“I’VE BEEN OFFERED CHANCES TO LEAVE BURNLEY, BUT IT WAS NEVER THE RIGHT TIME”
Sean Dyche laughs out loud as he recalls the time he, Stuart Pearce and some old football pals nearly headlined at Knebworth.
The group’s transport that day – normally a Nottingham Forest minibus ‘borrowed’ for a few hours – had been upgraded to a limousine for the iconic Oasis and friends gig. Dyche and Co were mistaken for the Gallagher brothers.
“The limo should only have held six people – I swear we had at least nine in it,” he chortles. “We turned up and there were these people banging on the roof and windows thinking we were one of the bands.”
It was the summer of 1996, and the image of Pearce’s Psycho celebrations against Spain at the Euros had transcended football into the music world. “Clambering out of the limo was the first time I’d ever witnessed the power of fame in football,” reminisces Dyche, who was 25 and playing for Chesterfield in the third tier. “They were going, ‘It’s Stuart Pearce’. I thought, ‘Crikey, he’s a proper star’. It was like he’d gone to a new level. Members of the Manic Street Preachers and Kula Shaker, who were playing there with Oasis and The Charlatans, were turning around to watch Pearcey walking through the crowd.”
The punk-loving left-back had organised trips to various gigs a few years earlier, when Dyche was a promising youngster alongside Pearce at Nottingham Forest.
“Pearcey was the leader of our music group when I was a young
