uncomfortable impression that while Gascoigne might be the toast of every bar and club he enters, a loneliness lies beneath the surface.
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Gascoigne’s children went to live with mother Sheryl (centre) after the marriage disintegrated - PA
Granted, he has too often been his own worst enemy with his relapses into alcoholism and self-destruction. And yet some of his closest friends have let him down. These days, he tends to find his most reliable kinship with the people who pay at the door. “I love you guys,” he announces to this packed social club. “I don’t see you as fans, I see you as proper friends.”
The signs last year were alarming. On a podcast with Jake Humphrey, he disclosed that he was living in the spare room of his manager, Katie Davies, in Poole. While there have been many wrenching glimpses of Gascoigne since his retirement, few were as poignant as the sight of him arranging his shirts on a single rail, with his packets of cigarettes perched on his luggage. Davies’s company, TheMNT, sought to clarify that this was purely a temporary phase while he looked for his own place. In the summer, he informed Lineker’s The Rest Is Football that he was renting a property near Bournemouth beach. “2024 is a big year for Gazza,” declared a statement on his behalf.
But was it a big year for him? In November, Companies House issued a compulsory strike-off action against Gazza8 Limited, set up in 2019 to channel income from his TV spots and public appearances, when the firm failed to submit its accounts by the required deadline. The action has since been suspended, the fifth time in 2½ years that he has had to stave off attempts to close the company down. Its first set of financial figures were due to be received in July 2021, but latest records indicate that they have still not been filed.
Gascoigne insists he is “doing well”, revealing that he has a second book in the works, as well as a “four-to-six-part” TV dramatisation of his life. Not that the actual details require much dramatising. The scrapes he documents on stage – from taking a phone call from the Pope to coming face-to-face with Colonel Gaddafi on a pre-season trip to Libya – are sufficient to fill many more TV episodes than six. He claims to have smashed up the London hotel room of Richie Sambora, Bon Jovi’s guitarist, on the pretext that he had “always wanted to live like a rock star”. Now he simply craves something, anything, that gives him a grounding. “I just want to be real again,” he says.
This is why he still schleps to all four corners of the kingdom to pore over his halcyon days. It makes him feel connected, wanted, reminding him of what he continues to mean to so many. It can be gruelling work, however. Gascoigne is clearly exhausted by the time his question-and-answer session wraps up, but the nostalgia is not complete. His day at Lostock Hall is a matinee-and-evening affair: by the time he shuffles out of the building at 5pm – the doors opened at 11am – fans are already arriving for the second session. When he is thanked for travelling so far for the session, he shrugs: “Well, there’s f--- all to do in Bournemouth.”
Even some of his most ardent admirers are concerned for his welfare. Martin Carter, a mechanic from Lancaster, was eager to see the figure he grew up idolising, wearing his “Gascoigne 8” England shirt especially for the occasion. But this confounding experience, with Gascoigne’s language so coarse it could strip paint from the walls, has been one to revive the wisdom about never meeting your heroes. “It looks as if the past has caught up with him,” he says as we leave.
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Lostock Hall Conservative Club is far removed from the peak of ‘Gazzamania’ - MGE Photos/Mick Ellison
It is Gascoigne’s last such engagement for a while. He intends to escape with a spot of fly-fishing, a pursuit he has long adored. While hours of patiently casting his line might seem antithetical to the madcap Gazza image, his passion was self-evident during his few minutes as a guest on Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing show. You half wish that they could recruit him as a third permanent presenter. This calming, innocent programme would provide a precious counterpoint to his profane after-dinner guise, where raking over the wildness of yesteryear can leave him too close to the edge for his own good.
Gascoigne will be back on the road soon enough. His never-ending tour takes him next to Watford, Accrington, Cannock and Ramsgate: all venues far removed from the peak of “Gazzamania”, when Terry Wogan hailed him as “probably the most popular man in football today”, but all helping to fill the chasm that hanging up his boots has created. Beyond these talks, he makes few concrete plans any longer. He refuses even to go on holiday, fearing he would succumb to temptation. “I can’t, I don’t trust myself,” he says. “I’m all right where I am.” Instead this national icon, diminished though he might be, plots his path month by month, day to day, still desperately trying to navigate the tightrope between happiness and oblivion.
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