Seb Patrick Who He Is And How He Came To Be

Football Songs #1: The England Squad

I should have known that a bad performance in England's opening game - itself something of an inevitability - would have slightly dampened my enthusiasm for spending this week talking about various England-related World Cup songs, and so it's proved. Nevertheless, although I'm scaling back the "post a day" idea, I still want to get a few posts up trawling through a couple of instances of football song history, so as we gear up for the second game against Algeria, here's the first.

The football squad song was a curious phenomenon - unique, in British football at least, to the '70s, '80s and beginning of the '90s. England only qualified for four World Cups in that time - missing out in 1974 and '78 - and the four "official" tracks that featured the squads' voices were wildly different in musical style, lyrical tone and downright performance.

Back Home (1970) - mp3

More than anything, the odd thing about "Back Home" is just how old-fashioned it sounds. I mean, while it was 40 years ago now, it was still 1970. The swinging Sixties had been and gone. And George Best's career was well underway, so it's not as if we hadn't yet reached the point where football and pop culture would begin to merge. Yet "Back Home" presumably must have felt dated even in the year it was released. It's jaunty enough, but it's essentially a safe, incredibly simple two-minute football chant delivered in a boisterous yet stiff-upper-lip fashion, sounding for all the world like the 1958 squad rather than the 1970 one. Lyrically, the team are coming from a position they never would be again - they're the reigning champions at this point. Arguably, they had nothing to prove going into the 1970 tournament save for the question of whether or not they could repeat the accomplishment on foreign soil - which is perhaps why the song's preoccupation with "the folks back home" is so noteworthy.

The song arguably more notable nowadays, of course (at least to my generation) as having its tune nicked for the theme to Fantasy Football League, also being used for a number of musical refrains throughout the show's run where a single lyric would be repeated over and over again and fit (deliberately awkwardly) around the tune. I think my favourite examples were Saint aaaaand, Greavsie talk about the Endsleigh League as if it's im, portaaaaant... and Peleeee, was shite Pele was shite, he was worse than Jason Leeee...

This Time (We'll Get It Right) (1982) - mp3

Whisper it, but I quite like this. The tune, at least - it's catchy, and pleasant, and after a somewhat bizarre little intro, builds to a fairly memorable chorus. Okay, so it's an absolutely massive ripoff of "Stop the Cavalry", but it's quite a good one.

Lyrically, though, I'm not sure it hits the mark. There's a (not entirely unjustified) lack of conviction to it, and it's almost apologetic in tone - while I rather doubt the assertion that "We're on our way / We are Ron [Greenwood]'s twenty-two" had the rest of the world shaking in their boots. Furthermore, the point that it's trying to make - "We've been buggering World Cups up recently, but we're going to get it right this time" doesn't even work, because they hadn't even qualified for twelve years. So really, they'd already "got it right", relative to recent performances, simply by qualifying. Anything else was a bonus.

Still, for all of that, it's hard to dislike, particularly once it reaches a climax that could almost be described as rousing - provided you ignore the further oddness of a brief calypso-style insert on the bridge. They did realise the tournament was taking place in Spain and not Barbados, right?

We've Got The Whole World At Our Feet (1986)

Oh god. Oh god. This is just... awful. From the title, you might expect this to be sung to the tune of "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands", but it doesn't even have the decency to be a clever parody (if only they'd let Nigel Blackwell have a go...) Quite aside from that disappointment, though, this fails on every conceivable level. The tune is bland and forgettable. The backing track is flat and insipid, sounding more like "The Chicken Song" than anything else (only, you know, not as good as "The Chicken Song"). The lyrics are meaningless rhetoric, lacking in a theme for the first time (following 1970's "We'll bring it back with us this time" and 1982's "Come on, we can do better this time"), resorting to lines like "There ain't a single team that we can't beat". And of the three songs that feature the entire squad singing en masse, this is the one where they sound the most like a bunch of tuneless footballers trying to sing when they can't.

I don't have an MP3 of this to link to, but if you want to subject yourself to it, here's a Youtube link. But I suggest you spend the three minutes listening to "Paintball's Coming Home" instead.

World In Motion (1990) - mp3

You've got to hold and give, but do it at the right time. You can be slow or fast, but you must get to the line. They'll always hit you and hurt you - defend and attack. There's only one way to beat them: get round the back. Catch me if you can, 'cos I'm an England man, and what you're looking at is the master plan. We ain't no hooligans, this ain't a football song. Three lions on my chest, I know we can't go wrong.

Aside from everything else that's ever been said about possibly the only "credible" football song also to include performance by actual players (and the first single I ever bought on cassette, fact fans), what interests me is how indicative of its time it is - not for the style employed by New Order, or John Barnes' rap, or the "edgier" lyrics, or the presence of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Keith Allen, but for the use of samples. It's not the first football record to make use of samples of actual commentary and other soundbites (if nothing else, "Anfield Rap" had done so two years previously), but it's the first England one to do so, kicking off a tradition that would run through the nineties. They're good choices, too, with Kenneth Wolstenhome's defining hour along with a great snippet of the narration from the film Goal! ("'We Want Goals'. Against Mexico, they got one - a beauty scored by Bobby Charlton.")

But if nothing else, it's hard to believe that there were only four years between this and "We've Got The Whole World..." It's like they're from different planets.

Next time: The best football song of them all, and how its sequel is entirely justifiable rather than self-indulgent horse-flogging.