If there's one thing more annoying than football on the TV, it's football in the charts. Though 'Back Home' wasn't the first football song, the instances of Team X recording a single before embarking on some campaign or other showed a marked increase in it's wake. Very often said team had taken an early bath long before the song left the charts, making the usual 'We're Gonna Win 'Cos We're The Best Ra Ra Ra' message of hubris deflated like a month old balloon.'Back Home' was England's official Mexico World Cup song. As defending champions with a strong team, they headed off to South America with a definite spring of optimism in their step, which makes it odd that this is such a staid and lumpen affair. With about as much excitement as a rain swept Sunday league game, 'Back Home' has the entire squad mugging along in flat unison and with the forced jollity of an army gangshow tune. In this context this could either be taken as a provocative 'we're off to war' cry to recall the old blitz spirit, or else it's indicative of the stuffy mindset and concept of entertainment that the British establishment still held in 1970.
Either way, it's a dull recording only made interesting by virtue of the "Back home, they'll be watching and waiting, and cheering every move" lyric. Whether by luck or judgement, this simple line does ring rather evocatively in that those 'back home' lucky enough to own a colour TV would have in fact been watching images of sun drenched, day-glo colour that were far removed from the grey, austere, strike affected, power cut ridden Britain of 1970.
That famous photograph of Pele and Moore exchanging shirts shows life on a different planet altogether than the one that hosted the 1966 tournament merely four years previous, and I've no doubt that many burgeoning pop stars who tuned in were just itching to add a bit of that self same colour and glam to our own domestic palette. Their time would come.
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