Ian Broudie interview: ‘I do not want to be remembered for Three Lions’

The press seats at Kenilworth Road are unusual for their proximity to the directors’ box. Journalists looking over their shoulders in February found themselves closer to Harry Styles than fans paying hundreds of pounds for front row seats at his gigs. In November, a row behind me, was the familiar face of another musician.

Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds has links to recently relegated Luton Town through his friend and club director Rob Stringer, who is also chairman of Sony Music. Broudie considers them his second team, but when Liverpool scored a 96th-minute equaliser he broke directors’ box protocol and celebrated with gusto. Of course there is one football moment the singer will never shake off, and it is not a stoppage-time headed goal by Luis Díaz.

Three Lions is his song, linked to Euro 96, France 98, Russia 18 and basically every moment England have been exciting for the past 28 years. “Every band has a defining song, one that looks after them,” he tells me over breakfast in Notting Hill. “I want mine to be Pure, but it’s not, it’s Three Lions. But I can live with that.”

The great misinterpretation is to read “football’s coming home” as a triumphalist statement. It was in fact a pre-tournament slogan to celebrate England hosting, rather than potentially winning. “It was summer, it was sunny, it was a lovely vibe. It was everywhere. It was sung at Wembley, Gazza wouldn’t go out on the pitch until they’d played it in the dressing room. If I went to [son] Riley’s school I’d get mobbed by kids singing it to me. Then it became something else and people were saying ‘it’s arrogant’.”

The lyrics, written and sung by Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, are anything but. They reflect the realities of supporting the national team: you suffer untold pain but still hope for the best. “The lovely thing about music is that you make it, it goes out there and then you have no control over what people take from it. It’s been used for Bayern Munich, in South America, and adapted to mean something.”

That adaptability has its downside, as Broudie learnt after England’s defeat on penalties to Germany in the Euro 96 semi-final. “I was in a hotel near Marble Arch. I was devastated, nearly in tears, I felt like this giant bubble had just burst. It was a hot evening and I had the windows open really wide and I heard Three Lions coming in and thought ‘that’s good’. I looked outside and it was German fans singing it. I shut the window after that.”

Liverpool has a reputation as being cool towards the national team, but there is no hostility towards Three Lions. Days before we meet, the Lightning Seeds finished their Liverpool Arena set with it and it went over with the same goodwill it does anywhere else in the country.

For the 2022 winter World Cup it was resurrected again with new lyrics, sleigh bells and a clip of Sarina Wiegman’s team singing it after winning that summer’s women’s Euros. That meant remaking the video too. “It was harrowing. I’m 65 years old. When you look in the mirror you always expect a 19-year-old to be looking back. Most people don’t have to put up with their old self side by side with their younger self. I wasn’t that young in 1996!”

Like most of us, Broudie’s relationship with England waxes and wanes in relation to whether there is a tournament happening, or the drudge of qualifiers. Liverpool are his first and enduring love. “When I was a kid my dad and my uncle would take me. There’s only about two ways you can possibly get to Anfield and every week I’d be in the back and there’d be this argument, ‘where are you going?!’ Later on when I used to go with my brothers they’d have the same argument, it used to make me giggle.

“About a year ago I went with Riley and my nephew and I was in the back of the car and they were having the same argument. This is the best thing about football, the same stuff I heard as a kid. Don’t go down Sheil Road!”

When Broudie was making his name in music, initially as a member of Big In Japan then as a producer, football took a back seat. “I loved it when I was young, then around punk rock, the two things were incompatible for me. My musical obsession took over.

“I actually missed Liverpool’s most successful period. When I started dealing with record companies in London the way they would try to relate to you, some kid from Liverpool, is talking about Ian Rush. I wanted to talk about the Ramones.”

Now he is back to regular attendance. He has season tickets in the main stand with Riley, a slightly different experience to his first games at Anfield. “We used to sneak into a dairy and steal a crate. We’d get a bus, get to the Kop when it opened but we weren’t tall enough to see over the white wall at the front, so we’d stand on the crate and have our arms over the wall.

“It would fill up and you couldn’t ever leave because you were held upright on your crate. I would like to say we took the crate back afterwards, but that wouldn’t be true.”

He speaks with rare tenderness about the game, no hint of the blinkered pettiness which can bog down fans of the biggest clubs. Instead he focuses on the joy of watching Liverpool in person or on the sofa with his son, who is now also performing the role of manager and rhythm guitarist in the Lightning Seeds. But there are still some moments when tribalism takes over.

“Liverpool is my club but Luton was this other place, lovely people, everyone saying hello. We’ve been going there for nearly 20 years. I couldn’t help celebrating the Liverpool goal though.”

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