Some time in the second half of the 1980s, a group of around thirty young West Ham lads went out in Romford and ended up at Hollywood's, a new and impressive nightclub that had been open only a few years. By the end of the night several of them were on the pavement, hurt, and the club's head doorman was holding a card one of them had handed him. It read: "Congratulations, you just met the ICF."
The story comes from Mick Kelly, the club's head doorman at the time, who told it on the Terry Stone podcast and talked it through again with the film's narrator. It is his account of a fight between a door team and a group of young men he had never seen before.
Hollywood's
The film describes Hollywood's as a work of art. Its interior had been built for the owners by an Italian architect in 1983, and its centrepiece was a vast revolving dance floor. Women who danced the night away would step off and find their tables, their handbags and their friends on the other side of the room. There was a VIP section with a pianist and hostesses for wealthier and famous guests. That same VIP room, the film notes, was the scene of a separate brawl between the bouncers and Roy Shaw and his friends, which Shaw wrote about in his own book.
The door team was, in the film's words, proper old school: big men in immaculate dinner suits and bow ties, many of them bodybuilders and fighters.
The fashion and the firms
The early 1980s, the film says, was when the football casual scene swept the country. Skinheads and boots gave way to Lacoste and Pringle, and organised groups of lads followed their clubs and sometimes clashed with rival groups, or with doormen who got in the way of their night out. West Ham's firm, the ICF, had a fierce rivalry with Millwall.
The alarm
On this night, by Kelly's account, the lads got past the door in small groups, gathered together inside by the DJ box and began to make their presence felt in a busy club. In those days the DJ had a panic alarm. If he saw trouble, or was in trouble himself, he pressed it.
He pressed it twice. Kelly led the charge from the front door to the DJ box and found a large fight already under way, a big group attacking a smaller one, though through the crush he could not see who was on the losing side. He made a quick decision: push everyone out through the fire doors and sort out who needed dealing with once they were outside.
He and his men drove the whole mass of bodies out into the night air. Outside, the lads carried on punching and kicking the men they had been fighting. Those men, Kelly discovered, were the rest of the Hollywood's door team, among them Lee Chapman, whom the film describes as broad as a house, over six feet tall and a skilled fighter, throwing the lads around like flies.
Once Kelly saw that it was his own colleagues under attack, the thinking was over. His team went in. The lads, most of them in their early twenties, came off very much the worse. The film describes the pavement littered with men nursing cuts, bruises and dented pride.
The card
The doormen had no idea who the lads were. None of them was known to the door team. The only reason they ever put a name to the group was that, after the fighting ended, one of the lads who had taken a heavy beating got to his feet and, in a daze, handed Kelly the card. The doormen could not see why anyone would hand over a card like that after losing, and put it down to concussion.
Kelly's own view, as the narrator relays it, is that these were young lads, late teens and early twenties, while the better-known faces of that time would have been in their late twenties. The narrator's reading is that they were probably fringe or aspiring members carrying calling cards, not the seasoned main group. Firms like West Ham's, he points out, drew lads from many different areas, not from one place, so it could have been anyone. The door team's verdict was simpler. The lads, they said, were not much competition.
Afterwards
Ambulances took away the injured. The police arrested the head doorman, two other doormen and several of the West Ham lads. Officers wanted to arrest the whole door team, but the owners pointed out that a club with no bouncers would see even more trouble later that night, and they settled on three.
After questioning, it was clear no one on either side wanted to press charges. The police reluctantly let everyone go, releasing them a few hours apart. The film ends it plainly: the ICF and the Hollywood's door team went on to fight another day, and there were plenty more of those to come.