Jinxing England's Euros with voodoo music

At the risk of repeating myself (again, again, again ...) I feel the need to reiterate: music and sport do not go together. I was banging on about this years ago on this blog (remember Mohammed Al-Fayed's Michael Jackson statue outside the Fulham FC ground, is it still there?). I said then and I say again: the forced co-habitation of these two separate areas of human endeavour ... should stay separate. England's progress to the final of the Euros (despite my unavailing efforts to jinx them with special Niluccio on noise home-made voodoo dolls and muttered incantations) has brought back the full horror of the music-sport admixture. Take some examples. Three Lions (Football's Coming Home) makes me want to retch every time I hear a ragged fragment. New Order's World In Motion was a clear sign that Sumner/Hook/Morris/Gilbert had lost the plot and would never find it again. These and all the other lame efforts to marry music and sport are irredeemably awful. Even the slightly more "artistic" efforts (Colourbox, Barmy Army/Adrian Sherwood) are still wrongheaded and mediocre.

Lorenzo Insigne: a big fan of drum and bass in his spare time 

Hmm. I should calm down. Anyway, I know that plenty of serious and talented musicians like the dramarama of professional football. And I know that my antipathy marks me out as snob, a contrarian, a wilful would-be aesthete showing off about his pathetic taste in music and the arts. Yeah, so be it. But ... stop chanting about stuff coming home for a minute and hear me out. I'm not condemning people for enjoying football (or cricket, rugby, or whatever), I'm just sick of hearing about it all the time. The problem isn't with these games themselves (I've played all three, equally badly). It's the crushing overkill of media and political hype, the advertising onslaught and the endless public chat that goes with them. It's obvious to the point of redundancy to say that British life is over-saturated in sporting "culture" and celebrity nonsense (while the arts and sciences are relatively neglected), but it's still true. What's a poor Wildean aesthete like myself to do? Not much. Batten down the hatches and try to weather the storm. However, what does not work in my opinion is those compromise arrangements where gig venues also show the football or whatever. A (generally very good) small venue I know in south London does this. Football-loving locals chatting and cheering to some Premier League game down one end while a band plays to 25 people down the other. Oil and water. Not only is the music interrupted by periodic shouts and cheers, but the mix is just fundamentally wrong. Put them in separate pubs! (Personally I will never spend time in a pub if there's sport on a big screen and probably won't even go into it if I know they regularly show sport. Principles, principles). Anyway, I'm swimming against the tide and am slowly going under so I'll bid you farewell. While you're watching England v Italy (or whatever else gets thrust onto prime time in the coming months and years) I'll be sinking gracefully to the bottom of my aesthetically pure ocean humming a favourite tune. Enjoy the match.