The Stags Head Inn in Lelley was the venue last week for the launch of Richard Lusmore’s new book ‘Special Attraction’, and Hull City Kits were there to hear Lusmore and guest Alan Fettis recount supporting/playing for City in the early 90s, and we had some matchworn shirts on display for added colour.

A fine evening was had by an assemblage of Tiger Nationals old enough to have endured supporting City through the final years of the 20th century and psychologically battle scarred from the experience, with Absolute Radio 80s DJ and one-time Amber Nectar podcast host Matt Rudd mastering ceremonies. One of the few bright spots in a bleak decade, Ulster-born goalkeeper and seemingly professional Mod Alan Fettis spoke positively of his first spell with the Tigers (1991-96) and writes the new book’s foreword.

I’m a notoriously slow reader and still only three quarters of the way through ‘Special Attraction’, but here’s my thoughts on the book…

‘Special Attraction’ is Lusmore’s second tome, and is a follow up to ‘Not All Ticket: From Withernsea High to Boothferry Park Halt’, which chronicled a Tigers fan’s coming of age as a Hull City supporter in the 1980s.

Naturally the sequel picks up where the first book left off, and it would be understandable if you presumed an account of Hull City’s fortunes from the summer of 1988 till late 1996 would be an unrelenting Kafkaesque hellscape. After all, while English football was re-inventing itself, transforming from a “slum sport for slum people” (The Sunday Times, 1985) into a glamourous ‘product’ awash with money and celebrity, the Tigers somehow emerged from the barrel of ample bosoms sucking their thumb, proving immune to the upward momentum seemingly experienced by every other club in Yorkshire and tumbling down the divisions.

There is schadenfreude to be had in recalling such misery, even if you remember much of it yourself, but even so the book thankfully has a wider scope, taking in not only the failings of the Tigers but also the joys of Hull’s nightlife back then (including many lost spots, such as Silhouette, Henry’s, Pepi’s and LA’s), the fortunes of local musicians (taking in the creation of ambient downtempo overlords Fila Brazillia, favourites of mine), the nascent City fanzine scene (Hull, Hell and Happiness and Look Back In Amber) as well as egg-chasing in the shape of Hull Kingston Rovers if you like that sort of thing.

Hull City have reached heights that would have seemed fever dream fantastical in the period this book covers, and understandably those high points have been chronicled in ink and paper, almost to excess, but the period covered in ‘Special Attraction’ needs detailing too. The tapestry of Hull City AFC isn’t all golden threads, some of it is moth-eaten and tatty, but those parts are just as important when considering the whole, equally key to the ‘soul of Hull City’, and Lusmore recounts them eloquently, in detail and with wit.

He reminds us too that ‘blind faith’ can pay off in the end, that high points taste sweeter when you’ve endured the almost subterranean lows, and that following a football club truly is more than watching ’22-men chasing a bag of air’, it’s about the people you do it with, the relationships forged, the shared journeys, the hairy situations, the joyful cameraderie that gets you through a humping at Swindon.

From the incredible spectacle of the Tigers leading Liverpool at half-time, via the improbable aceness of ‘keeper deployed as striker Fettis scoring not just once but twice to rival the strike rate of one time Milan, Monaco and England man Mark Hateley, to the depths of despair of being the first team in the country to be relegated in the same year people sang ‘Football’s coming home’ (for the first time), it’s all covered here.

This book deserves a space on your bookshelf, buy it here… (Waterstones, external link)

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