Ramble Meets... James Montague
Football Ramble
Stak Production
4.6 • 9.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2020
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s Ramble Meets… we welcome author James Montague to talk about his experiences writing his new book, 1312: Among the Ultras.
James has travelled to over 90 countries while writing the encapsulating football stories he’s become famous for, and this latest book documents another classic gonzo-style voyage to the inner workings of football’s ultra culture. He sits down with Luke to recount his experiences in the scene, from talking to the heads of ultra firms who typically hold disdain for the outside media, to being invited to organised brawls.
James discusses his own moral dilemma in writing the book and presenting it for the reader to judge the stories, as well as the gambles he took with his own safety to get stories from some of the most dangerous fans in the world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | James Montague, I'm a journalist and author of 1312 Among the Ultras. |
| 0:11.5 | James, thank you very much for joining us for this episode of Round One. It's great to have |
| 0:15.2 | you here. It's a pleasure to be back in the box. Yeah, you're a regular visit. It's so |
| 0:19.1 | many regular visits here, really, aren't you? Well, three, but I mean, it's not, I like it, you know, |
| 0:22.8 | sir. Give you a hatric ball then, if it's you there. Yeah. You were here to talk about your new book, |
| 0:27.9 | 1312 Among the Ultras. And we'll come onto that, of course. That's the main reason we're here. |
| 0:32.4 | But for those who are listening who aren't usually aware of your work, there can't be many of them |
| 0:36.6 | out there, but there are a few. Describe to us if you wouldn't mind exactly what you do. |
| 0:41.2 | I guess I write about kind of obscure football around the world and the culture, politics, and |
| 0:50.4 | you know, the interesting human stories that come out of that. So, I mean, I don't actually |
| 0:54.7 | write about kind of football mainly or much about English football, I never really |
| 0:59.4 | cover English football and I've lived abroad for a few years. So, I've written a number of books. |
| 1:04.6 | Some people might have seen my journalism in New York Times or more recently, the Bleacher Report, |
| 1:09.3 | where I've started making a few films for them. But, you know, the thread amongst all of them are |
| 1:14.0 | just kind of untold, underdog stories, somehow tangently connected to football. And, |
| 1:21.1 | and yeah, it's been quite good fun. And so, it's kind of led me to this, my fourth book, |
| 1:25.1 | one, three, one, two, among the altars. And where I've decided, I wanted to tell the stories of this |
| 1:32.9 | kind of very secretive and unknown subculture, which we see almost every day on every football |
| 1:38.9 | match we watch, every Champions League match, every Europle League match, every Italian football |
| 1:42.8 | match, everything. We see altars are there. You see the pyro, you see the choreographies, everything. |
| 1:48.8 | And yet, it's such a secretive thing that no one really knows anything about it, which also |
| 1:53.2 | means that they're kind of othered as dangerous hooligans and, you know, caricatured in a certain way. |
... |
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