John Fendley has been around a bit. He had a knack of stealing every scene on Soccer AM before he eventually became host and frontman of the show. He’s now built LIFEJACKET - a channel where he conducts in-depth interviews with the biggest names in sport and music about clobber and football boots. He’s also one of the soundest blokes you’ll meet. He sat down with our editor, Lee Kelleher, in a West London boozer recently to give the Showboat company card a good hammering.
My favourite thing about LIFEJACKET is seeing these artefacts that people have either collected or developed deep ties to. Were you a collector as a kid?
No, I wouldn’t say so.
Next question!
No, I didn’t really collect things as a kid, apart from marbles and things like that, because we didn’t have any money. Conkers, marbles, all the stuff people collected.
I’m trying to think of anything I really collected. I didn’t collect football programmes or football stickers. I used to get Spider-Man comics. My dad bought me Spider-Man comics, which was mad when you think about it now. That was the 1970s. Every weekend I’d get this comic and it was amazing. Then there was Match magazine. I always thought Match was slightly better than Shoot. It felt a little more edgy. I didn’t collect those, but I acquired them.
I thought a good idea would be to go back and get one of those old interviews. You know, the ones with “favourite food”, “favourite drink”, steak and lager, favourite car, and “what do you dislike?” People smoking and all that stuff.
I was in the Lee Sharpe fan club when I was a kid, weirdly.
He was the kid, wasn’t he?
If he’d been five years later, he would have been Beckham.
I’d just dropped my daughter off at Liverpool University. We were in a little Tesco next door to where she was staying. My wife loves Lee Sharpe. Properly loves Lee Sharpe. Quality footballer, good-looking, nice swagger, everything.
We’re in Tesco and this lad is standing at the end of the aisle, clocking me. You know the thing where someone recognises you, or thinks they recognise you? They keep looking and looking away.
We do our shopping, go outside, and he’s there. He comes up and says, “It’s you, isn’t it?”
I say, “What do you mean?”
“You. It’s you.”
“Who?”
“Lee Sharpe.”
I started laughing. He’s going, “It is. It’s you.”
I said, “Mate, trust me, it’s not Lee Sharpe, but thank you for that.”
He walks off and, from about 30 or 40 yards away, he’s still shouting back, “It’s you!”
I went straight to my wife and said, “You won’t believe what just happened. I’ve just been mistaken for Lee Sharpe.”
She was like, “Yeah, good fucking luck, mate.”
I can see it now.
Righto!
I remember there was a pair of trainers when I was a kid with some sort of dial on the tongue. It was meant to make you run faster. I don’t know whether they were Pumps or something else. Were there things you wanted as a kid, football boots or anything else, that were out of reach?
This is very clear for me. We used to go to Sydenhams Sports Shop in Scarborough. It was a classic, good-sized independent sports shop. You’d go in and have football boots on the left, snooker cues on the right. You’d go through a couple of glass cabinets and then there were sports jackets, tracksuits and all that stuff.
I always gravitated towards the football boots. There was a pair of Adidas Profi football boots. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Adidas Profi. They were like the World Cups, but blue. They had the fold-over tongue, which the World Cups didn’t have back then. They had the shorter tongue with the blue trefoil underneath.
The Profi had the fold-over tongue with the trefoil on it. They were the ones I would go in every week to pick up, look at and smell.
A bit weird, that.
I think everyone did.
The manager would be standing there going, “Any chance?” You know, “What are you doing?”
They were about £45, which was a lot of money then. They made them in white as well, but the blue pair were amazing. Blue football boots were mad back then because everything was black. Everything was black. You might have different coloured stripes, but the boots themselves were black.
There were Italian brands that were all black as well.
Pantofola d’Oro.
You knew someone was a player if they had them.
Jamie Redknapp wore them at Bournemouth. They had them imported. When I did the Boot Room with him, I pulled out the Pantofola d’Oro and he remembered them.
Di Canio used to wear them as well. They’re still around and still doing stuff.
I loved all those boots from that era. They weren’t middle-of-the-road boots. They were amazing boots, but they were your indie boots. They were like Pavement or Bivouac.
You like Pavement? What a band.
Yeah. I saw them in Leeds in about 1993 or 1994, when I was at college. Stephen Malkmus had a Ping golf hat on, so I remember that. If I sat down and asked myself who my favourite band was, they’d be up there. There’s so much to go back to, find and discover. I’d love to interview him. He’s into football as well, I think.
Tell me about the brands from your youth.
I remember around 1996 buying this Henri Lloyd jacket. Back then you had a jacket. You didn’t have loads of jackets. Maybe you had one or two, but you had something you’d spent all your money on.
It was cream with blue trim and reflective bits on it. At the time, it felt incredible. It was about £130, which was serious money. Then I went to Sky and got a job. I think it was partly because I had this jacket that I got the job.
I loved it. I don’t know where it’s gone. I keep searching for it. That’s something I do now. I go back and search for things I owned because I don’t know where they went.
I lived in Umbro at college. Tracksuits, drill tops. We had a college Umbro drill top. Unbelievable, classic Umbro.
I also had a full Germany 1990 tracksuit. I started college in 1990 and I had the whole thing. I wore it to death. I wore it all the time.
People would shout, “German twat,” and I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah.”
How do you know when to let something go? I struggle with that.
It comes down to seeing something else I want. I’ll go, “Right, that’s going to cost me £300,” so I have to find £300 from somewhere. I’ll sell some bits to pay for the thing. Otherwise, you get yourself in trouble because it’s a false economy.
You just keep buying and you don’t stop. I wouldn’t stop unless I imposed that rule. If you told me I had endless funds and space, I literally would not stop. I’d be on Vinted buying pairs of Hi-Tec football boots or whatever. At the minute, I’m buying football boots. It’ll be something else next.
Do you ever regret letting anything go?
My rule is that if I think I’m never going to get something back, I won’t get rid of it.
There are some things where you think, if I move that on and send it down the conveyor belt, it will come back to me one day. It might take years, but I’ll get the same one again.
Then there are certain things where you know that if you get rid of them, you may never see them again. I’ve got a few of those and they’re not going anywhere.
You started your LIFEJACKET journey at roughly the same time we started Showboat, when did LIFEJACKET become a thing in your head, and how long did it take to turn into something real?
It starts with a journey, funnily enough. I can remember it vividly. I was on a plane going on holiday to Menorca. I was still at Soccer AM and I’d started thinking about wanting to interview people I really admired or liked. Not necessarily heroes, and not necessarily people who were famous in the traditional sense, but people I’d love to sit down with and talk to on a Saturday.
It might be someone like Johnny Marr, who is obviously very famous, or Mick Head from Shack, or Nigel Cabourn, the designer.
I wanted to make content around those people because many of my friends are into football, music and clothes. Those are the three things that tie us together.
I remember writing a list of people in the Notes app on my phone. It was my hit list of people I wanted to interview. Weirdly, we’ve now managed to get quite a few of the people on that list.
That was the beginning, but it still took a while. Necessity is the mother of invention. It took me losing my job at Sky to say, “Right, you want to do this, so fucking do it. Stop dancing around it because somebody else will do it if you don’t.” And here we are.
I’m proud of where we’ve got to so far. We’re nowhere near where I want it to get to, but if you said LIFEJACKET ended today, has it been a success? Yeah, it has.
I’ve made something that is different for me. It’s not just chasing an algorithm or chasing numbers. I’ve been myself. It sounds a bit wanky, but it’s me finding my voice and having the confidence to think I might have something to say. In the past, I never had the confidence to do that.
Can I ask about Soccer AM?
Absolutely.
It, and specifically you, were a massive part of my teens and twenties. Not to make you sound old. You were young when you were doing it. When did you know it was something special?
I think the magic of Soccer AM was that none of us were media professionals.
None of us had been trained in media. We were all lads who’d come in through work experience, got jobs and started at the bottom of the ladder.
We just wanted to be in football and around football. When I went to Sky, I had no interest in being on Soccer AM. I didn’t really know what it was. I wanted to work in football. Getting work experience at Sky was about trying to become part of the live football team.
Then something came along and they said, “Can you work on this for a couple of weeks?”
You had Tim, who was an unbelievable talent. He was a driven producer and presenter with great ideas. He would take inspiration from films, things he’d seen and all sorts of places.
He invented Showboat. We were sitting in a corridor. There was a smoking corridor at Sky. Sky was small then. It was a bit like Drop the Dead Donkey. There was a lot of testosterone flying about.
Tim would be smoking with the co-producer, Andy Harris, God rest his soul. We were in this glass corridor that ran from the offices through to the canteen. I remember Tim saying, “Do you know what showboating is?”
I said, “Sort of.”
He said, “In basketball, showboating is a big thing. People doing skills, Harlem Globetrotters and all that. We should do an item about showboating.”
I thought it sounded good. The problem was, nobody was showboating. There was literally no skill. Nobody was doing anything. You’d get a little backheel from Gianfranco Zola or one stepover. That was it.
The way we started was with three clips. It would be, “It’s time to climb aboard Showboat, the magical moments that make our ball pitch. So hang on to your hats, it’s showtime.”
There was a boat graphic. We were really ramming it home. At number three, it might be Zola doing a backheel. Then number two would be another angle of the same thing. That was basically the start of it.
I’m responsible for two things that happened on television. One was “Taxi”. Remember the “Taxi” shout?
Very much so.
I used to play with a lad called Neil Owens at college in York. During the warm-up, somebody smashed the ball over the boundary and he shouted, “Taxi!” I was never sure whether the taxi was to take the person away or to go and get the ball, but we put it in the show and it became a thing.
The other thing was that I said, “When we put music over the goal montages, why don’t we put a graphic on saying who the music is by, like MTV?” So if we put a band on, the lower third would come up at the end with the artist and track title. Then all the record companies started going, “Great, can we get our song on?”
Were you into casual culture?
Yes I was but always about the clothes. I always played football. I played from the age of six or seven until I was about 35. Every weekend I was playing rather than going to games.
Hooligan culture wasn’t my bag. The clothes element was always part of it for me, though. I liked the early casual clothing, the Fila and Tacchini stuff. That was what we wanted. But we couldn’t afford it.
There was a lad whose dad owned an amusement arcade in Scarborough. He had all the stuff. He’d wear a really cool corduroy parka, slightly flared jeans and a pair of Gazelles. He looked fucking mint. We’d knock on his door at the weekend and ask, “Have you got anything you want to get rid of?” I’d have £15 and he might give me a Jaeger jumper, a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a Tacchini T-shirt. You’d go home with it and wear it forever.
Nobody had money. Nobody had a way of getting things unless it was from a mate, through a mate, through another mate. There were no shops in Scarborough. You could go to Hull. We’d go to a shop called Prem. Or we’d go to York and later Leeds.
For me, though, it was mostly window-shopping because I didn’t have any money. It wasn’t until later in my life that I actually had some disposable income. That’s probably when I started collecting more.
Now I’m basically back to knocking on the amusement arcade door.
When we ask football shirt collectors about a grail, it’s usually something like Holland 1988. Is there anything you’re chasing? Is there an item of clothing where, if you see it on Vinted, you’re pulling the trigger?
The original Nike Omega Flame trainers. They did a reissue. They’re red, orange and yellow and the colours fade into one another. The reissue was big, but I mean the originals.
I remember my mate Jason Wilshire having them in 1984. He lived in West Ayton which was a bit more affluent. I lived in East Ayton. He had those trainers and a VHS player. Nobody had a VHS player. Channel 4 had shown Michael Jackson’s Thriller video at midnight one night and he recorded it. We’d go round and watch the whole thing. It’s about 15 minutes long, which was mad at the time. We’d sit and watch it, then go, “Again, again, again.”
That’s how you spent your summers. Play a bit of football, go round Jason’s house and watch Thriller. Another mate had a VHS and we’d go round and watch Beverly Hills Cop. We wouldn’t say, “We’re going to watch Beverly Hills Cop.” We’d just go back, put it on and watch it again. We must have watched it hundreds of times. I knew every word.
There was no chance of putting something else on. He had Beverly Hills Cop, so we were watching Beverly Hills Cop. It was magical because you didn’t have access to that stuff.
What’s your football shirt collection saying?
When the show ended and they got rid of us, there was this massive container and I took two shirts. A David Beckham shirt and a signed Steven Gerrard shirt.
Over the years I’d already picked up a few things. I’ve got a Robbie Fowler Liverpool Ecru shirt signed to me. I’ve got a Rio Ferdinand shirt from when he was at Leeds. I’ve got a Matt Le Tissier shirt. I’ve got a signed Pelé shirt. I met Pelé. I’ve got a Rivaldo shirt too.
One of my mates is devastated that I didn’t ask Pelé to sign a shirt for him. I got one signed for another mate and he’s never forgiven me. I’ve told him, “Mate, when I go, you can have it.”
What are you saving if your house is on fire?
That’s a different question. I’ve got a Stone Island Ice Jacket from around 1989 or the early 1990s. It’s coral-coloured, but it changes colour with the temperature. It has Stone Island written across the back. It’s one of those pieces where I know that if it went, I’d never get it back.
I’ve also got a complete CP Company Mille Miglia set from 1989. The jacket, vest and bag. I sold one of my children for it, but I’ve got two more. People ask me about it all the time. “Have you still got that?”
Recently, I’ve got to the point where I’m going, “What are we talking?” Whereas before, I’d never even entertain selling it. I probably still won’t, unless this interview goes well and gets me a few more followers. Those are the two things I wouldn’t want to lose.
You’ve met loads of players on LIFEJACKET who have let everything go. What makes something worth holding onto? What is the point of keeping it? Is it about passing it on, treasuring it or something else?
I think it is about treasuring it. It isn’t about making money for me.
There was a store called Oki-Ni in London. It was a physical store, but I don’t think you could really go into it. They did an Adidas Grand Slam trainer in yellow, green, blue and pink. The other day, I saw a pair of the pink ones. I’ve got every colourway. They weren’t my size, but they were deadstock with the tags still on, so I bought them.
I’m never going to wear them because the soles would crack, but I’ve got them. I remember them. I wanted them. I want to have them there. It isn’t about owning them so I can tell someone, “I’ve got a pair of those.” I just want to have them.
I can go into the room, see them, and they give me joy in the same way a piece of art might give joy to somebody who collects art. I’m not comparing trainers to great art, but I’m saying they give me the same feeling of satisfaction and comfort. I get my jackets out and hang them up just to look at them.
It sounds ridiculous when you’re talking about a pair of trainers, but it’s about what they mean in my life. Those Grand Slams remind me of being in London and of a particular moment.
The Nike Omegas are the same. They’re right up there for me. If I can find a pair I can actually wear, that would be even better. But just having them there, cluttering up a sideboard, is great.
That was decent, wasn’t it?
Yeah, spot on.
You can check out LIFEJACKET here. You can check out Showboat - an app for football shirt collectors - in the App Store and Google Play.
