1990 – hold and give, but do it at the right time
ENGLANDneworder, ‘World In Motion’
I have exactly one memory of the 1990 World Cup, and it’s the end. Namely, the ‘final score’ graphic which popped up on-screen at the end of the Final to declare West Germany the 1-0 winners over Argentina. I think there were fireworks over the stadium, too. I was five.
Retrospectively, the fireworks will have been more a statement of, well thank goodness that’s over. The 1990 World Cup featured what has been since described as the worst standard of football ever played in a major tournament, and had the lowest goals per game of all time (a record which still stands).
The games may have been bad (and they are; I’ve checked out a few of them since), but the 1990 World Cup is still fondly remembered by football fans – particularly in England. The men’s team reached its first World Cup semi-final since 1966. It couldn’t have come at a better time for the high-profile English game because, when it came to football, John Barnes wasn’t the only one with a bad rap.
Football hooliganism at home and abroad had tarnished the world view of English fans, and the players had to suffer for it too. English clubs were banned from competing in European competition for the second half of the Eighties following the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, the peak symptoms of the ‘English disease’. The Thatcher government was “hopelessly out of touch” with the state of the English game, and media outlets took every opportunity to look down on the sport as a whole – for a while, ITN News didn’t even announce the matchday results.
So if you’re the embattled press officer from the Football Assocation, facing a reputation meltdown alongside a team manager who’s been getting grief from the press for months, if not years, what do you do? Give Tony Wilson a call.
*
England football songs had had a chequered history even before 1990. ‘Back Home’, the 1970 single recorded by an England side only four years removed from raising the Jules Rimet trophy at Wembley, was a banger for the time.
Other songs followed with mostly low levels of success (and I’d like to very quickly note their 1986 song was called ‘We’ve Got the Whole World at our Feet’, 1986 of course being the year they went out in the quarters to a bloke using his hand instead). Stock, Aitken and Waterman oversaw the 1988 effort, ‘All The Way’, and it’s all the way awful. So by 1990, you’ve got to admire the FA’s persistence.
New Order already had a foot in the door, having supplied the music for a Granada TV show called ‘Best and Marsh’, in which George and Rodney waxed nostalgic over archive footage of old games they’d played in. Mediating the riveting discussion here was one Tony Wilson, who will doubtless have jumped at the chance to boost Factory’s fame and fortunes in whatever ways possible. He was a maverick like that.
The tune was taken care of already, as it sounds remarkably like an existing theme they provided for another TV show, called ‘Reportage’ on the BBC. For help with the lyrics, they turned to comedian Keith Allen, whose finger was a bit more on the pulse of the terraces. The final result is an interesting cultural close-up of music and football in the early Nineties, an effortlessly cool (for the time) cross between two of the UK’s biggest alternative groups in both music (New Order) and sport (the England men’s football team).
I’m not a particularly big fan of ‘World in Motion’. It’s a good enough football song but not a great New Order song. It occupies an odd spot between many fans’ favourite album, Brotherhood, and their very least favourite, Republic. Bernard Sumner once called ‘World in Motion’ “the last straw for Joy Division fans”, who were still somehow hoping for a return to the gloomy post-punk of a decade prior. I love that description.
My actual musical highlight of 1990 football was an aria written in the 1920s, and performed at various venues in and around the tournament by Luciano Pavarotti.
‘Nessun Dorma’ (“None Shall Sleep”) from Turandot is best known for its final, emphatic cry of ‘Vincerò!’ (“I will win!”). But in the original opera, the character singing this moving aria is actually bragging that he’s going to marry the princess despite the fact she’d rather have him killed. It’s a bit...women are possessions-y.
But my goodness, it’s a powerful piece.
I now feel I’ve sufficiently confused the issue as to want John Barnes to have a crack at it, and regretting that no recording of Pavarotti doing the ‘World in Motion’ rap exists. Maybe in a parallel universe the roles have been beautifully reversed.