The English Disease

Wonder why no one has really ever taken up the challenge of football chants in music? There's The Barmy Army's fairly disappointing take on The English Disease which could have been definitive but which derailed almost from the off with a refusal to acknowledge that the chants sampled had their own rhythm and inflection and didn't necessarily need the bolt-on Le Blanc bits to be foregrounded.

It's sad that this album sounds so damnedly clunky as if Adrian Sherwood found himself unable to see through the two elements he was trying to meld together. I guess it doesn't help that some of the people he worked with - Al Jourgensen! - had no real appreciation of the power he was trying to evoke and simply treated the material in the same way they might have treated a sample from Blade Runner.

I guess it's only natural that Throbbing Gristle, still the most clear-headed attempt to document Working Class culture in all it's brittle glory, had a go but their Footie Dad sampling on United was more about familial extensions and interpersonal longing than an attempt to understand the collective unconsciousness evoked on the terraces.

I can imagine a TG track building and building Oundle School-style to You'll Never Walk Alone (12" gatefold pack, with a photo of a Pringle-jumpered Sleazy looking up at a teenage Liverpool fan, hanging upside down in happy cruxifixion from the gates of Anfield cross referenced on the back sleeve with a photo of Crowley evoking his Holy Guardian Angel during the Paris Working), using the inherent power of that song to crease away the folds of humanity, interspersing it with bargain Bucket Tesco call-outs and the sounds of Hillsborough...

But I'm gonna have to imagine it, I guess because their 'fans' always seemed intent to sidetrack them into the easier associations of Nuremberg = Mass Consciousness = Automatic Evil...

(Are the people who go and see the TG reunions now still hung up on Hyndley and Slug Baits? Seems wrong...)

Still, there's a gap in the market I reckon. Someone to take on Football in music - not Michael Nyman again - someone to do it justice, someone to understand that there really is nothing more exhilarating that watching your team 3-0 down in the European Cup and playing badly and then your captain scores and, in the crowd and the expression on his face a light turns on and suddenly, against all rational understanding, against all the carefully thought out agnosticism, you realise that you are capable of belief after all...