"We've made it to the first qualifying round of the Birmingham Spaghetti Junction All Comers' Floodlight trophy. I know, let's make a record."
There was once a time when even the most mundane event in a football team's history would spawn a record release, but now thankfully it seems that these mind numbing ditties have died a death.
Apparently it all started in the 1930s with Arsenal releasing their own gramophone disc but the craze took off with the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. What a great football fiesta that was. Pele vs. Banks and Italy vs. Brazil in the final. Aah, halcyon days. After that save Bobby Moore is reputed to have said to Gordon Banks "You should have caught that, Banksy".
Anyway, the England squad recorded Back Home, a song harking back to good old Blighty where friends, relatives and supporters would be glued to flickering black and white 405 lines 10 inch widescreen TVs (CRT, remember those?) in the early hours hoping to catch a glimpse of the ball as their heroes sweated and toiled under the blazing sun.
Next was Arsenal's 1971 Cup Final song Good old Arsenal. Actually those were the words and not much else, mindlessly repeated about a thousand times. We have the late Brian Moore* and ITV's the Big Match to blame for that excrement and I'm an Arsenal fan.
Then it all started to get a teeny bit silly with Leeds, Chelsea, ManU, Tottenham (with Chas n' Dave Aaargh!), Liverpool, all and sundry joining in plus of course the ever optimistic Scots. How they do love to make a rod for their own backs with their classics:
Scotland's 1974 World Cup Squad Easy Easy and it was indeed for Peru as the Jocks crashed out.
Del Amitri Don't Come Home Too Soon. A Scotland fan's 1998 World Cup plea. Of course, they did come home soon with one point from the group matches.
Scottish World Cup Squad 1982 We Have A Dream. It was a nightmare redeemed almost by a 5-2 thrashing of New Zealand. Hold on, don't they usually play rugby?
It was later revealed that in most recordings each player would perform an individual sound check and the sound engineers would surreptitiously turn off the microphones of those players not deemed able to hit a note. C'est la vie as they say at the Stretford End between prawn sandwiches. It then became de rigueur to engage a popular music star or band to gloss over the team's vocal deficiencies. This resulted in one or two not half bad songs, some of which reached the dizzy heights of Number One:
World in Motion, a great song from the 1990 World Cup with England and New Order featuring John Barnes' rap. Classic and what's more it's musical. The England squad opted to take a flat fee of £5,000 on this instead of royalties. Idiots.
Fat Les Vindaloo, extolling the virtues of England's multicultural society for the 1998 World Cup. Good work.
Simply Red's We're In This Together the official Euro 1996 song. Who remembers this? Nor me. It was eclipsed mightily by Baddiel & Skinner and the Lightning Seeds' Three Lions as are all football songs now and forever more.
So almighty thanks go to Baddiel & Skinner for killing off this abomination, although I'm sure there are some more of these criminal acts out there somewhere on the internet.
*Sadly Brian Moore died on the morning of 1st September 2001, the very day that England went to Munich and beat Germany 5-1. It still saddens me that he couldn't last a few more hours and die happy.
