It's World Cup season soon, and that means one thing - blogging about a New Order track. More specifically, their only number one hit, World in Motion, released in 1990. Technically, the song was released under "ENGLANDneworder" for the charts, but ignore that.
Some context might be necessary, and sorry, it's to do with football. England have never been that good at football - coming into the 1990 World Cup in Italy, they hadn't won the cup in nearly 24 years. They hadn't come close in that time, even failing to qualify twice. Yet the worst thing about the team was they had awful songs ahead of World Cup season. You see, it used to be common for football teams to release songs ahead of tournaments or finals, usually along the lines of "we're great and we're going to win because we're better than everyone else", usually performed by the squad. This tactic got them a number one song for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, but by 1986, their song "We've Got the Whole World at Our Feet" was only a number 66 "hit".
The song was so awful that FA press officer, David Bloomfield, had had enough. He called up Factory Records, New Order's label at the time, and asked label owner Tony Wilson about whether New Order could record a song for the 1990 tournament. Wilson agreed, and that brings us up to date. And if you're wondering why Bloomfield would want New Order...apparently he was a fan of Joy Division.
New Order at the time were possibly at their creative peak, having just come off recording Technique, in all its house-inspired glory. They could have written anything, and it would have sounded good.
Musically speaking, it's a solid track. A bit cheesy, and almost certainly sounds dated nowadays, but still solid. The synths are lovely, and Stephen Morris's drumming is energetic as well. Occasionally, you'll hear Peter Hook's banging basslines, but they're still too rare in the song for my liking. At this point, Hooky was no longer as big a presence in the songs, the synths had long taken over, so that's to be expected. The end result is a fun, enjoyable Ibiza-flavoured anthem, far weaker than anything on Technique, but that's not too surprising.
Lyrically-speaking, New Order had assistance from comedian Keith Allen. You end up with loads of generic football-themed lyrics: "Express yourself, create the space, [..], you never give up, it's one on one", Bernard Sumner sings in the first verse. Then again, Allen has also said on the lyrics, "Basically, if you break it down, most of it is either homosexual innuendo or drug taking innuendo." Perhaps I underestimated his lyrical prowess. It's also well known that one of the original lyrics was:
"E is for England, England is for E. We'll all be smiling when we go to Italy."
but the FA vetoed it because it sounded like a reference to ecstacy. I'm surprised they realised, it seems so subtle to me.
There are also some footballers on the track. Most of them do backing vocals on the chorus and the final verse, the one that goes "We're playing for England (En-ger-land!)". I suppose it adds a nice chant-like flair to the track. John Barnes, who played on the wing for England, even got his own verse midway through. He raps about how "you've got to hold and give, but do it at the right time", with the verse effectively boiling down to "I'm an England footballer". Barnes isn't the greatest rapper ever, not even close, but he's possibly the star of the song. I reckon most people know this song purely because of the Barnes rap, indeed it's one of the first things that's mentioned whenever World in Motion is brought up. Even weirder, it's not the only time New Order toyed with rap, and this might actually be the best of the lot.
I'm not convinced this should have been New Order's only number one hit. I'd say they made about forty songs better than World in Motion alone. However, I get why it got that high up, and it's honestly cool they even had a number one at all. It might also be one of their most iconic tracks, too. That same World Cup, England stumbled into the semi-finals, where they narrowly lost, in a tournament that's still remembered fondly by the media to this day. World in Motion got irreversibly linked with those highs and lows, and suddenly recording a song for the England team ahead of a major tournament was all the rage. If World in Motion didn't succeed, would we have ever gotten Three Lions by the Lightning Seeds, which also became a number one song? Every major tournament, radio stations ask whether people prefer World in Motion or Three Lions, and both get severely overplayed. That's arguably World in Motion's legacy, not "that one song New Order made".
In a weird way, New Order's biggest hit isn't even theirs anymore - it belongs to England fans, wheeled out every year whenever either the men's or women's football team plays in a major tournament. Hell, New Order have only played the song live five times. Yet it would have been weird to not review World in Motion at some point, it's that iconic.
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