Gorton girls, Francis Benali, and the lost art of not knowing.
It was not unusual, it has to be said, to spot graffiti in Manchester. Not something to make me stop and take notice, but one piece I saw in the suburb of Chorlton in the mid-2000s did manage my attention. Stencilled neatly in big letters, it said “Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Khan”. It struck me as an unusually poetic turn of phrase compared to the tags and crudity I might normally see. Someone had clearly gone to a decent amount of effort to spread this particular message. Who was the urban poet who had written this, I wondered, and why?
Whilst I can’t say it preoccupied my every waking moment, I thought about it regularly and mentioned it to friends from time to rime. It was a mystery, albeit a pleasant one, that I never particularly expected to find an answer to. Until one day, many months (or maybe even years) later, I happened to be browsing in a Manchester bookshop and started flicking through a book of poetry by local writer Mike Garry. “Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Khan” turned out to be the opening line to his poem Mancunian Meander. The mystery had been fun, but stumbling across the answer purely by chance was even more pleasing.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m on a family holiday in LA. We’re walking through Venice, and I spot something unexpected. It was a sticker of the footballer Francis Benali, who had played 300 games as a good, but not exceptional, centre back for Southampton, ending 20 years earlier. The sticker didn’t even seem to be that old, and I wondered who would be wandering around LA with mint condition stickers of largely unremembered footballers from decades earlier.
Then, the following week, a few miles away near the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica, I spotted another one. Seeing one such sticker was a curiosity, but a second made it a full blown mystery. Multiple Francis Benalis had to be more than coincidence. Did he have some connection with the city? Had he come to play or manage here in his later years? Was it like when another footballer, Luther Blissett became an unlikely pseudonym for activists and anarchists? What was going on?
Unfortunately, mysteries don’t last any more. When we got back to our hotel room a few minutes later, I searched ‘Francis Benali stickers’ and pretty much immediately found this article about how Southampton fans are sticking Francis Benali stickers at locations worldwide, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil.
Of course, the mystery not lasting is entirely my own fault. I could have just not searched for the answer. But a mystery is not quite the same when you know the solution is just a few taps away. The pleasure of a mystery is not just the not knowing, it’s the not being able to know, the being unsure if you will ever find an answer.
If I’d seen the Chaka Khan graffiti today, I would have googled it, and found an answer instantly. I could even, literally, have bought the t-shirt. Back in the mid-2000s when I first saw that graffiti, it was of course very possible to find out stuff online. Google existed, and was in the process of becoming one of the biggest companies in the world, but an internet search wasn’t everyone’s immediate answer to any question. Even, if you did search, answers were not always easy to find.
There were no smartphones then, so the answers that could be found were not literally to hand, and there was little social media. Posing questions to your followers was not option. At those time when the Gorton Girls mystery came to mind, I was not typically in a position to immediately find the answer, so a mystery it remained.
Of course, there’s a lot to be said for having so much information at our fingertips, from so many different sources. I like remembering a song from the past and being able to listen to it instantly. I like being able to find out more about an obscure historical figure or event. I like being able to find out sports results instantly and following breaking news (sort of). But sometimes I miss the not knowing. The having to go to the library, or wait for the next day’s newspapers, or even looking it up on Ceefax. The sometimes never finding out.
And that was going to be the moral of this story, that sometimes a little mystery, not knowing things, is actually quite nice, but there are a couple of codas to the tale (can you have more than one coda? I’ll have to look it up). The first is that, until I started writing this piece, I had always remembered the Gorton Girls poem as being by another, more well known, Mancunian poet, Lemn Sissay. My brain had forgotten the actual answer, and no longer knowing had inserted the most likely answer instead, like a rubbish LLM. So, another lesson is, even when you think you know something, you actually might not. This is an important one to keep in mind when arguing with strangers on the internet.
The other is that, The Athletic article about the Francis Benali stickers was hidden behind a paywall, a reminder that the internet isn’t always eager to provide the answer to our questions. The information you seek may be out there, but it may also be hidden behind all the bullshit, the false information, the adverts, the paywalls, if it is even there at all. We may yearn to solve all of our mysteries, but the fake answers, the biased answers, the simply incorrect answers might just be worse than none at all.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on May 6, 2024.
