Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #140138

When:

Short story:

World In Motion by New Order enters the UK singles chart, where it will peak at No1.

Full article:

EYE WITNESS feature by Johnny Black

Tony Wilson (MD, Factory Records) : It started in mid-October of 1989, with a phone call out of the blue from David Bloomfield, the press officer at the FA. He was a total New Order fan and he said, ‘Football songs are always crap, so I’d like to do the first really great one.’

I pointed out to him that despite being a Manchester band, none of New Order were even remotely interested in football. I was a Man United fan, and their manager Rob Gretton was a Man City fan, but the band didn’t give a toss.

Still, he asked if New Order would do a song, and I agreed to put it to them, which I did at a meeting in the offices of our accountants, Styles And George in Bramhall. It was actually a crisis meeting about Factory Records financial problems, but we stayed on after and had a general planning meeting.

New Order were kind of between projects at this point and the big idea that came up at the meeting, this was about 8.30 in the evening by now, was for their spring project to be making a video in the Dee Estuary, directed by Michael Powell, based on the poem The Sands Of Dee by Charles Lamb. I thought this was totally nuts. Who’s going to see it? What’s it for?

So I brought up the idea of doing the song for the FA Cup.

Stephen Morris (drummer, New Order) : There was no way I could have written the lyric. I really couldn’t write a football lyric.

Peter Hook (bassist, New Order) : It was also a time when we all hated each other.

Tony Wilson : They really did not want to do it, but after an hour of shouting, I won.

Peter Hook : We agreed to do it because the World Cup was about the only thing in football that did get us excited.

Tony Wilson : None of the rest of them were interested so it fell to me to put the whole thing together, and I set about finding them someone who could do lyrics about football, and I spent a month and a half ringing up literate, witty people who I thought might be right and then Barney rings up one day and says, “I’ve got Keith Allen.”

Stephen Morris : We got to know him through Making Out, which me and Gillian did the music for….

Tony Wilson : Making Out was a tv drama series made in Manchester, which Keith came up for, and he started hanging out in the Hacienda, he was virtually a member of the family, so I should have thought of him right away.

It was starting to come together by January of 1990. I’d wanted them to work with (record producer) Stephen Hague for a long time, and he was up for this one, so we had a producer on board. Brian Ronson, the England captain, was not helpful, but all the other players and the management were great.

The melody came from a demo on a cassette that Stephen and Gillian had put together.

Stephen Morris : It was really easy … Hooky and Barney went, yeah, we can play over that, and that was it.

Peter Hook : Bernard wrote his verse and Keith Allen, who was very knowledgeable about football, came up with the rest of the lyric.

Gillian Gilbert (keyboards, New Order) : The FA came to us and said, ‘What’s all this ‘Love’s got the world in motion’ stuff? You can’t sing that. It’s got to be ‘We’ve got the world in motion’. And we just said , ‘No.’

Peter Hook : There were some changes to the lyric though. We had the ‘E for England’ line, because E was huge then, but Stephen Hague convinced us that it wasn’t clever putting something like that into a song that would be heard by very young kids, and I have to say I agree with him.

We did the basic backing track in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio outside Bath, then brought the footballers in one Sunday at Jimmy Page’s cottage studio in Crookham, Surrey, the one that previously belonged to Aleistair Crowley. It was a very quick in and out thing, because we didn’t want to be together for any longer than we had to.

Tony Wilson : That morning, Stephen Hague suddenly decided he wanted some lyrics for the anthemic bit at the end. So Keith Allen and me shot off in my car to get Barney out of his hotel, and Keith was trying to write lyrics as we drove along these country lanes, but the word ‘England’ being just two syllables, wouldn’t scan properly with the melody. Then, from nowhere, I suddenly sang it as ‘Eng-err-land’, making it three syllables and it worked. After that, it was relatively straightforward.

John Barnes (footballer) : The studio was close to the hotel the team was staying in, but we knew nothing at all about the song. We were basically told to go along to the studio on the Sunday at 2.00pm and make a record, but only a handful of us turned up – me, Gascoigne, Des Walker, Peter Beardsley, Steve McMahon and Chris Waddle – because the previous year’s football record had been so awful it sunk without trace. So it was only when we got to the studio that we learned we were working with New Order.

Stephen Morris : Gazza and them were only there cos they were getting a backhander and it was a mad panic all round.

Peter Hook : They had to be paid in cash. As they walked in, each one of them was given an envelope with, I think, £1000 in it.

Gillian Gilbert : When you've not met any footballers, you have this image of what they're like. We were really disappointed. It was like having a load of lager louts let loose in the studio making jokes about the size of our organs.

Tony Wilson : I took along the Bailey Brothers, who’d done the Happy Mondays’ videos, because I wanted them to do the video for this. They were rabid Newcastle fans, and Gazza was God to them but after watching him down two bottles of champagne straight from the bottle in the first twenty minutes of recording, they came to me and asked, “Is it Terrett’s Syndrome or is he just crazy?”

Peter Hook : Then they all started on the vodka and orange and went berserk, like schoolboys who’d been let out for the day. The Pet Shop Boys were there as well, just to watch, and I think they found it highly amusing. Tony Wilson was being quite liberal with his devil’s dandruff too, so it was all a bit crazed.

Stephen Morris : Keith Allen more or less saved it by being more of a drunken bastard than they were.

John Barnes : There wasn’t even a rap in the song when we got there. It was knocked up during the day by Keith Allen, and I got to do it because most of the rest of them were Geordies and they were just useless at rapping.

Peter Hook : None of the footballers showed any signs of musical talent, except Barnes. Gascoigne’s rap was awful, Beardsley just terrible, but Barnes saved the day. He nailed it.

John Barnes : You hear about artists who spend months making a record but with us, we just all got very drunk and every time we sang a line half-decently they’d say, ‘That’s great’ and then twiddle a couple of knobs and we’d sound OK.

Peter Hook : Once the rap was done we started on the backing vocals but in the middle of the afternoon, the players just walked out. They said they had to open a Top Man in Middlesborough, and that was it. Their vocals were crap anyway. We had to go back into a studio in London a few days later and re-do the backing vocals ourselves, mixing in the footballers for a kind of rabble element as best as we could.

John Barnes : When they came to make the video, I had been injured, a pulled hamstring or something, so they shot most of the team in London, then came up to do me separately in Liverpool. Obviously it was easier for me as an individual to give them a decent amount of time than the whole team could, so I ended up being featured a lot in the video.

Peter Hook : Looking back at it, the whole thing was a trial from start to finish. The FA were not helpful at all, and even after it was a hit, we didn’t get tickets to the matches or anything. We were just discarded.

Tony Wilson : The Friday morning after it came out, I was sitting in my car down by the Hard Rock in Mayfair, when I heard that the mid-week position was No2 – which meant it was virtually guaranteed to be No1 the next week, that was an incredibly exhilerating moment.

John Barnes ; When it got to No1, we had to do a load of tv appearances and I remember things like Saturday Superstore where the whole team would turn up and start talking about “our record” and I’m thinking, “Our record? You weren’t even there!”

Stephen Morris : That took us mainstream. But people said to us, were you excited? But when we got excited was when Love Will Tear Us Apart got in the Top 20. World In Motion really made us aware how important singles are – it’s amazing how it pushes up your back catalogue sales.

Stephen Morris : It’s quite strange that you have to record with a comic and a football team to get a No1

Tony Wilson : The footnote to all of this is that Michael Powell died in 1990, so twelve months after we’ve had the hit, I’m giving Barney a lift to London and, as we pass Newport Pagnell, there’s a lull in the conversation, and he suddenly says, “Do you know, Michael Powell was one of the biggest influences in my whole life?” And that was it – the only reference any of them ever made to me giving them their only number one single ever. It felt like I was being accused of having personally killed Michael Powell … but then that’s New Order.