80 June 2022 FourFourTwo
S
ean Dyche laughs out
loud as he recalls the
time he, Stuart Pearce
and some old football
pals nearly headlined
at Knebworth.
The group’s transport
that day – normally
a Nottingham Forest
minibus ‘borrowed’ for
a few hours – had been
upgraded to a limousine
for the iconic Oasis and
friends gig. Dyche and
Co were mistaken for
the Gallagher brothers.
“The limo should only
have held six people –
I swear we had at least
nine in it,” he chortles.
“We turned up and there were these people
banging on the roof and windows thinking
we were one of the bands.”
It was the summer of 1996, and the image
of Pearce’s Psycho celebrations against
Spain at the Euros had transcended football
into the music world. “Clambering out of the
limo was the first time I’d ever witnessed the
power of fame in football,” reminisces Dyche,
who was 25 and playing for Chesterfield in
the third tier. “They were going, ‘It’s Stuart
Pearce’. I thought, ‘Crikey, he’s a proper star’.
It was like he’d gone to a new level. Members
of the Manic Street Preachers and Kula
Shaker, who were playing there with Oasis
and The Charlatans, were turning around to
watch Pearcey walking through the crowd.”
The punk-loving left-back had organised
trips to various gigs a few years earlier, when
Dyche was a promising youngster alongside
Pearce at Nottingham Forest.
“Pearcey was the leader of our music group
when I was a young pro at Forest,” explains
Dyche. “He would sort out all the gigs. Spear
of Destiny, The Stranglers, Stiff Little Fingers,
Big Country, loads of different bands. We’d
travel to Leicester’s De Montfort Hall, Leeds’
Townhouse, Nottingham’s Rock City.
“Chas the groundsman had been at Forest
for years. We’d chuck him a couple of quid to
borrow the minibus. Old school – a few beers
and off to watch the gigs.”
The Burnley manager’s music buzz shows
no sign of fizzling out. This despite the annual
battle to maintain the club’s place among
the Premier League elite, a battle which has
been more difficult this season than at any
time since the Clarets’ promotion back to the
top flight in 2016.
Camera phones and Dyche’s own ubiquity
means his days of “losing it” in festival mosh
pits have been consigned to the past. His
enthusiasm for a good tune, though, endures.
“Would I swap football for music? All day!
I said to Serge [Pizzorno, from Kasabian] that
surely with my voice, I could front a band?”
smiles the gravel-throated boss. “When you
have kids, you slow down for a bit. Eventually
I got going again, though. I love a mixture
of different genres. I loved the rave scene.
I used to go to the Hacienda in Manchester.
I went to Creamfields. I was stageside with
[former Forest winger, now Burnley first-team
coach] Steve Stone for Armand van Helden.
He came off at the end, I asked him how the
gig had gone and he said he was living the
dream. I thought, ‘Wow, what a comment –
a DJ loving life. Brilliant’.”
Dyche speaks about music with the sort of
passion he usually reserves for inspiring his
underdog Clarets. His team trailing Everton
2-1 at half-time of a relegation six-pointer
in early April, the manager told his charges,
“Everton don’t know how to win” during the
interval. A second-half equaliser from Jay
Rodriguez and Maxwel Cornet’s late winner
SEAn
DYCHE
