Rik Mayall's 'Noble England' And Six Other Questionable World Cup Anthems

Never underestimate the power of the internet. In reaction to the news of British comedy icon Rik Mayall's passing yesterday, a social media campaign has sprung up to get the late performer's unofficial World Cup anthem, Noble England, to the top of the UK charts.

Oh, did we not mention? It sounds like this:

You can laugh if you want (Mayall would probably want it that way), but, so far, the campaign - whose organiser, Steve Diamond, was also responsible for the Christmas 2013 campaign to have AC/DC's Highway To Hell take on The X Factor for chart supremacy - has been successful in topping the UK Amazon charts, and it has made it into the Top 20 on British iTunes.

Plus, to be honest, Mayall, in full historic "Anglo warrior" garb, actually manages to edge towards sincerity in the inspiration department, though it is arguable how much of that vibe is spillover effect from the still-very-raw grief of his death and reflexive canonisation of his body of work.

Mayall is not the first performer to have proffered up a rallying tune when World Cup time has rolled around, however - here's a selection of some of the battier ditties people have gotten behind in the pursuit of soccer glory.

Vaudeville Smash (feat. Les Murray) - Zinedine Zidane (2014)

We're not being unfair, here - the clip for this song from Melburnian outfit Vaudeville Smash is pretty damned wonderful. There's something to be said for any kind of convenience store-based mayhem, and, look, there is unquestionable joy and novelty value in this ode to the famed retired footballer and current assistant coach for Real Madrid, just as there was in Duck Sauce's Barbra Streisand, or Luke Million's Arnold, or... do you see what we're saying, here?

New Order (feat. John Barnes) - World In Motion (1990)

The Band Formerly Known As Joy Division adopted the name "EnglandNewOrder" for a short spell in 1990 when they released this song, which served as the official track for that year's English World Cup team campaign. You can tell it is a soccer song because of the refrain, "Express yourself/ it's one on one", an obvious reference to the average score of most soccer games.

Because it was the dawn of the '90s and hip-hop was chilling on the edges of the mainstream, Jamaican-born English player John Barnes even gets a look-in with a rap towards the end of this otherwise extremely white song, what with all its hallmark late '80s synthpop sounds hanging around a couple years past their welcome.

It made it to #1 anyway, because God is dead and justice is an illusion.

Hey, remember when Ricky Martin wasn't all washed up, desperately grasping at the fading lights of stardom as it just fucking floors it in the general direction of Right The Hell Away From Ricky Martin while Australia frantically gives his career posthumous CPR through generously allowing him to exist on our TV screens as a coach on The Voice, where he is now comprehensively living La Vida, only without the Loca?

Yeah, it was probably about the time this song came out, and there was a general decline in the average global level of the species' will to live.

Lightning Seeds - Three Lions (Football's Coming Home) (1996)

England loves it some official World Cup anthem action, if you haven't guessed by now. Originally released by the Lightning Seeds in collaboration with comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel - so, not a great start - for England's European Championships campaign that year, Three Lions is certainly among the more banal.

It was later updated and reimagined for the World Cup in 1998, because it was still pretty new and maybe some folks hadn't heard it yet and, besides, outros that genuinely recall the cruisy gang-vocal vibe of the old Slip! Slop! Slap! theme song were all the rage.

Do you know where Que Sera Sera comes from? Other than being the song the citizens of Springfield chose to sing together when faced with almost-certain death at the hands of Bart's Comet, the track first featured in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much, and loosely translates into "What will be, will be".

Then, football fans, the community least likely to accept the way things fall naturally without booing and rioting over bad ref calls and the like, adopted the track as a go-to chant at games before being recorded and released by walking bad hair day Rod Stewart, for the Scottish team's 1978 World Cup effort - as part of which he also released this:

Ole Ola, if you're not somewhere you can watch a video, was released by the Scottish national football team in collaboration with Stewart, and it sounds way sunnier than anyone in Scotland would reasonably have experienced.

Although it peaked at #4 on the Scottish charts upon its release, the fact its rhyme scheme pairs "ola" with "there" and that it amounts to little more than Rod Stewart approximating what he thinks "exotic" South American music sounds like in the key of a then-33-year-old blond man should provide you with a fairly thorough idea of a couple of the many, many things that are musically fucked about this song.

Number four, guys. This is what rabid nationalism at the hands of a quadrennial surge in soccer fanaticism does to society. Heed the lessons of the past, people, or prepare for waves and waves of balls.