Italia 90 was the flagship event of a summer when anything seemed possible. The nation’s great obsession, the England football team, reached the World Cup semi-final for the first time since 1966. There were golden boy Gary Lineker’s goals; Gazza’s tears; Chris Waddle’s off-centre, still-rising penalty kick, his feathered mullet fluttering in the wind like the spoiler of a launching space shuttle. Affable, able coach Bobby Robson went from tabloid punchbag to national treasure. Honorary Irishman Jack Charlton took his Republic of Ireland team to see the Pope. Florence, Rome and Sardinia shimmered with colour. Neapolitans bayed as Maradona, the petulant genius they’d taken to their hearts, helped knock Italy out. Opera was at No 2 in the charts as Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” – the BBC’s World Cup theme – touched the soul of a nation. And to top it all, England’s greatest ever World Cup song: “World in Motion”, which saw critical darlings New Order team up with England’s stars, including midfielder-turned-rapper John Barnes, went to No 1.
“The thing I never understood about football songs, songs for tournaments and the like, was how come nobody ever thinks to get their very best songwriters involved?” ponders bassist Peter Hook when asked about New Order’s involvement with the song. “People treated the process of writing a football song like they would writing for the Eurovision Song Contest. How come no one ever got their best people on it? How come the FA never asked Coldplay to do one? I think we were the first time a band – a proper band that people liked – got involved. I’m really proud of that. The secret is it’s a good song, not just a football song.”
There had certainly never been a recording session for an England official World Cup song quite like “World in Motion”. It’s inconceivable to imagine the recording sessions for 1970’s beloved, yet dusty “Back Home” being awash with cocaine – a gift from the visiting Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson – quite like producer Stephen Hague’s recording studio had been. Mayhem and mirth dominated Hague’s studio throughout the “World in Motion” invasion. In the building’s darkened corners, if you didn’t bump into the impish Gazza plotting a jape, you’d likely find wide-eyed and giggling Nineties renaissance man Keith Allen whispering bad ideas in your ear.
“Gazza, bless him,” says Allen now, “arrived late in a self-driven Merc, necked three bottles of champagne, got the rap down in one take – having asked if the black nylon pop cover was a pair of Peter Beardsley’s wife’s knickers – then drove back to the England training camp. I think the coolest player at the recording session was Chris Waddle. Very dry, very funny, shit haircut, couldn’t rap and no sense of rhythm – but what a great leather jacket…”
“I think when I look back on New Order,” says Peter Hook, who has been messily estranged from his former bandmates since 2017, “I think our involvement with the England single was as weird as it ever got. The most showbiz. The furthest it felt like we’d come from the group of us that had made up Joy Division. It was the most fun too. Proper once-in-a-lifetime popstar stuff. You know what? The band weren’t in the best place at that time either. We were barely speaking. ‘World In Motion’ thawed our relationships out…” he laughs, “…for a time.”
“I was asked by Tony Wilson to write the words,” notes Allen, “and I did indeed write the rumoured ‘E – is for England… England starts with E… we’ll all be smiling… when we’re in Italy… Obviously it didn’t make it in, but the rejection did make me try harder to squeeze as many sexual and drug double entendres into the rap…”
History records that John Barnes wasn’t the first to try the “World in Motion” rap. At the front of the queue was English football’s newest, brightest star, Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne. It didn’t work, really. Then Peter Beardsley had a go – what a sight that must have been. Then winger Chris Waddle, no stranger to pop music, having reached the glitzy heights of No 12 in the UK singles chart three years previously, collaborating with former Spurs and England teammate Glenn Hoddle on their song “Diamond Lights”. They’d performed it on Top of the Pops and everything.
It took Liverpool forward Barnesy – magnificent at Anfield but infuriatingly inconsistent for England – just one take to get it right.
Somehow the producer managed to herd the 10 players who’d bothered to attend the recording session – there was no Gary Lineker, the England striker preferring to record his own World Cup single, the deep cut “If We Win It All” – into a circle for them to record the song’s iconic gang-chant chorus, only for them to peel away one by one, citing a paid appearance that had been booked in at a new branch of Topman. They planned to reconvene in London in the coming weeks, whereupon the England football team came away with the first truly great football song recorded to tape (and New Order with their sole UK No 1 single).
Truth be told, FA top brass – never the most cutting edge of organisations – had little to do with New Order’s involvement in the tournament’s official song. Credit for that goes to an innovative young PR called David Bloomfield, who’d followed the work of Hook, Sumner et al since their existence as Joy Division a decade earlier. It was his vision that New Order and England would showcase a young, cool, aesthetic – a million miles away from the Euro 88 offering, Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s “All The Way” – that would distance the England team from the unsavoury incidents lurking in the national team’s recent past.
