Sport.co.uk caught up with the delightful pair of Chris Urbanowicz and Ed Lay from indie rockers Editors in the plush environs of the Paddington Novotel, in order to natter about their respective clubs of fancy, Nottingham Forest and Ipswich Town. ‘Proper’ old clubs they each might be, but they have both started the poorly in this season’s Championship – particularly winless Ipswich, whose 4-0 defeat at home to Newcastle over the weekend took place after this interview – and we wanted to know why…
So, Chris – is Billy Davies the right man for the job?
CU: Time will tell. I don’t know.
EL: You’re sitting on the fence.
CU: Totally. Well, I’m all for giving men a little bit of time…(chuckles)…in the right situations. So I think we should just give him a chance. The most promising thing about our start to the season, just from watching all the highlights – and I watched the Forest-Derby match as well – is that we’ve been playing some really good stuff, especially attacking-wise. The fact that we’re not scoring at the moment is the only worry but we’ve got a lot of strikers who can put the ball in the back of the net, from [Dexter] Blackstock to [Joe] Garner, and [Nathan] Tyson coming off the right wing, and [Dele] Adebola and [Rob] Earnshaw. So we’ve got goals in our team. I think we just need to get a little bit of confidence and it should start rolling from there. I think he is the right man for the job.
Do you think Garner should get a run up front?
CU: This is the problem; we’ve got too many strikers. Garner and Tyson have both been playing out wide, and sometimes Earnshaw. I found it a little bit weird when we signed all these strikers and wondered where they were all gonna play. I think we’ve found a gem in Paul Anderson, the guy from Liverpool, and I was watching Tyson absolutely destroy Michel Salgado in the cup a couple of days ago against Blackburn, so maybe he’s finding his niche on the right-hand side. Garner down the middle? Again, who do you pick to play up front out of all the strikers that we’ve got?
Do you rate Dele Adebola?
CU: No. Never have. He was always someone who I’ve never rated, since the 90’s when he was playing at Crewe. I remember thinking to myself when I was 15 or 16, “That guy is definitely gonna end up playing at Forest at some point in his career; I can see it”. I swear to god I actually said that! And here he is. No, I don’t rate him. Of course not; he’s not a Forest player at all.
Perhaps your form will pick up when Lewis McGugan and Radoslaw Majewski return from injury…
CU: (Corrects my pronunciation of Radoslaw Majewski) McGugan’s had a stop-start start to the season. I dunno about Majewski, to be honest; he’s a Polish international that we’ve got on loan and he’s looking pretty promising. He scored a cracker earlier on in the season. There’s another guy that we’ve got called Guy Moussi, who was playing a lot last season and who’s been injured a lot…
He sounds like a hair product.
CU: Yeah, that’s part of his charm! That’s why we like him.
Do you think you need a new stadium?
CU: I think that the city of Nottingham maybe needs a new stadium but I don’t think Nottingham Forest needs a new stadium. There’s nothing wrong with the City Ground; I went there a few times last season and it still does the business. It’s still quite an intimidating place to come sometimes and it’s one of the best stadiums in the Championship. If the council are willing to dip in their pocket and pay for one then I’ll take one; I’ve seen the sketches and they look pretty amazing. I think it’s a 40,000-seater or something like that. I don’t think it’s for us. It’s for the World Cup, mainly.
Would you share with Notts County, if it came to that?
CU: No. I wouldn’t want to. Why would you? The thing that I hate about sharing grounds is that they get played on every week. Forest have always been a passing team. We demand good football and you can’t play good football on a sh*t pitch.
What do you think of what’s going on there at the moment? It all seems a bit shady…
CU: As long as they’ve got support from the billionaires up top, then they’ll always have something to fall back on. Unless they lose interest.
Well the whispers are that the investigation into their new owners is going to reveal some dodgy goings on. Maybe that’s why Sol Campbell left…
CU: I’ve heard that as well, yeah. It’s difficult to tell. It did kind of stink a little bit from the start. You know, taking a club like that and trying to make them giants is a bit strange, ‘cause I can’t imagine it being the easiest of propositions, trying to convince people to come to Nottingham. Just like it was for Newcastle; trying to convince world-class players to come to anywhere other than London or Manchester is always gonna be a struggle.
Does it bother you that you were born a couple of years too late for you to be able to say that Forest have won back-to-back European Cups in your lifetime?
CU: Not really. I mean, I’d rather be younger than older! And even if I was born in 1975, I still probably wouldn’t have remembered them. So no, it doesn’t bother me. We still had a great legacy with Brian [Clough] when I was growing up. My earliest memories as a Forest fan are of Brian Clough teams. It wasn’t your McGoverns, your Woodcocks or your Birtles; it was Nigel Clough, Stuart Pearce, Des Walker and players like that. That was my legacy, and it was quite a team.
Brian Clough famously clobbered some fans that ran onto the pitch, in a far more emphatic manner than Craig Bellamy’s recent bitch-slap on a restrained pitch-invader. Would you let Cloughie punch you in the face if he was around today?
CU: Yeah, of course. ‘Cause he’d give me a kiss the next day on Central News!
And a Cup Final ticket.
CU: Absolutely! At least we’d be in a cup final, if Cloughie was still manager. But there you go. Of course I’d let him punch me. Square in the jaw.
Sorry, I’ll get to Ipswich shortly.
EL: No no no, this is all gold!
Ok, now we’re going to play Rate That Player. Who was better: Bryan Roy or Stan Collymore?
CU: Oooh…good question. I used to really like Bryan Roy, but I have to say Stan Collymore. In his pomp for Forest, he was destructive. He was unbelievable. The only problem with Bryan Roy was that he could be a little bit lazy at times. So I’m gonna go for Stan.
Do you like him as a pundit?
CU: I haven’t really seen much of his work, so I can’t really comment on that.
If you met him in a car park, would you…nah, let’s leave that one.
CU: Oo-er!
Steve Stone or Ian Woan?
CU: Oooohhh. The battle of the wingers. I’m gonna go for Stevie Stone. Ian Woan had a tendency to be a little bit slow and…I wouldn’t say lazy, but he came across as kind of ambling around a little bit, looking a bit lost. Whereas Steve Stone was a constant engine, just running.
EL: I really remember seeing Ian Woan when I was at school. I don’t know if it was while he was at Everton.
He played for Everton? Are you sure?
CU: He did, yeah.
I’m a Bluenose and I don’t remember him with us. He scored a cracking goal against us live on Sky once, though.
CU: He was a free-kick specialist. He definitely went to Everton after Forest went down.
EL: I think I had a sticker of him.
Are you thinking of Scott Gemmill?
CU: I am thinking of Scot Gemmill! Ian Woan definitely didn’t, then.
Lars Bohinen or Chris Bart-Williams?
CU: Bohinen was world-class. No, he wasn’t world-class, but he was brilliant. Chris Bart-Williams…you know what? I never really warmed to him. He never really got going; he came to the club as an attacking midfielder but he turned out to be an anchorman, which always perplexed me. He was an important player for us, captain of the team and all that, but Bohinen was different class. Ok, he went to Derby and did some naughty things, but it doesn’t matter.
Carl Tiler or Steve Chettle?
CU: Steve Chettle. Carl Tiler was terrible. Steve Chettle wasn’t that much better, either. I never rated either of them, to be honest. They got carried by Des Walker.
Last one, and probably the most obvious one too: Stuart Pearce or Des Lyttle?
CU: Stuart Pearce is my favourite ever Forest player, so…that was quite an easy one.
What happened with Andrea Silenzi?
CU: I picked him to be a big success. I was a big Serie A fan; I used to watch it on Channel 4 all the time when I was a kid. He scored a lot of goals at Torino and he was a big guy, an English-looking centre-forward. I saw him in a pre-season friendly just after he’d signed and I was really excited about seeing Silenzi, being a big Italian football fan. I think it was Steve Stone who beat a couple of men down the right wing and put the ball across; the ‘keeper was beaten and Silenzi was two yards out with an open goal, and he hit the crossbar. I remember looking at my dad and thinking, “Uh oh!” and it kind of went downhill from there. He got some bad injuries as well and he never got going.
Finally, is it true that you have synaesthesia?
CU: I do, yeah.
What songs bring out the brightest colours for you?
CU: It’s difficult to say. Usually the poppy ones, the ones that have lots of melody in them; they bring out really bright, primary colours.
What colour is your own music?
CU: I see lots of yellow in it. At least on this last record, anyway. But it’s mainly shapes that I see, which are harder to describe. Not so much colours.
When did you first discover you had it?
CU: It’s always been there. I thought it was natural and that everyone had it. Our manager pointed it out when I slyly mentioned that I was struggling to work on a certain piece of music ‘cause I couldn’t see any shapes for it. He was like, “What? Oh, you’ve got this or that” and I said, “Ok, that’s interesting”.
Onto the Tractor Boys. What on earth is going on at your club?
EL: It’s a really interesting time, isn’t it? I haven’t seen any games this season except for the first match, which was on Sky against Coventry. We didn’t play badly. Neither team played particularly well; it was a classic opening day of the season mess, really. But ever since then, there doesn’t seem to be any cohesion. I don’t think we’ve played the same side one after the other, and Roy Keane has been very quick to jump on certain individuals’ backs, it seems, shouting them down for being a being pathetic. Which may be his style, but I think anything that disrupts the cohesion in a team is not the best thing to do at the start of your reign.
Keane “shouting people down” sounds eerily familiar. He’s got previous in terms of being rather “outspoken”…
EL: Yeah, definitely. I mean, at the end of his time at Sunderland, there were all sorts of rumours flying around about who he’d fallen out with and why, and the fact that he wasn’t living in the area. But now, at Ipswich, he’s demanding his players to live in Suffolk, which smacks of double standards slightly. So that’s all a bit annoying but, having said that, I still think that the club made a wise decision in bringing him in because we’ve been coasting along for many seasons.
After George Burley got us promoted, we were overachieving – great – but, ever since then, nothing has really given the players the kick that they probably need. It highlights what’s wrong with the modern game, I guess, when mediocre Championship players are getting paid sh*t-loads of money.They possibly feel that they don’t have to try so much; I mean, Shane Supple, our reserve goalkeeper, recently quit football at the age of 22 because he was disillusioned with the game. I really respect that decision as well, because he must have been earning a really decent living and he just quit because he doesn’t enjoy it any more. It’s not what he wants to do with his life.
That takes real balls to do that. He was obviously seeing players’ attitudes not being as good as they were, so I don’t completely blame Keane for what’s going on. I think as soon as a rich player gets shouted at, he thinks, “Why should I bother playing for this manager?” So that’s obviously a big problem., but Keane’s bringing his players in. As long as we don’t go down this season, then I think we’ll be far better set up next season to challenge for promotion, because I think with players like Grant Leadbitter and Liam Rosenior, who he’s just brought in…we’ve got some quality. David Norris is going to come back from injury; I think he’s a good player who could potentially play in the Premiership. So we’ll see.
You may not have won yet, but you’re unbeaten in your last two games…
EL: (Laughs) Wow, we’re on a run!
…did you see any of the stirring comeback to draw 3-3 at Doncaster in your last game?...
EL: Apparently we played very well but, classically, I think we lost our heads when we went in front and assumed that they were gonna go on and win, possibly like Manchester City did against Manchester United the other day. They let the excitement get to them a little bit. Obviously, there’s passion; I saw them celebrate the goals and they were going nuts. So they obviously care and, going off the players Keane has brought in, and his making Alex Bruce captain, he thinks passion is a massive part of the game. And that’s what I was saying about players caring about the club they’re playing for.
So hopefully we’re gonna get a more settled team, ‘cause the players that are playing week in, week out are gonna want to play for the club, and we should move forward. We’ve got a massive game on Saturday against Newcastle. Obviously there’s a lot of emotion surrounding it ‘cause we’re renaming a stand the Sir Bobby Robson Stand and there’s gonna be events going on all day. It’s clasping at straws, but maybe the death of Bobby Robson over the summer has been at the back of their minds a little bit. Hopefully this weekend will put a real full stop under that and we’ll be able to move on and think about other things. It’s a home match, and if the players aren’t up for this match then they’re not gonna be up for any.
Who do you think Sir Bobby will be rooting for, sat up on his cloud?
EL: I think, in true Robson fashion, he wouldn’t tell anybody. Apart from his wife, probably.
CU: He’d want football to win.
EL: Exactly! What a wonderful guy. All the stories about him you hear are amazing, and he was a great manager for us. Hopefully someone like Roy Keane can turn people’s opinions around and emulate a great manager like that.
CU: I don’t know anyone in football who doesn’t love Bobby Robson. Ever since the World Cup [in 1990], he’s put himself in everyone’s hearts. You never hear a bad word about him, and there’s not many managers you can say that about nowadays.
Newcastle’s demise since sacking him has been gradual yet crystal-clear…
CU: I think Bobby was starting to lose it mentally. He was getting very old. A similar thing happened to Brian towards the end of his tenure; he started to not be so focused on football and…(Sport.co.uk flexes a sly elbow)…yeah, perhaps. But it’s difficult when you get to a certain age to carry on focussing while the game is moving.
Whatever happened to Francis Jeffers? He was amazing as a youngster at Everton.
EL: We offered him a contract…
CU: (Chuckling away) Sorry. Just the words ‘Francis Jeffers’ make me laugh!
EL: He did a good job when he came on loan to us, and we offered him a contract at the end of the season before last. He simply turned it down. Everyone thought he’d definitely accept the opportunity to play, but he obviously got offered more money somewhere else. Which is fine, but…
CU: Who does he play for now?
EL: Sheffield Wednesday. I think he’s on the transfer list ‘cause he hit someone.
CU: Oh yeah. And he didn’t apologise. Well, he kind of apologised…did you hear that? His ‘apology’, in inverted commas. He apologised to the fans but he didn’t apologise to the actual guy who he smacked. It was kind of a back-hander.
Didn’t he even give him a Cup Final ticket?
CU: (Laughs) Exactly. Times have changed!
EL: He’s just not very good, obviously. When players are on loan, it’s a classic situation; they often perform above their level ‘cause they’re looking for a deal somewhere else, they’re not happy at the club they used to be at, they’ve got a new set of fans who idolise them and they play so much better. And then, when they get a full-time contract, they sort of settle back into the usual old dross that they’ve been playing for the last two years.
CU: To Jeffers’ credit, I think he was injured at a very important time in his career, when he joined Arsenal and he got a bad injury, didn’t he? It was at that point of his career that he should have been moving onto that next step. He had the best manager in the world helping him – the best at developing young players, anyway – and I think he was a bit unfortunate with that. You don’t lose your ability or skill, but you can lose it up top, mentally, and I think that might have been the problem for him.
Ok, let’s play Rate That Player.
CU: (To Ed) You’re going to really enjoy this!
John Wark or Jim Magilton?
EL: Er…Jim Magilton…
CU: No!
EL: …‘cause I saw John Wark in the latter stages of his time at Ipswich. Beforehand, he was obviously a complete legend. But when I saw Jim Magilton knocking that winner against Bolton in the Play-Off semi-final…it was one of the best feelings of my footballing life. He was a really good player. He kind of sucked as a manager, but you can’t help but like him.
Chris Kiwomya or Marcus Stewart?
EL: Oh, Chris Kiwomya, definitely! He was awesome. He had a great song as well, to the tune of ‘Kumbaya’. (Sings) Ki-wom-ya, my lord, Ki-wom-ya! So yeah, definitely him. And he had a brilliant record for Arsenal: 1 goal every 2 games he played in, or something.
Really? But Gunners fans ridicule him!
EL: Maybe it was every game he started.
I was about to suggest that he was the proto Jeffers, in terms of going to Arsenal and bombing. They don’t remember him fondly there.
EL: Of course they don’t, but look at the stats! (Laughs) I think he started a handful of games and scored in half of them. That’s not bad. He was probably a sub in loads of games and didn’t do anything, but he wasn’t the worst player in the world. He’s our youth team coach now, or reserve team coach. I like him, I’m glad he’s back at the club.
(I later run this by Wikipedia, which lists him as having scored 3 goals in 14 games for Arsenal. But, then, a lot of their ‘stats’ are misleading. Can anyone shed any light on this matter?)
Martin Reuser or Kieran Dyer?
EL: I went to school with Kieran Dyer…so Martin Reuser! (Laughs)
CU: What was Kieran Dyer like at school? I can probably guess.
EL: He was a little bit of a bully, I’ve got to be honest. Hopefully he’s a bit nicer now…
CU: B*ll***s.
EL: …but, at school, he wasn’t the nicest of guys, unfortunately. But people change, they grow up, and I’m sure he has.
CU: I loved Martin Reuser.
EL: Martin Reuser was an amazing player, a real cult hero. We absolutely loved him at the club. He’s one of the best players Ipswich has ever seen.
CU: You know who he reminds me of? Sebastien Larsson of Birmingham.
EL: Oh yeah?
CU: Similar kind of player, kind of light but with all the skill in the world.
EL: Absolutely, yeah. Very good. Still playing.
Where is he playing at these days?
EL: Vitesse or somewhere like that. He’s back in the Dutch…
(At that point, Sport.co.uk is asked to wrap things up. So, sadly no time for the ‘Richard Wright then, or Richard Wright now?’ poser…)
Ok, quick final question: if Editors were a football team, who would they be and why?
CU: Good question. Um……I’d say the 1970’s Leeds team, because they’re very aggressive but they can still win things. But I think we play better football than they do! Is there a team that’s aggressive and…
EL: Argentina? They’re usually pretty aggressive.
CU: Definitely. We’ll be Argentina.
EL: We don’t mind a little bit of cheating here and there either!
CU: Exactly; they’re aggressive, they’re hard but, at the same time, they can play some very beautiful stuff.
‘In This Light and On This Evening’, the third studio album by Editors, will be released on October 12th on Columbia. The album will feature a bonus EP disc of five songs, called Cuttings 2.