The year when Louise, Jordan and Lenny Henry marketed Brighton kit
Louise. Jordan. Lenny Henry… three names that you have probably never heard in the same sentence before and chances are never will again once you finish reading this article on Brighton & Hove Albion’s 1997-98 kit.
The reason they appear in that opening paragraph together? Because for some reasons no sane person will ever be able to fathom, this strange trio were the three celebrities chosen to promote the shirt of a struggling Division Three football club.
This was the Brighton’s first season playing ‘home’ games at Gillingham following the sale of the Goldstone Ground. Attendances at Priestfield never crept above the 3,000 mark.
The campaign ended with the Seagulls finishing 91st out of 92 in the Football League with only 35 points. Smehow, Doncaster Rovers were even worse. Their greater ineptitude was all that saved the Seagulls from dropping into the Conference.
As a result, the Albion needed all the help they could get to flog shirts. Their answer? To call upon the services of a Page 3 model who went to Blatchington Mill school, a comedian and a woman who had no links at all to Brighton and Hove but had sung about being naked.
Louise was first up. This was six months before she married Jamie Redknapp and really it’s just as well Twitter did not exist back then.
Imagine the rumours that would have abounded if it did? Somebody would have convinced themselves that Louise modelling for Brighton was proof that England international Redknapp was coming to the Albion.
It would have been the 1990s version of “Juan Mata is mates with Bruno” and “Michael Owen owns horses like Tony Bloom”.
The Albion decided to kick off Louise’s marketing campaign in late November 1997 with the questionable tagline “Louise gets her kit off…” followed by a picture of the former Eternal singer in an Albion shirt.
Underneath, they rather cleverly added “…the club shop” – just in case anybody thought she was actually going to get as naked as her song which reached number five in the UK charts in 1996 suggested.
Whilst you could never get away with such a marketing campaign these days, this was 1997 lest we forget. The marketing did not stop at Louise in an Albion shirt either.
So rubbish were Brighton at this point in time that they the club tried to entice people into the club shop with offers of Louise posters and competitions to win tickets to her upcoming show at the Brighton Centre.
You could even win a Louise signed Albion shirt. Because lets face it, who wanted anything autographed by Andy Ansah, John Westcott and Denny Mundee?
The second campaign featuring Louise launched in the New Year and was arguably even weirder. This time, the Albion decided to try and sell posters of the singer in a Brighton shirt alongside a poster of Peter Ward from a photo that was taken some 21 years previously.
To put that into some context, it would have been like selling a poster of Cheryl wearing the 2019-20 season Brighton home kit in the same advert as a picture of Gary Hart which was taken in 1998. Whoever was coming up with these ideas must have been on some serious acid at the time.
The tagline for the Louise-Ward double act was “The best-looking face ever in an Albion shirt…” written above Louise with “…but not the most striking” next to Ward. Louise is pretty, Ward was a good striker. Very clever.
Unfortunately, this marketing campaign contained no tickets to see Louise in concert or the chance to win any sort of signed shirt. It was also the last one that Louise was involved in as she was replaced as the Albion’s poster girl by a poster boy.
Step forward Lenny Henry, who was brought in to market an end of season sale of Brighton shirts as the club prepared to replace Sandtex as sponsor with Donatello.
The reason for using Henry was because he had worn a Brighton kit whilst filming his Lenny Goes to Town television series and the club were desperate to capitalise on any publicity they possibly could.
Fair enough. Except rather than come up with something new for Lenny, they decided to simply rehash the “Louise gets her kit off…” campaign as “Lenny gets his kit off…”. Seemingly not concerned that there is a slight difference in looks between the two individuals involved.
The Albion did hammer home that this was a sale by including “For less” and “the club shop sale” to the poster. They also added at the bottom, “Note from Brian Horton. Sorry Lenny, the transfer deadline had already expired”.
This was clearly meant to be a joke but given we had been treated to Damien Hilton, Michael Mahoney-Johnson and Valur Gislason playing for Brighton by that point in the season, you could argue that Lenny Henry would have actually improved Horton’s squad.
Katie Price – or Jordan as she was known back then – was the third and final celebrity used to try and sell the kit, although oddly she never appeared in the matchday programme advertising it.
She was only 20 years old at the time and if you did not know that the above poster was of her, you probably would not recognise her compared to what she looks like over 20 years later.
Not exactly a glowing recommendation for countless surgical procedures, knocking out enough kids to fill Wembley Stadium or an ill-fated relationship with Shane Duffy.
We managed to dig up very little on Katie’s campaign. Our hazy recollections of 1997 imply that there may have been posters to buy of her, but other than that it is all a bit blank.
Given that she was arguably already on her way to becoming a bigger star than both Louise and Lenny Henry, it seems strange that Brighton never fully utilised her fame.
So, the big question is did any of these celebrity endorsements work? Sadly, the answer appears to be no. The kit was ditched after one season and not one of Louise, Jordan or Lenny were ever asked to promote Albion merchandise again.
Which is a shame. We would definitely fork out £52 for a new Nike home shirt if Lenny was being used to promote it.
