Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.
This piece is about New Order’s ‘World in Motion’, the official England team song for Italia ‘90 (or, as the under-45s call it, the 1990 World Cup).
But why ‘World in Motion’? It is a decidedly ‘mid’ New Order record, leaning towards bad. It wouldn’t make it into any list of New Order’s best tracks (which are: 1. Bizarre Love Triangle / 2. Age of Consent / 3. Temptation / 4. Regret / 5. Thieves Like Us or The Perfect Kiss; I will be taking no questions on this matter.)
To understand why ‘World in Motion’ mattered more than it should have, you first need to take a trip back to 1986, and understand what it was like to take an interest in English football back then. Most of us did not have season tickets and attend every match; most of us were definitely not throwing bottles of piss from the terraces or stabbing each other in car parks. I’m talking about the ordinary, mildly-invested people. We were listening to the live commentary on Radio 2, watching live TV football when it was available (maybe a couple of times a week), and getting the transfer news from Ceefax.
People like this — people like me — have always formed the vast majority of football fans, and our experience was typical of the mid-’80s more generally: the clothes were bad, the food was awful, the weather sucked, and people from other countries were always more talented and better looking. The actual football, like any other kind of top-flight sport, had moments of splendour. But the overall experience for fans was underwhelming, drab, and pinched.
But in 1986, the music suddenly acquired potential.
Until 1986 I hadn’t realised football songs could be good. I only knew two: ‘Back Home’, the official England team song from 1970, and 1982’s ‘This Time We’ll Get it Right’, which a) they didn’t and b) is the aural equivalent of being repeatedly thumped on the ears with a sandbag. Wikipedia tells me the official World Cup song in 1986 was ‘We’ve Got the Whole World at our Feet’, of which I have no memory at all. But one night that year, on Radio 1, John Peel played something called ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’.
According to legend this was in the running to be the theme for the BBC’s World Cup coverage that year but lost out to ‘Aztec Lightning’ by the Heads, a sort of electro/mariachi mash-up. And so the title — ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ — was itself a self-aware joke. Which was new, where football songs were concerned.
Colourbox were no slouches. They were signed to the cultish/experimental 4AD label, and in 1987 they would go on to have a worldwide smash as MARRS with ‘Pump Up the Volume’. But we didn’t know that in 1986. So, given that it was a football song, it felt weird that this propulsive, euphoric slice of cartoonish electronica was quite… good? I’m not going to be rude about ‘Aztec Lightning’ because I can see that it has a certain amount of charm, and I don’t want those of you with fond memories to come round my house and fight me. But it ain’t no ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’.
The Colourbox anthem was unusual in another way too. Now that everyone (including all Germans) can sing the allusively self-deprecating ‘Football’s Coming Home’ backwards, it’s easy to forget that football songs used to be chest-thumpingly boorish, and incredibly literal. Actual professional footballers were forced to sing lyrics in which they hymned their mum’s roast potatoes, asserted that our team is the best, and shamefacedly promised to really put their backs into it this time. ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ doesn’t do any of this, not least because it has no lyrics. Nor does it make any references to the host country, Mexico; there is a blessed absence of mariachi horns.
No: like all good instrumentals, ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ captures a feeling. Specifically, I think, it captures what it feels like to enjoy watching the World Cup. Not play in a World Cup: watch the World Cup. It’s about the fans, and how football makes you feel.
At some point in the late ‘80s, football fans in England seemed to take a collective decision to reclaim the experience of watching the game for fans. I’ve got some theories about why this happened. First, the ‘86 tournament saw Gary Lineker winning the Golden Boot, a squad of promising young players, and England making it to the quarter-finals. Then, ahead of the ‘87—88 season, John Barnes moved to Liverpool, then (as now) the best team in the country, thus bringing him to further national attention. It’s hard, now, to convey the impact of this. Barnes was astonishingly talented and (sorry, but facts is facts) extremely handsome. He was also articulate. One of the most glamorous, thoughtful and promising faces of English football was black. This is unremarkable these days, but it was such a moment then, and played into the sense of a changing mood. (Barnes would go on, of course/regrettably, to perform the rap on ‘World in Motion’.)
Then, in 1989, came Hillsborough. I can’t say anything new about this, but there’s one thing I want to underline in the context of this absurdly over-involved piece about football songs: one of the realisations prompted by Hillsborough was that many people in England held a casual belief that football fans were essentially sub-human. The Taylor Report, published in early 1990, laid out the consequences of this and, together with the Hillsborough disaster itself, prompted a rethink. The report was still in the headlines when New Order were asked by the FA to write the official England song for Italia ‘90.
The scene was set for something to happen, but three further factors combined to produce a pop-cultural moment for the ages.
The first factor was the FA’s press officer David Bloomfield, who persevered with the then-unfashionable idea of an official England song, and insisted on the astoundingly counterintuitive choice of New Order. Interestingly, he was specifically inspired by ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’. (There’s a whole section on the Wikipedia page about this, liberally scattered with ‘citation needed’, which makes me suspect that David Bloomfield has decided to get events on the record.)
The second factor was New Order themselves. Like many people in England in 1990, they didn’t particularly like football. (This is why they had to draft Keith Allen to provide expertise on key points, such as the spelling and scansion of ‘In-ger-land’.) They were, though, from Manchester, where the collectivised drugged-up comradeship of the Second Summer of Love was entering its third year. A sport associated with menace and violence was being mashed together with a youth movement associated with going up to complete strangers and telling them they’re beautiful. ‘World in Motion’ — whose original lyrics were about taking ecstasy — was the gorgeous bastard child of football culture and rave culture. It is love that has the world in motion; Peter Beardsley is merely love’s glorious instrument.
The third factor was pure serendipity: Italia ‘90 turned out to be a good tournament for England, and drew huge TV audiences. As England got deeper and deeper into the latter stages and the collective mood became more and more joyfully hysterical, you could barely pass a shop, a pub, a rave, a building site or a house party without hearing ‘World in Motion’. Finally, as is the way with such things — indeed, it’s the whole premise of The Metropolitan — Paul Gascoigne’s tears in the semi-final took on great pop-cultural significance. You can take your pick about what that significance was, because what Gazza was actually crying about was that he wouldn’t be able to play in the final. The point is that a footballer — a footballer! — had publicly expressed a deep emotion that wasn’t rage, and in turn this prompted everyone to start talking about how Gazza’s tears made them feel. Suddenly it was just feelings, turbulent and overflowing, all the way down. (There is a whole thing here about conceptions of masculinity, but this piece is already too long.)
‘World in Motion’ marked the official beginning of an era in which millions of people who — like New Order — didn’t particularly like football cautiously started to take part in football-adjacent activities. Lots of them discovered what sports fans have always known: that there’s real sustenance to be had in being a part of a crowd. Not all the time, you understand. Some crowds are awful, and people who cannot exist outside the crowd are scary and weird. But it does us all good, sometimes, to be part of a crowd; to subsume your own individuality a little, just for a couple of hours, and experience the communal expression of emotion. It reminds you that in a lot of ways we are all the same, and feel roughly the same things.
After 1990, gatekeeping was out: joyful inclusivity was in. You didn’t have to be a dour, obsessive, violent monomaniac to enjoy Nick Hornby’s breakthrough book Fever Pitch (1992) (which was partly about what it had been like to be a football fan in the benighted ‘70s and ‘80s, and partly about what it had felt like to be the child of separating parents). You didn’t have to know much about football to watch a Euro ‘96 game in the pub. (As a young woman at the time, I can tell you that the vibe shift in pubs was real.) The smart, funny fanzine When Saturday Comes suddenly became mass-circulation, and the moment in the early ‘90s when the London media class discovered that Camus had been a goalkeeper was quite something to behold. Football in England became a thing you could just do when you felt like it, a thing that was fun: a thing that could be lighthearted and self-aware, increasingly distanced from negative connotations and the chance of getting stabbed.
Gloriously, none of this was contingent on being an England fan. It was discovered that almost every country in the world plays football, and that lots of them are really, really good at it. Uncommitted newbies fell in love with individual players and ended up adopting whole countries. People with dual or multiple heritage could declare their maps of allegiance without falling foul of Tebbit Test dullards. The streets were awash with France shirts, Holland shirts, Cameroon shirts, Nigeria shirts, and yes — occasionally — Germany shirts. (The Berlin Wall came down less than a year before Italia ‘90, another huge factor in the vibe shift. I had to check whether the eventual winners were ‘West’ Germany or simply ‘Germany’.)
Of course, there are still millions of people in this country who don’t like football. And that’s OK; whatever your PE teacher told you 40 years ago, it’s not compulsory. For those people, there is a valid alternative version of this story: that the football mania kicked off by Italia ‘90 had, by 2002 if not before, curdled into an oppressive laddishness characterised by the threat implied in the phrase ‘can’t you take a joke?’ For people entirely on the outside of the phenomenon — goths, Scottish football fans — none of this felt particularly pleasant.
But for all its faults, I think something happened in this story that is worth paying attention to. Something that had been associated with violence and tragedy was commuted into something hopeful, lighthearted and, if not definitively inclusive, a great deal more open-minded than it had been before. A game that had long been associated with the worst kind of menacing nationalism became a vehicle for a positive, multicultural patriotism. And a lot of us had a bunch of innocent, collective fun, and shared a lot of feelings.
Football culture in England remains imperfect, sometimes menacing, and often racist. But it’s still a lot more fun, appealing and open-hearted than it was in the mid-’80s. ‘World in Motion’ took pains to declare ‘this ain’t a football song’; 35 years later, you don’t need to be a football fan to be glad that it was.
For a slightly more… accomplished rapper than John Barnes (perish the thought), here’s Melle Mel
Something like a phenomenon
It starts with those pulses, as regular as a heartbeat, juddering like a ruler pinged off the side of a desk. Then the backing singers kick in, singing those ahhs in an ascending scale - stolen from the bridge of ‘Twist and Shout’, and also stolen in the same year by David Bowie for the start of ‘Let’s Dance’. When the
When England were knocked out of Italia 90 my goth friend Julian took himself out into the garden to weep. He must have caught it from Gazza
You have just encapsulated my entire relationship with football which started with Italia ‘90 and definitely peaked in ‘96 when I was a student in Birmingham and you couldn’t move in the streets for huge men painted entirely orange or blue, during the period when Scotland and the Netherlands were playing their qualifying matches at Villa Park.
Definitely feel good times despite the heartbreak inevitably linked to English football.