Tennis (Chris Rea, 1980)

There aren’t many pop songs about sport, especially if you discount the mostly excruciating football anthems by national and local football teams. We’re on the March wi’ Ally’s Army sticks particularly in my mind – the embarrassing England-bashing effort by comedian Andy Cameron on behalf of Scotland’s World Cup team for Argentina 1978.

We're representin’ Britain
And we're gaunny do or die
England cannae dae it
‘Cos they didnae qualify

A masterpiece.

So when my mobile disco Blame It On The Boogie! got a booking for a Kirkby Stephen Tennis Club function in the village’s King’s Arms Hotel in 1999, I was delighted to be able to tailor my playlist for them, to the extent of Chris Rea’s 1980 single Tennis.

Tennis peaked at #88 in the Australian Top 100, the only chart in which it made any impression at all. I always liked it. I had first come across Chris Rea in, I think, 1979 when, as the college DJ at Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh I got to go on a jolly to the NUS Student Entertainment Conference in Reading. Chris Rea, then being touted by Magnet Records as the Next Big Thing^TM in British singer-songwriters, was the headline act for the conference, in a very sweaty hall in Reading’s Student Union.

I and my companion, our Student Union president, were of course much more interested in drinking and showing off to girls than in watching the band. We were both drama students and hoped to impress with demonstrations of the stage-fighting techniques we had learned. I would throw Dai against a wall, then he would throw me. Look! No pain! No impressed women falling at our feet either.

The wall was a folding one with hinges and, numbed by alcohol, I didn’t realise that I had cut my forearm badly on a protruding hinge. I wiped what I thought was sweat from it, then wiped the sweat from my brow, unwittingly face-painting myself blood-red. The staff at the chip shop on the way back to our hotel gave us funny looks, but it was dark and the street lighting was sodium; and I only realised why when we got back to our room and I saw my face in the en-suite mirror.

Although Rea had had a minor pop hit with Fool If You Think It’ Over in 1978 (#30 UK, #12 US), he is a bluesman through and through whom Magnet were trying to make into something else. In 1979 he was still trying to be what they wanted and I was not especially impressed with his Reading gig. With punk and disco music both in the ascendency it was a bad time to be launching a singer-song-writer with blues chops. It would be another ten years of hard graft before he made his only entry into the UK Top Ten with The Road to Hell.  

Tennis came from the album of the same name, Rea’s third. Having started out playing in local bands in his home town of Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, he recorded the album with fellow musicians from the town. There is, to my ears, a sense of camaraderie in the playing which comes across. It’s particularly evident in the extended choruses at the end of the single.

Like any good bluesman Rea has remained true to his Middlesbrough roots. In 1997, when MIddlesbrough FC reached the finals of both the English League and FA Cup finals, he re-recorded a 1988 track, Let’s Dance with new lyrics by another local lad made good, comedian Bob Mortimer. Neither Mortimer nor the Middlesbrough team proved adept at becoming pop video stars, but musically Let’s Dance is a cut above most football anthems and streets ahead of Ally’s Army.

Perhaps the football anthem is just something that everyone has to get out of their system at some point in their lives. Along with everyone else, even I sang along with Andy Cameron. As for tennis anthems, Tennis cleared the floor when I played it for the Kirkby Stephen Tennis Club. 

 (Ally, by the way, was Scotland manager Ally MacLeod. Scotland went out in the first round. Middlesbrough lost both finals.)