Football and Music

I’ve gone on record saying that the 90’s (apart from a couple exceptions) was a shit pointless decade music-wise. But then I end up being a webbie version of ‘arry Redknapp in that even though I don’t rate them, I keep on playing them.

This is because as much as it irritates me, the 1990’s was the era when it became cool to sing about football.

As we all know this all began in the early 90’s when Sky invented football the Football Association approached New Order to do an England song. This reached it’s nadir in 1998 when the Spice Girls got involved.

But before it jumped the shark, there was a band that unintentionally benefited from this trend…

They gave themselves a slightly unfortunate but memorable name: Collapsed Lung.

The band, straight outta Harlow fused rock, hip hop and rap. In their early days the band had Nihal, now a national DJ as their rapper. He was featured on their first release the Chainsaw Wedgie EP. Not long after Nihal left the band and they replaced him with Jim Burke (more about him in another post).

The band released their first album: Jackpot Goalie and three singles from this LP; “Down With The Plaid Fad”, “DIS Mix” and “Interactive” but sadly none of them bothered the charts.

Below are a couple of tracks which one of them… well you know…

Again like the singles not much notice was took of the album. But then everything really took off when Coke used that Eat My Goal track from the album in their “Eat Football, Sleep Football, Drink Coca Cola” campaign in 1996.

There was a clamour from the public to know who and where they could get this song used in the commercial.

The band then released the single: London Tonight/Eat My Goal, which reached number 31 in the charts.

» Collapsed Lung – London Tonight

The curse of that song…

These are some comments originally posted on Forgotten Band Planet from Anthony Chapman, also a vocalist with the band:

  The Eat My Goal which-release-is-which dilemma :

“…OK, as you know, Eat My Goal was originally on the Jackpot Goalie album. When we were asked if it could be used for the Coke ad, we decided to re-record it and alter a few lyrics. We didn’t want to make it the a-side of a single though, as we were worried about looking a bit desperate, and didn’t want to be remembered for only one song (oh dear). So the ORIGINAL release in the UK was on the b-side of London Tonight, the blue single with the toy policeman on the front. That said, Deceptive just put stickers on each one saying it featured Eat My Goal, as featured on the Coke advert anyway – complete with Coke logo! Ah well.

BUT, the licensees in mainland Europe (mostly parts of the London Records group) wanted to run with Eat My Goal as the a-side, and that’s the blue release with the football on the front. As an amusing aside, Deceptive and London actually had legal action taken against them as a result of this release. They had licensed Jackpot Goalie to Semaphore, a German indie, and as far as they new, the new version of Eat My Goal was from the same recording as the first album, and was an infringement of their rights. It came to nothing, though – at least as far as I know.

The green version, loaded to the gills with every dog-end mix of the track in existence was a blatant cash-in by Deceptive (specifically Tony Smith – Steve Lamacq was long gone by this point) for the 1998 World Cup. Disappointingly, it charted considerably higher than the original release at #18 (original peaked at #31, Shakespeare’s Sister entered higher and were on TOTP). We were offered TOTP, but I said no. The rest of the band were undecided, but I was totally adamant that I wouldn’t do it as Deceptive (specifically, Tony Smith) would be the main beneficiaries of any publicity….”

He also comments about the various remixes (scroll to the bottom of the page)

They released their 2nd album Cooler – and there was a limited edition which contained three extra tracks, including a remix of Eat My Goal:

…and a cover version of an Elastica song:

Two years later Eat My Goal was re-released with multiple remixes and as you know the song can still be heard fecking everywhere. Not that it’s a bad thing though. This is still one of my favourite footie and music tunes.

Sadly the band broke up a few years later but I’m glad to say they have recently reformed.

PART TWO: After The Lung Collapsed…