‘Vindaloo’: The Most Unlikely Hit Record I’ve Ever Made

Keith Allen was my friend, and he was keen to do a football record. When I say keen, I mean he would not stop bothering me.

He’d previously co-written the lyrics for World in Motion for New Order, which was a turning point in football records because it was the first cool one. I think everything changed with John Barnes’ rap. Football records had been the most rubbish kind of sub-genre of music until then. Every tournament, or even FA Cup Final, there’d be another football song, and they were all dreadful. Some of them were kind of good dreadful, but dreadful nonetheless.

But on the other hand, there’s this incredible history of people singing all together at football matches, which doesn’t happen anywhere else. You never get big groups of people singing unaccompanied like that, just for joy. It’s a kind of vestige of folk music.

Keith kept bugging me, and I thought, well, maybe if we can approach this in the way you might approach cooking leftovers, because often the best dishes come out of leftovers.

So, we took a terrace drumbeat – g-dunk, g-dunk, g-dunk – and a bunch of chants I used to sing at football matches when I was watching AFC Bournemouth as a kid. We nailed it all down to that one-note chorus: “We’re going to score one more than you.”

I didn’t expect anyone to be singing it thirty years later, or for it to become a Pukka Chicken Vindaloo Pie, which I’m delighted about. A four-chilli-rating pie. Who knew?

I remember playing it to my publisher after we’d recorded it and him saying, “You’re never going to get that on the radio.” And to this day, I’ve still never heard it on the radio.

It’s a song that’s just completely grown through being sung at football matches. It’s crazy.

I think the video helps. It’s a really funny video spoofing The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. When we gave The Box, which was a kind of MTV rival, the video, they just started spanking it.

We were just having a laugh, and it’s the most unlikely hit record I’ve ever heard. I mean, you never know whether you’ve got a hit on your hands. You’ve just got to keep turning up; that’s the key.

Keith said that because it was for the World Cup in France, you would get the train from Waterloo to Paris Gare du Nord. But also, there was obviously a good kind of Waterloo battle reference there. He said he just needed something to rhyme with Waterloo, and Vindaloo was the first thing that came into his head.

There are also good resonances with the kind of English attitudes to guzzling food and drink back then. I mean, hopefully we’ve changed a little bit, but that was sort of the idea of drinking your body weight in beer and then eating a bucket of the hottest creation on the planet.

Now we can have a Pukka Vindaloo pie at half-time with a nice glass of sparkling wine, and enjoy things in a more civilised fashion, while still singing silly songs.

Because you can definitely shoot too high, but it’s quite hard to shoot too low. Keith’s words are clever, and I can’t listen to it without smiling. It is joyous. And the vocal arrangements are quite lush.

I think there is something really uplifting about hearing many voices raised in song. There were one or two pretty good singers on that, and I think it’s just got that kind of silly, feel-good, joie de vivre, couldn’t care less, “we’re going to score one more than you” feel to it.

Long may it continue. Cheers.

Alex James has teamed up with Pukka Pies for BRITPOP, a series of football-themed warm-up parties hosted by Alex at Lost Oasis, St Martin-in-the-Fields, ahead of England’s group-stage matches on 16, 22 and 26 June.