Good Telegraph article

[Fagan]

Embrace well placed to enter the World Cup hall of shame

By Jim White

 

Sunday was a big night for the group Embrace. They were showcasing their official World Cup anthem at the Professional Footballers' Association awards dinner and the nerves were all a jangle. The band's singer, Danny McNamara, told BBC News that this was the most important audience the song would face. He was hoping, he said, that if they liked it then Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and the rest might join the band in the Top of the Pops studio for a rousing singalong just before the finals began.

 

Well, he can scratch that date from his diary. As it turned out, the song was received by the football professionals with about as much enthusiasm as they might bring to a goalless draw between Barnet and Torquay. As the first dreary drones of the song played out across the Grosvenor House Hotel ballroom, many of those in attendance slipped out for a comfort break. After all, there wouldn't be a similar opportunity for a while: Gordon Taylor was due to speak next. Those left to hear it pronounced the song instantly forgettable, insipid and wearisome. One guest hadn't realised that there was a group playing at all; he simply assumed the music was coming from the lobby, where someone had left the doors of a lift open.

 

The rest of us will get the chance to judge World At Your Feet when it is released on June 9. I wouldn't hold your breath. As the comedian Mitch Benn sang recently: "Everybody sounds like Coldplay now." Embrace more than most. This is a junior version of the world's most popular band, Lukewarmplay perhaps. Their song is filled with Coldplay-like lyrics which strive for gravitas, but just end up sounding meaningless. There's lots of "You know it's going to be our time" and "You lift it up with one proud kiss". Plus there's the opening couplet, with its vague suggestion that this might be England's year: "You're the first in my life/To make me think that we might just go all the way". It was a phrase that The Observer has suggested sounded less like a stirring musical call to arms than a Sven-Goran Eriksson chat-up line.

 

Sadly, Embrace's World Cup song is not the only one we will be subjected to over the next couple of months. Already the airwaves are clogged with unofficial tunes. Chris Evans, on his Radio 2 show, is championing a truly execrable effort by the appropriately named Tonedef All Stars based on the old Dad's Army theme called Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Jurgen Klinsmann? This is a song which, with scant acknowledgement of the way the World Cup draw will pan out, is predicated on an England v Germany final.

 

On TalkSport, Alan Brazil has favoured Koopa's Stand Up 4 England, a tune which at least has the merit of sounding like a terrace anthem. Mainly because it is one. Elsewhere, the Liverpool comedian Stan Boardman has a number out which will hardly help the Foreign Office in its attempts to get England fans heading to the finals to adopt a more conciliatory approach to their hosts; the Virgin DJ Christian O'Connell has issued a song called, rather presumptuously, The People's Anthem; while Joe Fagin (no, not that Joe Fagan) is re-releasing his 1984 hit That's Living All Right, this time on a football theme. In short, let's just say as the World Cup approaches, the judging panel for the Ivor Novello Awards will not be much exercised by the quality of the songs on offer.

 

Mind you, it was ever thus. Somehow the assumption has developed in our collected consciousness that there was once a golden age of World Cup tunes, that back in the mists of time the nation swayed to a glorious cornucopia of rousing patriotic ditties, a sort of perpetual Last Night of the Proms conducted on the terraces. Like most golden ages, this one is mythical.

 

In fact, back in 1966 there was not a single World Cup-related song released. At number one in the charts as Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy were the Kinks with Sunny Afternoon, Ray Davies' magnificent critique of instant wealth, which begins with the ever-pertinent line: "The taxman's taken all my dough." It was not until 1970 with Back Home that the idea of marrying football to pop music was first mooted, a concept that was sustained in 1974 and 1978 by Scottish songs.

 

The Eighties were completely bereft of decent numbers (remember Yer Man, the Northern Ireland squad's official offering in 1982? Thought not; it didn't make the charts). But in 1990 the two classics of the genre emerged: New Order's World In Motion and the Pavarotti Nessun Dorma, theme to the BBC's coverage, which sat at numbers one and two in the charts throughout July. Purists might argue that Puccini didn't write the latter with an eye to Italia 90, but let's not split hairs at this juncture.

 

From that peak, it was downhill all the way. In 1994 Ireland's Watch the House for Ireland failed to chart, while in 1998 the self-consciously yobbish Vindaloo by Fat Les was kept off the number one slot by the reworked Euro 96 anthem, Baddiel and Skinner's Three Lions, perhaps the only official number to have made the transition into the fans' songbook.

 

The 2002 event proved that when it comes to World Cup songs, more is undoubtedly less. There were 25 tournament-related singles released, including such forgettable efforts as Sven's 11 with Smells Like Team Spirit, V For Victory with We've Got Goldenballs and Grandad Roberts and His Son Elvis and their Meat Pie, Sausage Roll: Come On England. Thirteen of the efforts failed to reach the top 100, this at a time when singles sales were so low that pimply teenagers playing around with a joystick in their darkened bedrooms could hit number one. Meanwhile, the official song by England United (an unholy alliance of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Spice Girls) staggered to wholly unimpressive number six.

 

Judging by the light ripple of applause that greeted the first public performance of their work, Embrace will be pushed to do much better. And when it comes to the tournament the fans will be obliged to rely on the well-thumbed songbook that has served them so well over the years. Now, what's that one about 10 German bombers?

[owenthomas]

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[owenthomas]

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[Des]

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