So… enough of the blah de blah! What exactly have REDaction done since they’ve been around?...

NBKU: The North Bank Knees Up started on Fans’ Day as a well-informed suggestion from us to the club. Before we intervened, the club had intended to have a “Karaoke in the North Bank” comprising of hesitant day-outers coming onto the stage and reciting “Dancing Queen” to a crowd of equally baffled Gooners. “Surely there’s something better than that to get the crowd going before kick off” we thought and so we suggested having a couple of us compere on stage and encouraging lads to come up and kick off some old and new Arsenal songs. The result of this little trail before kicking off against Citeh was fantastic! Ben and Paul started it all off by pelting out a few chants before asking others to come up and, beer-assisted, they came up and rocked the concourse for a full hour! There were four since Fans Day and since the closure of Highbury, we now do a knees up at The Rocket.

Banners: The strip of space that ran the length of the North Upper had been largely a bland shade of white with a touch of white for a decade before we suggested we should fill it with something. The best suggestion from our group was to have our four most famous title successes displayed simply with the venue and year in the colours we were wearing that day. A simple idea, which has proven to be extremely popular with even the most discerning fan.

The other half of the white strip was reserved by Nike who were currently paying the club for its advertising space. We suggested to them that they post a length of the famous 49 unbeaten results there as a continuation of the “WDWWW…..”campaign they had at the end of the 2003-04 season but we instead went with “Kings Of London”, “Rocky” and “93 Years Of Memories”. These signs were salvaged when Highbury was redeveloped into flats and we’re now (as of late 2007) close to getting the club to approve the banners to be shown somewhere in the new stadium. Most likely one of the concourses!

Montage: We felt the club weren’t being as proud of their history as they could be (in the vein of “This Is Anfield” or “Republic Of Mancunia”) such is the humility of Arsenal Football Club. We wanted to invoke some pride and passion in the fans before kick off as well as reminding visiting fans that they were at Highbury – the venue of so many historic games! And so we went into talks with Granada to compile a video montage of some of our most historic victories.

The project was lengthier than we’d initially anticipated but, several months and hundreds of metres of chopped celluloid later, we’d created a final seven minute montage which was aired before every Highbury kick off and we’re looking at carrying it forward into the new stadium.

Fancy Dress: Where’s the eccentricity in football gone? Answers on a postcard, please! Too many “too cool for skool” and self-conscious chappies and chappesses go to football nowadays so the only place you’ll find any degree of mentalness is in the lower and non-leagues. Well we want some of it back! And so we revived fancy dress in the top flight by co-hosting Fancy Fulham with The Gooner fanzine in 2004. We managed to convince 150 fans to dress as gorillas, Fred Flintstones and even biker chicks for the journey across the capital to Loftus Road. The sun was beating down, the title was on Arsene’s desk and the Gooners were in carnival mood. Traditionally, fancy dress is on the last away league game of the season and so 2005 saw our second beano, Fancy Brum.

Due to the distance and Birmingham being a particularly ugly part of the world, we only managed to get just over 100 looking like Pontins rejects but, in spite of the team’s defeat on the pitch, it proved to be a great prelude to a Cardiff showdown with the Mancs! We then followed it up with Fancy Pompey but will be skipping Sunderland for 2007-08 due to distance. Somehow, 10 hours on a coach dressed as Vikki Pollard wasn't appealing for some reason!.

Flags/Bowler Hats/Beach Balls: Carrying on with the care free spirit of following the team around, we hand out various bits of junk for cup ties for big and small kids alike. In the culture of banter, swearing and drinking barrels of beer, it’s easy to forget that a lot of us were first taken to football matches by our dads and nowadays, the demographic going to football is much wider than before. Well…..that’s a pretty poor argument for handing out a bunch of useless crap before matches but it’s a larf innit? Looking at other leagues in the world, it’s clear to see that a club’s colours are seen as tribal and anything a club can do to fill a stadium with them can only be good if it encourages their own players. We hope that Arsenal fans can bring as much red and white to Arsenal games as possible. We all know how good it can look when we look at the Arsenal card displays or at continental teams’ tifos. It’s not that much of an effort but what an effect!

REDsection: Probably the single most important thing we’ve done as a group. One thing which needs to be addressed in the current change in football culture is the need for segregation. All Highbury had to offer was a family section where people could bring their children to games and sit in a less hostile, friendlier environment. As a result, they enjoy their match day experience a whole lot more.

The REDsection was formed to cater for fans who feel frustrated by singing on their own and being away from their friends who they sit with at away matches. In a sense, it’ll bring the advantage of applying with friends and fellow singers to cheer on the team in a 600-strong section of the new stadium. There were trial REDsections in the 2004/05 season; most notably against Everton in the Carling Cup. A register was compiled for those wishing to join the list and trial REDsections were set up for Carling Cup games with great success. Now there are 775 of us spread across blocks 5 and 6 in the north west lower corner of the new stadium.

Unfortunately, it’s only gold members and in an area furthest away from the away fans but this is what the club offered and we accepted! Although we get requests from fans to relocate to this section and we do our best to accommodate, there are obvious retrictions; the two most obvious being taking existing gold members out and relocations only being handled in the close season. If you’re interested in joining the REDsection, drop your details in and we’ll hand them to our club contact. We cannot make any assurances as relocation is subject to AFC administration and existing REDsection members moving out.

Large Flags: Generating a fantastic, memorable atmosphere is about colour as much as it is about noise. In England, we don’t seem to have the same amount of vibrancy in our stands as our continental counterparts and we very much wanted to change that. We asked the club if it was possible to have big flags at Highbury and they said “We can’t! There are Health & Safety implications so the fire brigade and local council won’t allow it”. We weren’t especially satisfied with this as an answer so we dug deeper and asked Islington council directly if there was a problem with having flags in a football stadium and guess what? There wasn’t!

With the excuses brushed aside, we’ve now made two beautiful large flags and take them to away games in Europe as well as the odd away cup tie and home Champions League game. We then asked “what happened to the giant red and white Dreamcast shirt we had at the 2002 F.A. Cup final?” and it seemed nobody at the club knew until it was discovered discarded under the Highbury stands. We then asked if we could dust it down and use it in the next cup final and eventually, our new sponsor kindly decided to replace it with a giant O2 shirt. It’s was used at Cardiff three times and we hope to use something similar for Wembley should we ever play there. We now have two more giant flags in use. The “REDaction Gunners” one and the “Pride Of London” one.

Songs: What happened to the creativity we used to have as fans when it came to songs? It seems we pull out the odd gem but not often enough so we’ve come up with a few. Some have made it, some haven’t!

Click this link to see what they are and if you recognise any of them. We’ve also added every Arsenal song sung regularly over recent years. We want this to be THE bible of Arsenal songs but this can only happen with updates and suggestions from fans so if you’ve got anything to add, please email us at redaction.gooners@gmail.com

Card Display: Again, adding to the idea of introducing more colour to Highbury, we arranged a 6,000 display of colours to salute the team’s unbeaten run of league games. The lads at Philosophy Football – the group behind the England card displays – offered their expertise and vast experience to ensure the North Bank Lower spelt out our message of gratitude to the world and those eleven men in red and white. The display went amazingly well and the team acknowledged their gratitude back to the fans as, let’s face it, it was a fantastic achievement and there was a danger we wouldn’t be able to show our appreciation.

Since that initial display, there was another one this time involving 35,000 cards for the 2005 home match against Man United. It was a high profile game and it gave us the opportunity to wash the whole of Highbury in red and white for one of the last times in the historic ground. Again, the display went fantastically well with almost everyone participating fully to produce a spectacular effect!

Fan Event Promotions: There were two very historical events in the space of ten days in 2005/06. The first was something that doesn’t happen every day – a big English club were to leave their home for another! It was an emotional day for the fans, the players and members of the board and REDaction wanted to offer all fans, both those who were lucky enough to attend the Wigan match and those who were in the area, the chance to have an honorary piss up. That event was the Highbury Wake hosted by ourselves at The Rocket and with all ticket and auction proceeds going to charity.

It event was attended by 250 fans and proved to be a roaring success with beer flowing and the Ska, Indie and Mod music pumping out ‘til midnight on that memorable Sunday. Ten days later, Arsenal played in the biggest game of their rich history when we took on Barcelona for the European Cup! With UEFA being penny-pinching bastards, so many thousands of loyal fans missed out and with the Highbury pubs exploiting desperate fans with £10 entry and £3 pints, we decided something had to be done.

In collaboration with the Islington Carling Academy, we arranged free entry to the main Academy hall and pure, non-watered down Carling at £2.10 a pint. Again, it proved to be the best place to be in the UK that night as we embarked on a rollercoaster of a night from celebrating Sol’s goal to enduring Belletti’s cruel late blow and finally feeling an immense sense of pride and sadness as the players walked off the pitch defeated. We plan to do more work with these two venues and possibly others like them in the future so Arsenal fans can have even more choice.
 

The Rocket: Back in early 2006, we were contacted by the good people at London Metropolitan University who offered us their student union bar and live music venue for our Highbury Wake event. It was a fantastic way to see the old gal off as many sore heads paid evidence to! Due to the success of the night, we asked to use The Rocket for every home match and we’ve been having fun ever since! Ever been chucked out of a pub for singing? Come to The Rocket! Wonder where you can see the likes of Peter Marinello, Bob Wilson, Perry Groves and Tom Watt? They’re all with us!

Want more reasons to come down? How about beer promotions every match, the biggest beer garden in Islington, live DJs and music acts, drunken karaoke, open mic sessions, every big match on the big screen, pool tables, loads of seating, lots of singing and a great atmosphere! Those that have been there still go there and know it’s the place to be on match days. Check it out on this page for more info!