ABSTRACT
Sport and music are both examples of popular culture and mass entertainment often performed by skilled practitioners exhibiting modes of aesthetic physicality. Although Adorno attacked their commodification by the ‘culture industry’, there is, as this volume demonstrates, more to be said about their interrelation than his rejection of sport and popular music indicates (though contemporary examples of their meeting ground may also point to the pertinence of his critique of the hegemonic flattening of cultural forms).1 When we think of the coexistence of cricket and music, the subject of this chapter, we may think historically of a number of cricketing musicians, like Sir Thomas Beecham, or examples of musical cricketers and cricket commentators, most famously Sir Neville Cardus, or cricket-inspired music and song, including those sung for or about public schools.2 We might perhaps turn to David Rayvern Allen’s A Song for Cricket (1981) which pulls together a large number of cricket-inspired ditties. Today, we may even bring to mind the sounds of the Barmy Army, that band of journeying England cricket supporters who seek to rally their team with chants of ‘Come On England’, renditions of songs like ‘Jerusalem’, and their own creative treats punning on the names of players and their most distinctive characteristics.3 Along similar lines, we could consider the relatively recent tendency, particularly in shortened one-day and Twenty20 versions of the game, to have fast, pumping pop tunes crashing out of speakers during brief interludes in the action, due largely to Sky’s repackaging of the sport, cricket’s need for TV revenues and its hope for larger and younger crowds. It seems quite likely that an English audience will also bring to mind the run of signature tunes that have introduced cricket coverage on TV and radio. In 2007, the year the cricket World Cup would be held in the Caribbean for the first time, Sky Sports was using 10cc’s hit ‘Dreadlock Holiday’, with its catchy refrain ‘I don’t like cricket, oh no, I love it’, despite the song describing the intimidatory theft of a tourist’s jewellery by a local (read ‘black’) Caribbean man. In 2006 Channel Five’s brief hold on the game brought Noll Shannon’s ‘Shine’ to speak for its tone of optimistic anticipation.4 Between 1999 and 2005 Channel Four’s awardwinning reinvigoration of televised cricket made Lou Bega’s version of ‘Mambo No. 5’ synonymous with the game. And, before all of these, the BBC had, for more than 30 years, used Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Soul Limbo’ (also known as
‘Soul Dressing’) as the musical lynchpin of its cricket coverage both on TV and on the radio with Test Match Special.
