When I wrote that I had lost the emotional attachment to Bristol Rovers, I meant it. It’s really not worth inflicting upon my loyal reader the many reasons for my disillusionment which, frankly, read life grotesque self-pity. Win, lose or draw, the euphoria had or the misery all but disappeared. Yet today something weird happened: the death of a brilliant musician who wrote the club’s greatest anthem, after Goodnight Irene, left me shocked and upset. How could this be?
In 2002, Tote End Boys was released by Ben Gunstone, a talented singer-songwriter, who I learned today has died aged 53. Matchday announcer Nick Day picked up on the song and played it, usually after a draw or defeat. As the Bristol Evening Post put it: “Its nostalgia-tinged melancholic verse mixed with the uplift of spirit in the chorus proving as close a soothing audio balm as is possible after a disappointing result.” The song is a taste of Rovers’ past, when we used to play at the other end of Muller Road at Eastville Stadium.
“The flowers are dead and gone behind the Eastville goals are dead and gone,” opens and closes the song, a reference to the flowerbeds which sat behind the goals, a fair way from the pitch due to the dog and later Speedway tracks. It was where I started to watch Bristol Rovers in the early 1970s, a place where IKEA now stands. Little remains of the old stadium, apart the footwells behind what was once the North Stand by the new shopping complex. It is coming up to 40 years since we left Eastville. I am not sure I will ever get over it.
I heard the news of Ben Gunstone’s passing and found Tote End Boys on YouTube. Immediately, I was covered in goosebumps. Perhaps, it was the memories of Eastville, or maybe it was even deeper than that, a glimpse into the spirit of the Rovers I left behind? Either way, it stirred up my emotions in the way only music can do. I was, at least for a moment, a spotty teenager on the Eastville terraces, though not in the Tote End: I was too much of a wimp, or a middle aged family man at the Memorial Stadium, where we played when Gunstone released his epic track.
I asked Nick Day what he remembered about Ben Gunstone. He said this: “He was a brilliant songwriter and musician and an even better human being.” Well, that’s good enough for me.
I now know that Gunstone was deputy head of Warminster School and a passionate English teacher. I should perhaps have realised the latter from the way he constructed Tote End Boys. Those of us of a certain age understand every word. It’s what Rovers means to us.
It certainly reminds me of happier and better times at Bristol Rovers, if not on the pitch, then certainly off it when we were, as they say, all in it together.
The years went by and many of us drifted away, all but cutting the umbilical cord with Bristol Rovers. Some definitely did cut the cord and they will never be back. I suspect that I will never be back either, but the sad news of Ben Gunstone’s death suggested that a little light flickers, that I will always be Rovers and no one or nowhere else.
And can you hear the Tote End Boys sing, Irene I’ll see you in my dreams.
And when the north Bristol chorus rings I can hear everything.
I can hear everything.
The flowers are dead and gone behind the Eastville goals …
