There’s a strange tradition with football tournaments that bizarrely has nothing to do with alcohol, racism or hooliganism: football songs.
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When a country qualifies, the the first thing the players do – after celebrating with their wives, then girlfriends, then strangers – is ask, “Right, what shall we sing?” This is by no means a new concept. Back in 1966, the England squad’s official World Cup tune was called ‘World Cup Willie‘. Of course, that was a more innocent age. Today, ‘World Cup Willie‘ is more likely to be a kiss-and-tell headline about a player who can’t keep it in his pants.
And with Euro 2012 in full swing, now’s the time to re-live a few of the most, shall we say, memorable football songs of all time.
Let’s start with Germany. When it comes to penalty shoot outs they’re always on target, but musically, not so much. In 1994, a friend of ours ate a chocolate brownie in an Amsterdam cafe and claimed he saw the Village People singing with some tone deaf Germans. Oh how we laughed until it turned out the brownie wasn’t laced with naughtiness, he was simply watching MTV. You see, the Village People had got together with the German national team to record their official song, Far Away in America.
And the Germans have previous. In 1986, they celebrated reaching the World Cup finals by recording Mi Amor. A gang of German men singing in Italian about their upcoming trip to Mexico. Go figure.
If Braveheart were alive and writing songs, buy cialis online we’d imagine he’d have come up with something as jingoistic as Del Amitri and Scotland’s 1998 track, Don’t Come Home Too buy cialis online Soon. Some people believe in the power of positive thinking. That you can make things happen by vocalising them so if you want a new job and keep saying “I will get a new job” a new job you shall get. Anyway, it didn’t work for Scotland. They finished bottom of their group and went out in the first round.
In 2002, loveable non-identical twins Ant and Dec released We’re on the Ball. With lines such as, ‘We’re on the ball, we’re on the ball, we’re on the ball, we’re on the ball’, it’s basically the football equivalent of ‘Where’s my keys, where’s my phone’. In fact, you never see Mr Zil and Ant and Dec in the same room, do you? Hhmmm…
It was left to Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds to discover the antidote to the poisoned chalice that is footie songs, with their quite simply stunning effort: Three Lions. Sure, “Three lions on a shirt” might sound like a horrific accident at Longleat but it’s actually “The most popular England song of all time“. Not our words, but the words of the Telegraph and they’re posh and use big words so it must be true.
It’s only fitting that we end by discussing Poland’s official song for Euro 2012. As co-hosts it was important the public voted for a modern song that appealed to youngsters. Instead they chose a folk song sung by 8 women, one of whom is 82. One thing’s for sure, by Christmas we’ll probably have forgotten who won Euro 2012 but ‘Koko Euro Spoko‘ will feature on BBC3 clipshows for years.
