Rick Blaskey glanced at the document in front of him and the words he wanted leapt from the page. It was 1995 and Blaskey, an executive producer who had worked on a number of successful sports‑related songs before, was deep in conference with a number of senior FA members, trying to persuade them that English football needed its own national anthem. “What do you suggest we call it?” somebody asked.
Blaskey had not got that far and had to think quickly; an advertising agency had been pitching to the governing body that day and had left behind a presentation dossier, its cover blank save for England’s crest and the phrase that would become Euro 96’s official slogan. “Well,” he began, realising the answer might be sitting right there. “You could call it Three Lions. Or Football Comes Home.”
Beyond a change to the present continuous, Blaskey’s brainchild mushroomed. Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home) was streamed 450,000 times after England’s win against Colombia and the number of downloads by other means will make that figure look conservative; the accompanying memes have proliferated and memories of how a cultural phenomenon grew from tentative beginnings are resurfacing.
“This was the year before the tournament and I said to them: ‘Look, we’ve had hooliganism on the terraces at Lansdowne Road, players getting pissed in the Far East … it had been a rotten time for football, so you can’t do a campaign telling everyone ‘We’re great, we’re going to win,’” Blaskey says. “We needed something to lift the spirits – we needed something real, something that put hope against expectation. We had to make it into a party.”
The need became more pressing when We’re in This Together, a track from Simply Red’s Life album that was pressed into action as the official song, went down like a lead balloon. Something jauntier was needed and Blaskey, used to hearing the Lightning Seeds’ Life of Riley on Match of the Day’s goal of the month competition, knew who to call.
“I was basically a marriage broker,” he says. Ian Broudie – AKA the Lightning Seeds – needed no persuasion to join, on the condition that he did not front the song; David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, selected for the common touch they showed on BBC’s Fantasy Football League, leapt at the chance and the project gathered speed. Blaskey provided the brief before leaving his collaborators to it; he then had to hold his breath until their recording date on 1 April 1996.
There was one moment of alarm when Broudie telephoned and said there was a problem. “I thought ‘Oh shit!’” Blaskey says. “This song was meant to be our saving grace, everything was resting on it.” It turned out that, in a moment of unassuming genius, he was concerned he had written two choruses. “I think that’s where the magic of the song actually was,” Blaskey continues. “Frank and David’s delivery and lyrics were phenomenal, but for Ian to come up with a song with two choruses …”
That temporary drama having cleared, it remained to ensure everyone played nicely. Baddiel and Skinner called Blaskey “chief of police” during a recording session in which he found himself constantly saying “no”. He says: “They were coming out with the most negative things and I was going ‘You can’t put that in!’ I had to deliver it to the FA that Monday and seemed to be nixing everything.” Blaskey was merely looking to ensure the pair’s genuine honesty was not reflected too cynically; their one condition for being involved had, after all, been that they would be allowed to reflect the sentiments of fans at the time.
“I left the studio and went out to place some bets on the Grand National. When I came back the atmosphere was better and everything picked up – but it wasn’t really like ‘Wow, this is going to be a smash’.”
Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home) made its debut at Wembley during a friendly win over Hungary on 18 May; it did not catch on and there was no joyous meeting of football and Britpop culture during the drab tournament opener against Switzerland, either.
“We were thinking ‘There’s no passion’,” Blaskey says. “But when we beat Scotland, it came on at the end and started picking up. That Monday Chris Tarrant and Chris Evans both played it, and it gained a groundswell. Then we played Holland and Wembley put the lyrics on the scoreboard; there was the lovely sight of people looking up and singing the song for the first time. A baskingly beautiful evening, a big win and then it was party time. But the slim line between failure and success was so evident.”
Blaskey feels pride that the fruits of such good fortune are still so obvious today. “It was real – people sing it with passion, not some anodyne sentiment, and that’s the genius. If we reached the World Cup final but lost then … I’m sure we could do something with it.”
