Three Lions

I’m afraid I simply can’t resist adding to the literally hundreds of learned takes on ‘Three Lions’ this week. Nor have I been able to resist listening to it, saying it, or singing it a little.

In May and June (i.e. before all this mania began) I participated in a group which sought to discover the greatest Number 1 single of all time – we were all invited to name our favourite for each year, and for some reason, to a certain degree of internal chagrin, I nominated Three Lions for 1996.

Which makes a bit more sense to me now. Do I like it? Actually like it as a song? A bit, yeah … I certainly don’t hate it. But, obviously, there’s more to it than that.

I do love football, and I did watch Fantasy Football League and the Mary Whitehouse Experience, and I do think shared experience is a powerful thing, and I am susceptible to nostalgia for the summers of the mid to late 90s, and I do care a lot and have read a lot and written a lot about “people’s songs”/“folk songs”.

Three Lions is a heady mix.

It’s best seen as a duology. The relationship between the first and the second versions (from ‘96 and ‘98) is key.

The person I think of most (apart from David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Ian Broudie, obviously) when I hear Three Lions is Paul Gascoigne.

In a way that I’ll get into later, the original song deals in a certain nostalgia – but I feel the nostalgia relating to the ’98 version is, then and now, more profound and poignant.

Its lyrics relate to Euro 96, and the near-glory relating to the year of the original song – but it also relates specifically the 0-0 deciding qualifier against Italy in late ’97, when Ince was ready for war and Gazza was good as before.

You can’t be too much younger than me and really, fully understand what the Paul Gascoigne thing was all about. He had such an odd, odd career. Many who played with him say quite unequivocally that he was the best they played with. But how much did we, the average English football fans, watch him play? Really? Compared to today’s players … there was no regular Match of the Day between ‘88 and ‘92, then he wasn’t back in the Premier League until 1998, after which his career was, mostly, a stuttering disaster with the odd bright spark.

English people (not Scots), saw him for Spurs in the FA Cup, maybe, occasionally, on Football Italia (though he played very few games, and very rarely well, for Lazio). But mainly they saw him playing for England. Popping up to be brilliant in 1990, injured for vast chunks of the in-between, then brilliant again (though more fitfully so) in 1996.

But, yes, I remember, he did play well in that 1997 qualifier against Italy. He played like an international footballer. When that second version of Three Lions was recorded, the idea of Gazza as a key member, a talisman, of the England team going forward was not unreasonable.

But by the time the song hit the charts, of course, we knew there’d be no Gascoigne (and indeed no “Psycho screaming”).

Retrospectively, with the fact England played pretty well in that tournament and that Gascoigne was never a top footballer again, people have looked favourably enough on Hoddle’s shock decision to axe him from the squad. But, Jesus, it was still cunty. His handling of Gascoigne, Le Tissier, Beckham and Owen betrays the ego at the heart of his time as England manager. Who knows how Gascoigne would have performed in that tournament …

There are a few different sliding doors moments with Gascoigne – the ‘90 tackle on Berthold, the ‘91 FA Cup final injury, the ‘96 slide at the backpost in extra-time – for me, there’s another one which didn’t actually take place – England played a friendly against Belgium on a Friday in late May ‘98. I remember while it was going on, I was watching TFI Friday and Chris Evans said “quick update from the football, England are 2-0 up, Gazza’s got both of them” and the audience roared, and I remember feeling a surge of relief inside that Gazza was going to pull it together and find some form again for the big tournament. Then Evans said something like “just kidding”. The balloon dropped. A bad joke.

 Gascoigne was taken off in the 50^th minute and never played for England again.

So that’s what the two main versions of Three Lions are about, for me. One, the tournament everyone hoped Gascoigne would pull it out of the bag for, and he did, and the other, when the dream of Gazza died.

In that sense, it’s a song that summons a genuine sadness in me, alongside all the other emotions.

That was always its cleverness as a song. It was never triumphalist, nor intended to be. It is about hope and disappointment. I much prefer it to the two other big football songs of the era – I mean, World in Motion is fine, but a little over-rated, and feels more blatantly like a football song tagged on to a pop song. And Vindaloo (which also has Keith Allen’s zeitgeist-chasing mitts all over it) is both knowing and triumphalist at the same time – it does nothing that Three Lions doesn’t do – it’s needless, and feels much less like an actual football fan’s song, but a Groucho Club version of it.

For the time, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were a strong encapsulation of modern England fandom. They appeared (though this is a simplification of who they are actually are, I think) to embody the old-fashioned working class fan (Skinner) and the more recent metropolitan fan (Baddiel). They had the momentum of what a fun show ‘Fantasy Football League’ was, and their choice of collaborator, Ian Broudie, was also ideal – an unstarry star at the peak of his gift for writing bittersweet pop melodies.

OK, now – a brief, compact history of English football, as I see it (really …).

Three Lions draws on two eras, each containing two competitions – the only four major competitions (apart, perhaps but to a lesser extent, from 82) that figured strongly in the English footballing conscious – 66/70 and 86/90.

In the early 90s, there was an awful lot about 66 and 70 on the TV – though I was born in 78, I’d watched a lot of those games and knew all the stories, about Jimmy Greaves and Geoff Hurst, Pickles, Bobby Moore’s tackle, Peter Bonetti, Charlton being substituted.

Then there was ‘86 and ‘90, which I’d watched – the Robson Era. A lot of the same players, a lot of the same feelings.

So the first ‘Three Lions’ was about looking back to those tournaments, the fact there’d once been a great triumph and a couple of glorious failures. But also, there’d been nothing of note for six years – the damp squib of Euro 92 and the disaster of not qualifying for World Cup 94. So, Three Lions captured a moment when English football was ready to burst back into life. Italia 90 was a long time ago, but we could all still remember it.

The next era (let’s call it the Three Lions era) is longer – lasting from 1996 all the way to 2006. In nearly all of those tournaments, England went into with a realistic chance of winning and went out, after doing pretty well, in a way that could be described as unfortunate (the one exception being England’s slightly insane performance in Euro2000, where they managed to go out in the group stage despite beating Germany and scoring two goals in both the other games …).

These felt like the football fever years – maybe it’s just the age I am. But these were the years Three Lions always re-entered the charts, England bedded in for a football summer, the flags were everywhere, everyone went to the pub for the games, and every one ended with a crushing sense of what might have been. Three Lions embodied the era. Hope, a growing sense that this might actually be the year, noble failure.

That changed. 2008 to 2016 was different. These were the years of ennui, beginning with the McClaren tenure (remember Southgate for a while felt like a McClaren-like appointment) and the failure to reach Euro2008, through successive limp campaigns and poor performances.

There was actually a re-recorded Three Lions for the 2010 tournament. No new lyrics, featured Robbie Williams and Russell Brand, it’s quite poor, reached Number 21 in the charts. Baddiel and Skinner probably felt that was it put to bed.

But here it comes again, the people’s song of people’s songs, the most popular of all the popular populist songs of its era. It’s obvious why it’s massive again – because the team’s doing well, because of its suitability for memes, because of the humour, because football’s coming home, because it’s got a couple of hooks which are as simple as perfect as anything you’ll hear in a pop song, perhaps because David Baddiel’s singing really embodies the gung-ho spirit more than almost anything else imaginable.

(Incidentally, I noted last week, its Chart Position was a little lower than expected – though it looks like going Number 1 this week - due to a recent recalibration of the chart formula which penalised songs which were more than three years old, and I wondered if it should be recalibrated again to incorporate public singings and memes …)

I remember it was on a compilation tape a friend made me in the summer of ’96 -  I may have briefly winced at the time, but it’s what I remember most about the tape, not all the other, cooler songs. I think no song is embedded so deep in our national consciousness over the last 25 years. I really do think that, and, actually, there could be a lot worse.