“It doesn’t bother me that even though I’ve done many other things in my career, when I’m dead they’ll say ‘best known for co-creating the England football anthem Three Lions’.”
Thirty years after the song’s release, David Baddiel remains proud of it and fondly recalls a time when football so nearly came home.
“I think it’s a fantastic example of something that wasn’t designed to be a really popular thing,” Baddiel says.
“There was no top-down element of it. It was just three blokes trying to write about football and it caught fire.”
You can say that again. People of a certain age will remember it as the soundtrack to the English summer in 1996 – a time of Britpop, Cool Britannia and England coming close to winning a major tournament.
And for new generations of football fans it’s become the England song everyone knows and sings at major events.
Liam Edwards, born in 1997, from the England Supporters Travel Club, says: “Even as a kid I remember just being enlightened by this song.
“I think it’s kind of embedded in England football history. It means community, togetherness and unity over one thing – that we’re desperate to see England win!
“I think it’s a song that follows the journey and wherever the England national team sends us we’ll sing it. I’ve been in some weird places – like Kaliningrad in Russia – where all you could hear was ‘it’s coming home’. We also sang it at the Qatar World Cup and at Euro 2020.”
So how did Three Lions come about? Back in 1996, Baddiel and fellow comedian Frank Skinner were established stars. Their football comedy show Fantasy Football League was a big hit and pulled in six million viewers.
When The Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie was asked by the Football Association to write the music for an England song for Euro ’96, he felt Baddiel and Skinner were the natural choice to write some words.
“Ian Broudie – bless him – felt that me and Frank represented, in a kind of grassroots way, the nation’s football fans,” says Baddiel.
“We thought, how can we actually authentically represent what it’s like being an England fan? And the way we did that was to talk about England losing.”
