FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

“Will Grigg’s on Fire” Is the Shitty Summer Anthem That This Shitty Country Deserves

The United Kingdom is in a state of turmoil and the only thing keeping us sane is a football chant affixed to a schlocky, slice of last-night-of-the-holiday Eurodance fodder.
Image via YouTube

From the bus stops of Blackpool to the basements of Bracknell, one man's name rings out long into the night. And it's not David Cameron's, or Jeremy Corbyn's. No. It's Will Grigg. Will Grigg, the previously uncelebrated Northern Irish professional footballer, the striker with 76 career goals to this name, is the unlikely emblem of a nation undergoing the kind of political upheaval that's probably best processed first as farce, then as tragedy.

Advertisement

If you've caught any of Coronation Street over the last seven months or so you'll be acutely—painfully—aware that Kylie Platt's spent 2016 living with the knowledge that the ex-boyfriend she stoved round the head with a wrench is buried under her mother-in-law's new bedroom. The decomposing body of a drug dealer rotting away in the family home might drive most of us to madness, but Kylie's made of stronger stuff and she's dealt with the psychological impact of morphing into a murderer in an unusually measured way. The most she ever seems to do is stare blankly at the pockmarked face of her husband David. Recently though, she seemed a little down in the dumps. The summer holidays had started and rather than being able to enjoy them with her son Max she was stuck inside worrying about the fact that she killed a man and then buried him in her own house. "Do you remember," she said wistfully, "when the summer was something to look forward to? It's just the same as any other season now." Kylie, we share your pain. Welcome to the story of the UK's summer of 2016: The Summer That Never Was.

It's not the first time that we, as a nation, have skipped the season. Strangely, exactly 200 years ago, nearly the entirety of the northern hemisphere was affected by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa which occurred the previous year. 1816 was The Year Without a Summer. Water buffalo froze to death in Asia, harvests failed in Ireland, and riots broke out in Switzerland. Things are bad here in the rudderless, disjointed, disaffected Great Britain of 2016, but they aren't that bad. And we've got something that our forefathers could never dreamed of. We've got "Will Grigg's On Fire."

Advertisement

§

We've written about the football chant that became a UK Top 40 record here on THUMP before, but that was back when the phenomenon was still bubbling just under the surface, back in the larval stage before the behemoth of a butterfly launched itself out of its own cultural cocoon. Now you can't escape it. Everywhere you go his name hangs in the air like Lynx Pulse and stale semen in a teenager's bedroom. He's on fire. You're on fire. I'm on fire. Defences up and down the country live in a state of near constant terror. And we deserve no better.

Why? Why don't we dare dream of a summer anthem that goes above and beyond a football chant affixed to a schlocky, slice of last-night-of-the-holiday Eurodance fodder? Why are we happy to roll around in our own sonic slurry like sunburnt pigs pissed on Sex on the Beach and sangria? Because we know deep down we don't deserve any better.

This is a country that talks about kinder, gentler politics while condemning hundreds of millions of children to life under the poverty line. A country content to spaff afternoons away reading lists with titles like 31 Times Waitrose Did Something that a Supermarket That Largely and Consciously Aims Itself at a Middle Class Audience Did Something Middle Class while around a million inhabitants find themselves having to use food banks. A country where a prime ministerial resignation is another entry in the index of misery rather than the totality of the most miserable book ever written.

Advertisement

§

We're island that sits in the sea, away from the rest of the class, voluntarily dragging itself further and further into the gunmetal grey surrounding it. And like the naughty schoolboy who feigns indifference to the mores of the crowd, we're unable to stop ourselves making noise. Not that we're saying anything of note. We're just making noise. We're on coaches to Croatia and planes to Ibiza singing "Will Grigg's On Fire."

And we're heading there, singing our song, because we're also a country obsessed with one thing we have no control over—the weather. And the weather, as you can't have helped notice, is having a really good go at pathetic fallacy. The sun's not even bought a bucket hat this year, let alone thought about wearing it down the pub. So we're escaping to sunnier climes, clutching our suncream and our Sunday roasts and our repurposed terrace chants.

The song's being sung because at a time of crisis each and every one of us longs for the familiar. We want some semblance of normality restored, wanting to wake up to a morning in which stasis has slide-tackled chaos into the advertising hoardings at the side of the societal pitch. So we chant our moronic chant and for a second, just a second, we feel a little better about ourselves, and what we've become, and where we're going.

The country's burning. And Will Grigg's on fire.

Josh is on Twitter