Saturday Flashback: Spice Girls feat. England United – (How Does It Feel to Be) On Top of the World

“Not Three Lions.”

Tim: “The trouble with all football songs is that, ultimately, they’re not Three Lions,” says you. Well.

Tom: What have I done to annoy you lately, Tim?

Tim: Haha, oh come now; think of it as an education more than anything else. Because, as far as England goes, the 1998 World Cup was basically Vindaloo and the Three Lions re-release, so this got entirely overlooked despite being the official team song.

Tom: And because whoever’s singing that first verse looks like the creepy male version of Kate Micucci. As for those morphing effects in the video: it was seven years after Michael Jackson’s Black and White, and that’s all they could come up with?

Tim: Which, yeah, kind of sums it all up. If we’re frank, the main reason this got overlooked was because it’s a bloody shambles. Quite why it’s credited to Spice Girls feat. England United despite ‘England United’ being itself a supergroup formed of Ocean Colour Scene, Space and Echo & The Bunnymen, I have no idea.

Tom: I wonder if they couldn’t get the rights to the names? Not all those band members are present and accounted for. They knew which name would bring in the money, though.

Tim: True, and it does at least maintain the ridiculosity present in the song itself – seriously, what’s going on? There’s a good key change, I’ll grant them that much, but it strikes me as though someone stabbed a pen at random into the top 40 four times and thought, “Right, let’s put them together and hope it works.” It really doesn’t.

Tom: The first thing I thought was “it sounds like someone tried to rip off the Lightning Seeds”. Which, lest we forget, were the band for Three Lions.

Tim: Yeah – weirdly, it seems to be the Spice Girls’ vocals that do that, despite sounding horribly weedy and backing vocalish, despite them being ostensibly the main act and actually leading the chorus, and everything else just…splurges around. I don’t know who thought this would be a good idea, but I do hope they got fired for it.