The true confessions of a football fan

The Boys From The Mersey is an unashamed account of one Liverpool fan's rampage through Britain and especially Europe in the club's golden age of the late 70s and early 80s.

With him were the rest of the Annie Road End Crew, whose reputation for traversing the continent with no cash or passports while simultaneously "bunking into" grounds for nothing, occasionally fighting and robbing our European cousins of their finest designer gear knew no bounds.

And Allt - former unemployed Kirkby scally, qualified fitter, landscape gardener and now full-time writer - is not here to apologise.

"I was gonna follow Liverpool and nobody was gonna stop me," says Nicky, 42, a former pupil at St Kevin's boys school, now a father-of-two. "I never had no money and there would be times when I'd go abroad to follow the Reds with no passport.

"I remember one time I went away with two two pence pieces in my pocket and I came back with the same two coins but in the meantime but I'd been at a hotel for two nights, been the game, had me food and got back. I did everything. "

"When I tell the younger lads now they don't believe you with all the drugs and immigration checks and what have you. I went on that Billy Butler show the other day and he said you've made all that up haven't you."

There's no doubting the authenticity of the material in Boys From the Mersey - "I was always there" says Allt - in which the writer's passion for his upbringing, the club and icons such as Shankly burn like a beacon. But the visions of hooliganism will disturb some as will the lack of penance for the Heysel disaster in which 39 Italians fans were crushed to death after a wall collapsed before the Liverpool v Juventus final of 1985.

The responsibility for those deaths lies squarely with the authorities - as do those four years later at Hillsborough.

He is aware that his "bunking in" claims will add fuel to those who blamed alleged ticketless Reds fans for causing the disaster - wrongly, as the subsequent Justice Taylor report categorically ruled.

But Allt - who had a legitimate stand ticket for the tragic game in 1989 and watched in horror as the Leppings Lane crush progressed - is adamant that he was not going to water down the book for opinion's sake.

"All my dad's generation bunked in," he says over a pint at his local in Aughton, proud of the city's cultural aspirations but determined not to pull the punches.

"With the Capital of Culture and the city going forward and everything, which is brilliant to see, people don't want to hark back to the those days, while I thought it was better to document it.

"People are gonna say 'oh the stereotypical image' but there are scallies in this city and that is as much a part of our culture as anything else. I think we should be full-on open about it and just laugh about it."

Even those whose sensibilities may not be able to stomach as what they see as another hooligan's diary may be interested to hear that in the flesh, Nicky is polite and affable, passionate about his roots, and whose determination to get his voice heard should be an inspiration to all first time writers.

He says: "The last job I had was as a landscape gardener which was about a year and a half ago. I'd saved up about 20-odd grand and finally said 'I don't wanna do that now I want to write'. What used to especially annoy me was that I'd go into places like WH Smith and couldn't get any Liverpool books. All there used to be was Her Benny and that's it. And I thought well I'm gonna try and write some. I'd just got fed up not hearing a Liverpool voice and I've always wanted to write about the city's underbelly."

He adds: "Me missus, Sue, was brilliant. I used to give her all this grief about how I hated what I was doing. And she just said go out and do it and get off my case!"

He teamed up with his old school pal Dave Kirby and went on English and scriptwriting courses at the JMU.

They also became known as the "writers in residence" at the Casa, the Liverpool city centre club bought by the former Liverpool dockers in Hope Street.

There they were allowed full access to the computer equipment upstairs, provided by the proceeds of Jimmy McGovern's TV play Dockers.

There they got stuck into their work with gusto which besides the separate projects - including Nicky's first book - has produced a collection of poetry called Kop Stories with all proceeds going to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and Zoe's Place baby hospice.

It features an amusing contribution from Hollywood superstar Mike "Austin Powers" Myers, a Canadian Kopite, who agreed to write the foreword to the book after being charmed by Nicky and Dave on a boozy three hour trip with the lads on the train from Liverpool to Euston.

The partnership has also spawned a play, Brick-up the Mersey Tunnels.

It's about the class war that still seems to exist between Liverpool and, shall we say, the more better upholstered parts of the Wirral whose residents, Nicky insists, are happy to show their Mersey roots only when the occasion suits.

Nicky says: "I took my kids to Florida last year and we were like swimming in Wykoko beach or somewhere and this fella heard me shouting to me wife. He said 'I know that accent you're from Liverpool - I am too' and I asked which part and he said 'Heswall'.

"And I thought to myself when they're away in like Beatle country America they're from Liverpool but when they're at home especially London they'll say 'oh no, no, I'm not from there, I'm from the Wirral'. "

As the play's title suggests, an impasse between the two Mersey sides is built up with a welter of wacky characters thrown in. It's already got a rave rating from one of the city's major theatres whom, he claims, want first option on staging it.

His working class preconceptions about writing and theatre folk in general have not been altered by his initial successes, however.

"The Playhouse is too highbrow. It wouldn't take Brick Up, it's too real isn't it. And it's about Liverpool isn't it. They'll take Noel Coward but they won't take that.

"And you go in the Everyman for a drink and you see all these fellas with little Parker pens in their coats and they're telling you they're writers and saying join our little club and all that and they've got nothing done for 10 years."

He concludes: "Liverpool is a city full of story tellers and I think a lot of people here think they would like to try and do something but once they see how London-centric the publishing world is they give up. They shouldn't and here's the proof."

Click here for more about Nicky Allt's book, Kop Stories