I have unearthed something in which there are attempts being made to ensure that you never see – or hear any evidence of its existence. No not because of that. Behave. You’ll discover for yourself one of the biggest football and music cover ups ever. They don’t want you to know but you must know. You must.

This is bigger than any of your election fixing stuff. Forget all that. This one involves charity fundraising, foam puppets and some very well known football managers of the time.

The main reason for the creation of what you will witness below was for charity.
You know the < insert name here > Aid charities. It began with Band Aid, followed by Live Aid and then a slight franchising/spin offs with Self Aid and Farm Aid. But the one we are focusing on was  Sport Aid .
For those of you who are too lazy to click that link – Basically it involved lots of people running or walking, whichever they liked, in order to raise money for African famine relief. Sport Aid ’88 was the biggest of them.

The main instigators in this affair were all working together on the satirical TV show  Spitting Image .
Spitting Image
The show if you are not familiar, was made with puppets (these puppets as we now know became sentient and somehow got into positions of power) and they were unflinching in their portrayal of well known personalities back in the day. They went straight to the jugular when covering some items these people were involved with, especially when Gazza cried at Italia ’90.

So then this Sport Aid ’88 thing came up and someone had an idea…

Hang on, have to give something else a mention before we proceed: Two years previously the Spitting Image gang had single in the charts. At that time there were an annoying number of summer holiday disco songs (Agadoo, Do the Conga, etc) and they decided to do a spoof version with nonsense lyrics (Example: “Hold a chicken in the air/Stick a deckchair up your nose/Buy a jumbo jet/And then bury all your clothes”) The intention was as I said to spoof these song by doing a tune so bad it was nearly unlistenable.

But of course this backfired because the British being typically British sent the single to the top of the charts.

Jump forward a couple of years and in 1988 with remembering this method of creating something purposely bad, which ends up ironically becoming popular. Could they do the same with this Sport Aid thing ?

I can give you that answer now because I know and you know because you’ve never heard of this until now. That answer is no.

The idea this time was to gather together some well know football managers and other personalities well known in the beautiful game back then. Gather them and get them to sing a terrible song. Oh this is so bad. Oh look, it’s so-and-so manager and he’s singing !

And those of them involved in the singing were: Alex Ferguson, Billy Bingham, Bobby Gould, Bobby Robson, Brian Clough, Dave Bassett, George Graham, Graham Taylor, Jim Smith, Jack Charlton, John Sillett, Lawrie McMenemy and Terry Venables, who as we know liked to belt out a tune.

The Spitting Image bods behind the tune were the composer Phillip Pope (with a contribution from his mate the impressionist Steve Nallon). Also in the mix were the writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

And the result of all these together:

» The Boss Squad – The Worst Song Ever

Ugh… You are thinking. But that is nothing. There is also a video.

Self hosted here because every time I try to add to YT it is automatically blocked. There are some that really, really don’t want you to watch this:

Sadly and even though it was for a good cause the single was a huge flop. It entered the charts at No. 88, stayed there for two weeks and then disappeared.

Some press cuttings:

As you can now see and hear it is probably best that this was buried. Let us never talk of this again.

2 Replies to “The Worst (Football) Song Ever ?”

  1. My god Webbie, you’ve excelled yourself here. I loved Spitting Image – can you imagine the field day they’d have with our current political elite? – but jeez, they knew how to do dreadful, didn’t they? Such a shame this wasn’t the highlight of Fergie’s career though.

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