The second is technology. Big complex fireworks routines need programming if they are to go off at the right time and in the right order, but they’re always outside and usually a long way away from power. The fall in processor costs meant that laptops became powerful enough to do this – along with materials technology that meant that they were rugged enough to sit outside and function even in poor weather and a low temperatures.

The third is about sound. Big fireworks displays generally need sound to hold them together. We’ve had big enough speakers to do this since the 1960s, as one look at the inner sleeve of Ummagumma testifies. But there’s a cultural side to this as well. If you’re going to play music to a heterogeneous group of people (mixed age. mixed gender, mixed class, mixed ethnicity, etc) they need to have a shared musical repertoire if it’s going to work for everybody. This wasn’t true of my parents’ generation; although the 60s created the possibility, it didn’t really become true until the 1980s, as a result of the inceasing ubiquity of music, of radio stations, and the social expectation that you’d be regarded as odd ir eccentric if you didn’t listen to popular music.

The fourth trend is about attitudes to risk, and – related – about public safety. Fireworks explode, and we used to willing to tolerate the risk that one might explode at the wrong time while we were organising a display in our garden. We’re less willing to take that individual risk now, and this is probably just as well, since the authorities are less willing for us to use public resources (fire, police, health services) as a result of our risk-taking behaviour.

And the final trend, of course, is the increasing competition between venues and places for residents and visitors and also for residents – which is increasingly around a combination of events and quality of life. (Which I’ve blogged about elsewhere). There are world and European championships in fireworks displays.

The question that emerges in the face of powerful combinatins of trends is what might happen to derail them. The answer to this question isn’t immediately obvious, at least to me. The public fireworks display is a good deal, since it is free or cheap (we paid £4 each to watch thousands of pounds worth of fireworks go up in smoke last night), and a big enought display has some of th characteristics of a ‘public good‘ (up to several thousand spectators my enjoyment of the fireworks doesn’t intrude on yours). The notion of fireworks as celebration is also cross-cultural – Bonfire Night, Diwali, Independence Day, and so on.

But it doesn’t take much research to identify possible limits in the areas of health, ethics, and animal right. The CO2 impact may not be huge, but there are some significantly unpleasant toxins in fireworks, in particular perchlorates, at a time when there is increasing visibility of the idea of ‘toxic consumption‘. As Leo Hickman wrote in the Guardian this time last year:

Name another product that maims children, scares pets and wildlife,
costs councils hundreds of thousands of pounds a year and yet hasn’t
already been tossed into the dustbin of history.

One doesn’t need to be a climate scientist to work out that the carbon impact of building and running outdoor ice rinks in temperatures which are generally comfortably above zero has a sharp carbon impact. (One rink – at the Eye of York – seems to be alone in having a sustainaility statement online. It has offset the carbon emissions, but I’m not going into that controversy here).

This is where the deeper social meaning comes in: that as a species we are in continuing denial of our part in warning the planet through our actions, and so we believe that at some primitive psychological level that we can make the colder world that is so embedded in our culture and histories. A Freudian analyst might consider this as a version of the ‘return of the repressed’.

The notion of being from a cold country is deeply embedded in the Northern world; the histories of the frozen Thames and the ‘frost fairs’ (another tradition ‘recreated’ recently, although without actually freezing the river), the enduring success of schmaltz like ‘White Christmas’, and cultural signs such as the surprising popularity of Raeburn’s modest portrait of the “Reverend Robert Walker Skating On Duddingston Loch“.

For the Natural History Museum’s part, given its work around climate change effects on species, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they know well enough about the climate change effect of the ice rink, but decided to take the money. How apt, then, that the sponsor is British Airways. Perhaps the age of irony is not yet dead.

The Ebbsfleet story goes like this. A former football journalist, Will Brooks, set up a website with the intention of raising enough money to buy a club. 20,000 fans had contributed £35 each (membership has since raced to 50,000), and they reached a deal with Ebbsfleet. The plan is that “every MyFootballClub member will have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club. Members will own the club through their MyFootballClub Trust, and together they will attempt to guide their football club to success.” The club had approahced the website, and was chosen after a vote of members – for its potential as much as anything else.

Obviously this is a shot in the dark: can an online fans network make collective decisions about tactics and players which are better than the traditional hierarchical approach? The club’s existing supporters are reported as being apprehensive – although football fans can’t be worse owners than many of the shysters who have taken control of smaller teams in the past, attracted by the opportunity to asset strip the ground. So trend 1 is about an experiment about the notion of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ – the evolving theory, recently the subject of a popular book, that groups – if asked the right question – can make better decisions that individuals. Liam Daish, the current manager, will stay as head coach and be a link between team and the MyFootballClub Trust – perhaps attracted by the prospect of significant potential investment in players. Gates and publicity are also likely to benefit.

Trend 2 is – obviously – about the ability of the internet to search out people with a common interest even if they are geographically spread, and to animate them. On this reading, MyFootballClub is similar to pledgebank, on which site people make a commitment which they’re willing to carry out as long as a specified number of other people also sign up to do the same thing. And it’s also worth noting that when Wimbledon Football Club was re-located in 2002 by its owner from south London to Milton Keynes, the internet was influential in letting its abandoned fans set up and finance their own club, AFC Wimbledon, which has so far climbed to the 7th tier of the League.

The third trend is possibly the most interesting. The top of the game has become absurdly rich in the last fifteen years as a result of Sky’s pay television deals and the revenues from the Champions League. But much of the rest of the game has suffered. Supporters Direct, which was set up (with some government funding) as a mutual organisation in 2000, has promoted the interests of supporters in clubs in the rest of the leagues, helping to develop Supporters’ Trusts at more than 100 clubs across the UK. 59 of these have an equity stake in their clubs, 38 have board representation, and 8 (2 League clubs: Chesterfield and Lincoln) are owned by Trusts. Trusts have been instrumental in saving more than a dozen clubs from closure. There is academic research on their social impact.

And tracing this back a little further, the Supporters Direct movement came out of the grassroots supporters movements of the 80s, at a time when club owners seemed clueless and disconnected. The Football Supporters Association was set up in 1985 after the Heysel Stadium disaster, and national fanzines such as When Saturday Comes and Off the Ball were both launched in 1986. (These in turn owed a debt to Foul (1972-1976) which had a punk sensibility before punk.) Off the Ball founder Adrian Goldberg wrote in the first issue:

“It is frustration that has led to the formation of OTB.We as supporters refuse to lie down and allow a self-elected clique with no other authority than their personal wealth to determine the nature of our pleasure”.

WSC, by the way, has just reached issue 250.

While it’s hard to see – right now – the ‘big four’ of the Premiership having problems, if only because of the way they and their European counterparts are able to rig the entry rules of the lucrative Euro competitions in their favour (why should a club finishing third – third out of four – in a Champions’ league group get a second chance in the UEFA Cup?), there are signs of a fragility in their base. Kids are more likely to support them than their local teams (there are, according to BMRB, more Chelsea fans in Bolton than Bolton supporters) but they can’t afford to get to many matches and are more likely to switch alleigance if form slips. Long-term fans are deterred by prices – the prices of everything, from tickets to ‘colours’.

And I was struck by a post on a Sunderland fans’ list from a long-term supporter who said that watching his local team, Histon (now in the same division as Ebbsfleet), had given him more pleasure than Sunderland’s promotion back to the Premiership.

So there’s a real gap opened up here between football as celebrity and football as community. It seems to me likely that more fans will choose to support both a ‘famous’ club and a local one. The local one will be easy to get to and won’t cost a fortune, while the famous one will as like as not be followed via television or online. The problem with Ebbsfleet and MyFootballClub is that it has the appearance of a community initiative – it’s fans, it’s the internet – but none of the substance. When you strip away the spurious grassroots pizazz over the online part, there’s no difference between MyFootballClub buying Ebbsfleet and A.N.Multinational Tycoon acquiring Liverpool, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Manchester City or Chelsea.

Other sports-related posts: : A sustainable football stadium; Cycling, doping, and the pace of change.

This came to mind because of an amusing exchange in an interview with the chief executive of another counter-cultural but expensive brand, Gibson Guitar. It turns out, though, unlike Harley Davidson, that the company’s success has more to do with youth trends than boomers.

Henry Juskiewicz was in London because Gibson was sponsoring a polo match (yes, horses, mallets, all of that), and of course it turns out that these days the top end Gibson, customised, of course, costs $30,000 or $40,000, and are sold to lawyers or similar who are trying to rediscover the musical passions of their youth, only much more expensively:

A bit like a Harley Davidson? [says interviewer David Teather] “It is very much like the Harley Davidson.” So you are a mid-life crisis brand? “Hum,” he considers. “It can be,” stretching the vowel in “can”. “But we are not really pushing the mid-life crisis agenda.”

Some interesting guiter market data: according to Music Trades Magazine, the size of the market has trebled (in volume terms) since 1998, and 3.3m guitars were sold in 2005. Market value is $1.1bln.

Juskiewicz bought the company for $5m in the 1986 when it was part of a conglomerate and losing sales at the rate of 20% a year at a time when the new wave was playing keyboards and not guitars (shades of the witty line in LCD Soundsytems’ song ‘Losing My Edge’: “I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables”.

So why is the guitar market doing so well now? Juskiewicz’s ‘investment bank pitch’ (his phrase) is like a technology and leisure trends summary:

“There is a major structural social change that’s taking place. Our generation was the passive entertainment generation. We sit on the couch watching TV, sit in the sports stadium watching football. The creative tools in our generation were very expensive. Fifteen years ago if you wanted to record a song you would go to a studio and you would pay £400 an hour and it would be very expensive.

“The internet changed all of that. The tools are now available to everyone for almost no money. Garage Band [Apple’s recording software] is a better production platform than that £400-an-hour studio in many respects and it’s a couple of hundred bucks.

“The second thing is, the ability to distribute your creative product is free. The fact is, creating music is becoming part of these youngsters’ lives. They do videos, they write, they do photos. We have the onset of the creative generation and the musical instrument of choice in the creative generation is the guitar and so the guitar is doing wonderfully well.”