Articles of Faith. Russell Brand
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going to win it, we’re coming home, we’re off there to win it.’
RB: Yeah.
DB: When me and Frank talked about it we said, ‘Let’s write a song about what it’s really like being an England fan which is, oh we’re probably not going to win it but we sort of hope we are anyway.’
RB: That is four more years of hurt.
DB: Yeah, exactly, and it begins with you know ‘everyone seems to know the score, we’ve heard it all before, England’s going to throw it away, going to blow it away’, all that stuff is about, oh well, no one thinks we’re going to win but maybe we will anyway. But unfortunately the lines of triumph over adversity, ‘football’s coming home’, which is the epiphany following that thought, they can only be sung when England are doing well.
RB: In a way David, yeah people wilfully took those lines out of context out of clear cockeyed optimism.
DB: I should’ve stood up at Wembley every time they sung it and said, ‘No, you don’t understand, it’s a sweet, melancholy ballad about loss.’
RB: (Laughter)
DB: You’ve made it into a strident national anthem.
RB: It was a Jeff Buckley-style lament on the futility of football.
DB: Yeah. But anyway, what else do you want to know about football?
RB: Wait a sec…well, I’ve got a very lovely linking device because West Ham’s song Bubbles is perhaps the only other song that captures the sort of sentimentality and pathos of being a football fan, as most songs do tend to be triumphant, and perhaps the team you follow, Chelsea, are a fine example of the kind of stripped-down refined success, lacking in magic but you know, under recent ownership, how do you define the romance of being a Chelsea fan for you at this time?
DB: Well…to start…the song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, is that a West Ham song, or is it just an old song that West Ham sing?
RB: I think it was, yeah I think it was co-opted.
DB: So what is it about when it’s not about West Ham? I never know quite what it is…is it about someone who is blowing bubbles?
RB: (Laughter) It is quite difficult to find a literal connection, other than fortunes always hiding.
DB: Yeah, it is. But we sing it. We sing it as an anti-West Ham anthem which is about beating up, I believe, West Ham fans. How does it go? ‘Tottenham always running, Arsenal running too’, yeah, that’s essentially the hooligan’s anthem of course, so we’ve absorbed your song.
RB: I’ve heard the hooligan version David, and I’ll go for a similar emotion that you’ve experienced when Germans sing Football’s Coming Home. I think this is abuse of the lyrics from the intentions of the song.
DB: Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful anthem, but to answer your question, I don’t completely agree obviously with the Chelsea thing because having been a Chelsea fan since 1970, the only thing about being a Chelsea fan if you were a Chelsea fan then is that you were actually reared on a very stylish but rather pale form of play, so something very romantic which was Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson and Charlie Cooke, and all those kind of players being brilliant and stylish and clever but not actually winning very much, they won the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup but that was it. And then I went to Chelsea, I wasn’t old enough to go when I started supporting them, when I was eleven and they were shit. They had Micky Droy in their team and they were utter shit and I went for twenty years watching them be complete shit and thus I actually get quite annoyed, not as enraged as you do about your mum, and questions over her sexual endeavours but…
RB: Even you mentioning it now is making me a bit cross.
DB: Also I’m worried that the initial conversation won’t be in the book and so people will think well why on earth has he said that, that’s awful.
RB: No, we’ll pick that out…
DB: But what I get annoyed about is the suggestion that this sort of wealth has somehow just landed on Chelsea fans unfairly whereas in fact when it first happened, I thought well this is actually Chelsea going back to its roots, because I think Abramovich, in his heart he wants Chelsea to be a bit like the Harlem Globetrotters, he wants them to be an incredibly skilful, exciting, flair-based club which he hasn’t really chosen the managers to do.
RB: No.
DB: He’s got that slightly wrong, but I think that’s what he wants. And for Chelsea fans of my age there is a sense that we should be that club, you know, we should be this very flair, colourful club with lots of fancy dans like Peter Osgood playing for us, so I’m all for it. And I’m slightly fucked off that now that there are Arabs at Manchester City who’ve got much more money than us.
RB: That must be irritating.
DB: That is irritating. I don’t want to complain about it…well, perhaps slightly.
RB: Oh, go on.
DB: I’ve heard Chelsea fans…
RB: Go on, you were going to complain did you say? I’m listening…
DB: I’ve heard Chelsea fans complain, and they could be accused of hypocrisy here, that the Arabs at Manchester City are going to ruin football with all their money.
RB: (Laughter) Difficult to feel sympathy for the fans of Chelsea.
DB: Yeah it is, although it’s a strange thing, you know, I’ve earned a fair amount of money in my time and you must be earning quite a lot now.
RB: Yeah.
DB: But these are people who can offer £138 million pounds for Ronaldo, just ‘cos they sort of fancy it. How does that happen? How can people have that much money? It doesn’t really reflect so much on football as the general state of the capitalist global economy.
RB: Yes that’s what I feel. I feel that in general when people talk about the commercialisation of football, just say well this is cultural, that it’s not something that is specific to football, it’s just that demonstrably the world is becoming more corporate and more commercialised so of course sport is going to also, it’s just a reflection of that.
DB: Yeah, that is true and football is a microcosm of the extreme nature of the free market because as football gets more and more successful, which it has done over the last fifteen years, more money is attracted to it. There aren’t really any proper laws. The FA tried their best, but there aren’t any proper laws like there might be in a country, so as a result there is a free-market activity leading to £138 million pounds which could probably save the whole of Africa being spent instead on Ronaldo and his stupid over-white teeth.
RB: I think you’re quite right – instead of looking at football and condemning the current climate and the amount of money that players are earning, people should look at the implications of that globally, what that demonstrably means for global human capitalism.
DB: And they should also consider whether, if it is going to be a common, global economy Ronaldo should at least not be going to a club whose greatest player in the past was Francis Lee ‘cos that in itself is an affront.
RB: (Laughter) Yeah, that is a peculiar poem of capitalism to go from Franny Lee to Ronaldo.
DB: It is, that’s right, that is capitalism