REVOLVER:IF, as Shootmagazine would tell us, the favourite food of footballers was once steak and chips, their taste in music is now similarly confined to rap and r'n'b. Even at Spurs (the spiritual home of Chas Dave), manager Harry Redknapp knows his Usher from his Jay-Z, and has alluded to the fact that having Empire State of Mindon repeat rotation in the dressing room helped the club in their push for Champions League football last season.
Jay-Z himself is not impressed by this endorsement. A friend of Thierry Henry, he is a Gooner through and through and regularly says how much he’d like to buy shares in Arsenal FC – which would make it the first time in his life he was among people who wear more bling than he does.
With the commercial noses already deep into the Premiership trough, this season will see a formalising of the already strong links between music and football. It has not gone unnoticed by music-industry suits that packed soccer stadiums are a ready-made forum for promoting music.
Pre-match, as the teams run on, at half-time and après match, there is music playing. Some 81 per cent of UK season ticket holders say they like to hear music being played at appropriate times and that it makes them “more sociable”.
What football does for music sales is very much a hidden force. Two Tone records sell extremely well in Dundee (it’s all you hear blasting out at United’s Tannadice stadium). When Man United went on their US tour this summer, their announcer was playing music by The Courteeners and Delphic – both of whom have benefited from the stateside exposure.
The Chelsea team takes the field to a choice Trojan reggae track, Manchester United to The Stone Roses, Stoke City to Eminem, Blackpool to Tomoyasu Hotei . . . it's a progression of sorts from repeat-ad-nauseum plays of the godawful We Are the Championsover the tannoy.
Of course, this is a game of two halves, so you also have Blackburn making an entrance to Europe's The Final Countdownand Fulham running out to Survivor's Eye of the Tiger.
Most football fans are 25-plus males – a demographic that the music industry is trying one of its "synergy" music-sports projects out on. And if you look at the top 10 songs played in UK stadiums over the past season, it's no surprise to see only one name from the distaff side: Florence and her infernal Machine with the inexplicably popular You Got the Love.
At No 1, predictably, is Kasabian with Underdog(as well as No 5 with Where Did All the Love Go?). Ian Brown, Doves, Scouting for Girls and Port Vale fan Robbie Williams also feature. The strong showing by The Courteeners at No 4 is explained by how the "Red Rockers" are championed on manutd.com and how often they get an airing at Old Trafford.
Football, in fact, has been very kind to The Courteeners. While still unsigned they were played on ITV's Soccer Nightprogramme, which brought them to the attention of A&R departments. They've also featured heavily on Match of the Day 2, and they're on the video game Pro Evolution Soccer.
The band also received a boost from fellow Red Morrissey, who claims (well, sort of) that if it weren’t for Man United, he’d never have formed The Smiths. “I once bought a Manchester United hat, which I think was 12 shillings, and somebody ran up behind me and pulled it off and just ran ahead. I thought, ‘It’s a very cruel world, I’m not prepared for this.’ And I decided to get my revenge on society through music.”
Morrissey is also the composer of one of the most beautifully poignant songs about football ever written: Munich Air Disaster 1958. "We love them; we mourn for them, unlucky boys of Red. I wish I'd gone down, gone down with them."
