The last of the white boys was a bloke called John Humphrey, a defender whose nickname was Tasty. He was coming to the end of his career. I remember taking a video of the 101 Greatest Goals on to the team coach once for an away trip. All the young lads sat down the front. The more experienced you were, the further back you sat. I stuck the video on and from the back this voice yelled out. It was Tasty. ‘Get that fucking shit off,’ he shouted. I asked him what his problem was. ‘Tasty, we’re footballers aren’t we,’ I said. ‘Can’t you enjoy Marco Van Basten scoring an overhead kick?’ He just said: ‘Stan, put the ball away. I have been doing this for 20 years. I have had enough of football. It’s bad enough playing it, let alone watching it as well.’ Fair enough, I suppose. Tasty always used to run himself down. He said if he was a car, he would be a Fiesta. Always dependable but nothing special.
When they went out on the pitch, black and white worked well together. So well that we finished third there in my first season, the equivalent of a Champions League place today, and Palace’s most successful season ever. But off the pitch it was two teams, not one. Me? I was 19. From my physical appearance I should have been in the black camp. But I didn’t talk like them. I didn’t have the same eating habits. I didn’t have the same experiences or the same background.
But to Alan Pardew and the rest of the white lads, I was a black Brummy. So I never felt I belonged. And I think having those two polar opposites at my first professional club had an impact on me. Neither side accepted me and perhaps that contributed to the reputation I gained at Nottingham Forest later in my career for being a loner. My only real mate at Palace was another reserve striker, Jamie Moralee. We hit it off immediately.
It was a real windfall for Stafford when they got six figures for my transfer fee to Palace. The Stafford chairman, Dave Bundy, was so happy he drove me down to south London in his Bentley to sign the contract. I had been down to Palace on trial for a week, staying in digs with a family in Biggin Hill. I hated it, but when Steve Coppell offered me the chance to sign I knew I had to take the opportunity. On the way back, the chairman pulled his Bentley in at Rothersthorpe services on the Ml and me, him and the manager, a brilliant bloke called Chris Wright who had rescued my career after I was released by Wolves, had a celebratory dinner at a Little Chef.
When the time came for me to leave Cannock properly, my mum and my girlfriend, Sharon, drove me to the station to put me on the train. I had one suitcase with all my stuff in it. That was it. They came up onto the platform to wave me off and I swear that with every retelling of the story that battered old InterCity train changes into a steam locomotive in my mind and Sharon’s dressed like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
I got to London and hopped on the Tube, a cornflake in my throat the whole way because I was so homesick already. Someone picked me up from Morden station, at the southern end of the Northern Line, and took me to my digs. I stayed with Bryn and Leslie Jones in a little annexe at the back of their flat in South Croydon. All I remember about that first day was going up into my room and Byker Grove blaring out from the television.
I hadn’t gone down there with any expectation of playing in the first team initially. Steve Coppell had told me I had the raw materials and that they would try and develop them. He said they would teach me my trade. And he was right about that. From Steve Harrison in particular, the first-team coach, Jamie Moralee and I learned everything we needed to know about how to make our runs, how to time them, how to bend them, and which runs tended to yield the most goals.
The two things that were obvious when I met Steve Coppell were how small he was and how unnaturally deep his voice was. Particularly for a bloke who was so small. If you were called into his office at the training ground at Mitcham, it was going to be something fairly serious. For such a little bloke, he commanded a lot of respect, especially from somebody like me who was wide-eyed and nervous about everything.
My first game in the reserves at Tooting & Mitcham was against Ipswich. I came on as a substitute and I scored. I scored ten or fifteen goals between then and the end of the season. I was on £300 a week with a £10,000 signing-on fee. I felt like I had won the lottery with that signing-on fee but a lot of it went on buying a Vauxhall Belmont that Andy Woodman managed to flog me.
I got the piss taken out of me the whole time I was at Palace for that car. It was like an Astra with a boot on the back of it, hardly a pulling machine, but it drove well, and anyway I didn’t even have a full driving licence then. Too impatient even to get a licence. But Andy Woodman didn’t care about that. He would have sold his granny if he could. I never understood why him and Gareth got on so well because they were like chalk and cheese, but they were inseparable.
Wrighty and Brighty ruled the roost. No question. They were the top men. They both drove a Mercedes. Everyone else had a Vauxhall Calibra or something of that ilk. When Wrighty and Brighty were together, you had no chance. You couldn’t shout them down. You couldn’t outwit them. They would always come out with some funny line to put you down. Wrighty was the off-the-wall guy, a bit of genius in him. Brighty was the archetypal solid pro who would cycle into pre-season training every day. He was having pasta on the team coach when everybody else was still eating fish and chips and sucking back the beers.
Wrighty was a goal machine. He was instinctive. Brighty was a bit more calculating. I learned a lot from both of them. Wrighty was a one-off and Brighty knew he was never going to be Wrighty so he worked the percentages. I had a bit of both of them in me. I could be a cocky fucker like Wrighty even though I wasn’t an extrovert like him, and I could be a target man like Brighty. I didn’t like being in their shadow at the time but my time observing them improved my striker’s education.
Then there was Salako. He was Wrighty and Brighty’s gimp. He was their fucking slave. He would put the crosses in, they would score and then they would reward him. Wrighty would say: ‘Salako, listen to me, right, if you put three good crosses in for me, I’ll buy you a nice pair of shoes.’ And Brighty would say he’d buy him a jacket. They’d compete with each other over who could feed the gimp the most treats.
Salako knew he was talented. He was stuck in the team fairly early and he was on fire. He was getting in the England squad but Wrighty and Brighty treated him like they had him at the end of their leash. ‘Salako,’ Wrighty would say, ‘you put those crosses on my head this afternoon, otherwise I am going to fucking kill you.’ On Monday, one of them would come in with a pair of Oliver Sweeney shoes or an Oswald Boateng shirt for him. That was his reward.
I roomed with Salako a few times. He was a nice-enough lad. He was a born-again Christian. I would go and have a walk around the hotel, and when I came back, almost invariably, he’d be lying on his bed, banging one out. Having a wank with Penthouse in front of him. I’d say, ‘I thought you were supposed to be fucking born again.’ And he’d be all sheepish and say, ‘I am, but we all succumb to our desires now and again.’
Fashion seemed to be everything with the black lads at Palace. A former player called Tony Finnigan used to come in every Tuesday with loads of John Smedley shirts for the boys to buy. It started to feel like you were in a chapter of American Psycho down there sometimes, everyone analysing what everyone else was wearing. It was label and logo heaven.
I always felt Wrighty thought I was a bit of a threat. I don’t know why, really, because I was never given anything like a run in the first team. But unless you agreed with him 100 per cent, he could be quite brusque with you. He was usually all right with me but he was scoring shed-loads of goals and it was obvious he was going to move on to bigger and better things. Both Wrighty and Brighty knew they were kings of the castle and Steve Coppell indulged them in that thinking. They were his babies.
We played in a pre-season tournament one year in Gijon, against Sporting Gijon and some Bulgarian team. We were at the Gijon training ground and there was me, Wrighty and Brighty doing some shooting practice. There was some minor disagreement and words were said between me and Wrighty. I told him to fuck off and he said, ‘You know what, I don’t even think you’ve got what it takes to fucking do it. I don’t think you’re even going to fucking make