It's coming home: How Three Lions became such an enduring England football song
The jitters kicked in over lunch. It was March 1996, and musician Ian Broudie and comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel had been invited by the Football Association to visit the England team’s training centre at Bisham Abbey in Buckinghamshire.
The purpose of the invitation? To play the squad and their coach Terry Venables the official England song that the trio had written for the upcoming Euro 96 tournament, to be held in England. Broudie, Skinner and Baddiel were proud of the song, called Three Lions. But they weren’t sure how the team would react; unlike most football songs, it opened with a few lines about how England were going to blow their chances.
“It was nerve-wracking. We were having lunch with the players and, when we got to the cheesecake, Gazza couldn’t wait any longer and went to put the song on,” Skinner would recall. “Fortunately, he was unable to use a cassette player.”
Minutes later, the song was played anyway. As the composers feared, the players were initially baffled by the downbeat opening lyrics. But following a detailed explanation about the song’s true meaning, everyone at Bisham Abbey was on board. Within weeks, the nation was on board too. Possibly the greatest football song of all time was number one in the charts.
As the England team prepare to play Croatia in their opening match of the 2020 Euros, what was it about Three Lions that made it such an enduring football song? And why, even 24 years later, is it unlikely to be bettered?
The release of an official song by a national football team ahead of a major tournament had been something of a tradition since England’s 1970 World Cup squad – then the world champions – released Back Home. The song, written by Puppet on a String writers Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, reached number one for three weeks.
However the law of diminishing returns, and diminishing performances, kicked in over subsequent years, and the football song started to become something of a joke. While songs like 1982’s This Time (We’ll Get It Right) by the England squad had a certain determined charm, the execrable Stock Aitken Waterman-produced All The Way in 1988 suggested the tradition needed to be kicked into the long grass.
Things changed in 1990, however, when New Order – a credible and popular band – wrote World in Motion for the England team. A genuinely good song that was capable of being sung on the terraces and danced to in the clubs (the band originally wanted to call it E for England), World in Motion revived the football song. It also paved the way for what was to come in 1996.
Three Lions worked for two reasons. Firstly, it was in tune with the cultural zeitgeist of the time. In the blazing hot summer of 1996, Britpop and lad culture were at their zenith. In pairing The Lightning Seeds with Skinner and Baddiel, Three Lions combined both elements.
The Lightning Seeds – effectively a solo vehicle for Ian Broudie – played Merseybeat-inspired guitar pop, the general cheeriness of which was flecked with just a smidgeon of melancholy. It was the perfect blend for long-suffering football fans. The band had form when it came to football songs: their track The Life of Riley was already the background music for the Goal of the Month segment on Match of the Day. Skinner and Baddiel, meanwhile, embodied the new laddism sweeping Britain.
As presenters of TV show Fantasy Football League, the real-life flatmates were poster boys for a new breed of football fan: hooligans no more, football supporters of mid-1990s were capable of combining wit and intelligence with a love of the terraces and the pub. This combination of music and lad culture had crested the previous summer with the Blur vs Oasis chart battle, and would reach a new apotheosis in August 1996, when Oasis played two vast outdoor concerts at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire.
But Three Lions really resonated for a second reason: those biting lyrics that had made its creators so nervous over their cheesecake. Baddiel knew what was needed as soon as Broudie approached them in early 1996 to write the song’s lyrics. “I remember sitting there with Frank, and what we talked about was [the fact that] all the other [football] songs that we grew up with basically told the lie. And the lie was that we’re going to win,” he recalled.
And so the song started with a huge dose of realism. ‘Everyone seems to know the score, They’ve seen it all before,’ it went. ‘They’re so sure that England’s gonna throw it away.’ But even this clever shunning of “the lie” couldn’t have foreshadowed how badly things started for the England team.
Euro 96 was already heading for disaster for the host team weeks before a ball was kicked. During a pre-tournament trip to Hong Kong, members of the England squad including Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne, Robbie Fowler and Teddy Sheringham got uproariously drunk in a nightclub called China Jump.
Having poured pints over each other and ripped their t-shirts to shreds, the players sat on the club’s now-infamous‘dentist’s chair’ and had tequila and Drambuie poured down their throats. Pictures reached the papers back home and all hell broke loose.
Things got worse when team members got drunk on the Cathay Pacific flight home and caused thousands of pounds worth of damage. Venables’ pre-announced departure after the tournament added to the perception of a fragile camp.
When England drew 1-1 with Switzerland in the opening game on 8 June, it seemed that the squad had already thrown things away. The song’s most hopeful and poignant line – ‘30 years of hurt never stopped me dreaming’, referring to the time lapsed since England’s 1966 World Cup victory – rang particularly hollow.
But victory over Scotland – including a wonder-goal from Gascoigne – and then a thumping win over the Netherlands changed England’s course. ‘But I know they can play,’ went Three Lions as it soared hopefully into its chorus. Suddenly, the song’s lyrical arc was mirroring England’s performance.
By now, the song was already an anthem. In the England camp, Gascoigne had taken to waking the squad at dawn by blasting out the song. For Broudie, hearing the ‘football’s coming home’ chant during the Dutch game was unforgettable. “Being there at Wembley that night was absolutely brilliant. It didn’t feel like my song any more, but as if it belonged out there, in the country,” he has said.
Three Lions had become football song as wish fulfilment. It was as though the nation had willed England through the early woes to success. A quarter-final win on penalties over Spain merely increased the belief that football – and the cup – was actually coming home.
Until, that is, the inevitable happened and England faced its footballing nemesis Germany in the semi-finals. England lost on penalties, just as they had done against West Germany in the semis of the 1990 World Cup. The bubble had burst. And the song had therefore gone full circle. Everyone knew the score. They’d seen it all before. England had indeed thrown it all away.
But despite England’s defeat, the song endured. The victorious German team cheekily appropriated it themselves. Baddiel and Skinner were even asked to appear on the German equivalent of Sports Personality of the Year at the end of 1996 to sing it. Brilliantly, they did it.
In the autumn of 1996, Labour leader Tony Blair co-opted the song for his conference speech in Blackpool. “Labour’s coming home. Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming,” he said. At least he succeeded where the England team failed: by the next summer he was Prime Minister. (A second political hijacking of the song by the Grassroots Out campaign in the EU referendum was less memorable. Although the video for Britain’s Coming Home is a must-see.)
Three Lions’ ubiquity in the summer of 1996 was all the more remarkable given the volume of competition from other football songs at the time. Who remembers Rod Stewart’s official Scotland song Purple Heather, or Mick Hucknall’s official Euro 96 anthem We’re In This Together? (If you don’t, that’s no bad thing.)
And how about Collapsed Lung’s Eat My Goal or Black Grape’s England’s Irie (which featured the remarkably un-PC line, ‘The wife’s lactating and I’m spectating’)? Three Lions towered above them all.
Football songs were never the same after Three Lions, partly because it was such a tough tune to beat. The 1998 World Cup saw a group called England United, featuring Echo and the Bunnymen and the Spice Girls, release a song called (How Does it Feel to be) On Top of the World?.
Not only was the song rotten, but it created the fatal error of once again telling “the lie”. England were knocked out before the quarter-finals. Besides, the song was overshadowed by a 1998 remix of Three Lions and the release of probably the last great football song, Vindaloo by Fat Les (aka Keith Allen, Alex James and pals). Since then, we’ve had poor efforts from Embrace and Ant & Dec and a half decent attempt by Dizzee Rascal and James Corden.
Three Lions worked because it represented the confluence of a number of things: a cracking tune, a cultural movement, national pride, sporting glory (almost), woozy nostalgia and a glorious hot summer. As Paul Rees writes in his book When We Were Lions, the summer of 96 was “the summit of a halcyon period in the country’s modern history, both socially and culturally”.
Such moments are as rare. Almost as rare as England football victories.