1990 seems like a distant, arguably slightly utopian, world away, with acid house culture swelling across the UK and England’s national football team looking to triumph during Italy’s World Cup campaign. Optimism was in the air.
Although ultimately they didn’t win, no one could contest the quality of the summer of sport’s official soundtrack. A song cooked up by the least likely footie fans - New Order.
Produced by Stephen Hague, the studio mastermind behind some of pop’s most stellar moments from the Pet Shop Boys to Lizzo’s About Damn Time, World in Motion became a bona fide classic - and gave the Mancunian outsider legends their only number one single.
It also gave footballer John Barnes an unending future of being asked to do his centrepiece rap, wherever he goes.
![New Order - World In Motion (Official Music Video) [HD Upgrade] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Re4aDJL3heA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Recorded at the Sol Mill, the song has become a staple anthem for England’s international football squad, resurfacing during subsequent World Cups and international football tournaments.
For Stephen, making the song was a peculiar experience in a career full of huge accolades…
“I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years and trying to scale it back but haven’t been able to,” he laughs on recent work. “My head is always full of music, it doesn’t seem to stop.”
As World Cup mania grips us once again, we caught up with Stephen to ask about his memories of the making of the record, how he corralled Manchester’s premiere electronic legends to side with the country’s national team, and how a nation-unifying banger was born…
MusicRadar: You now live in the UK and have a connection with different British artists like the Pet Shop Boys and of course New Order - did music bring you here?
Stephen Hague: “I cut my teeth on British music from the late sixties and early seventies. I grew up between Maine and California and in high school, it was quite tribal. There were those into US bands and those into British acts. I was firmly in the British bands tribe, though later I would become a huge Brian Wilson fan.
“When Peter Gabriel did his first US solo tour, he chose a band I was in at the time as his support act. Peter and I hit it off, and I sent him some home recordings I'd done in Boston. His record label heard them, and asked me to work with an act they had signed in New York, the Rock Steady Crew. It became a hit in the UK, and the phone started ringing… the domino effect.”
MR: How did you get involved with New Order?
SH: “Again, it was off the back of a couple of things, Gillian [Gilbert] from the band loved my work with the Pet Shop Boys and West End Girls. I started by working with them on True Faith and 1963 for the Substance album.”
MR: How did the sessions for World in Motion first begin?
SH: “I got a call from Tony Wilson, New Order's label chief, who said we have a ‘code red’ situation to make this track in time for the World Cup. There was an immovable deadline for any contribution from the football players and the sessions they'd been doing at Real World studios weren't exactly ahead of schedule.
“I had the time to get involved and agreed to do it. John Hudson, an excellent producer who ran Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill, moved some bookings around so we could go in and see what they had from Real World.
“We had one day to try and put something together as best we could with Stephen Morris [New Order drummer] and Gillian, just enough so we could record the football player’s vocals the next day. We ended up starting the backing track over from scratch, and the clock was ticking!
“It was a long day, Steven and Gillian left the studio in the evening and engineer Mike ‘Spike’ Drake and I continued. We were working on a Sony 3324 recording system, one of the early digital machines. This was long before Pro Tools, but with two Sonys we could move things around as the arrangement required. Spike stayed behind to make 24 track analogue multitracks to take to the studio the next day so he was there really late - coincidentally, the clocks changed too, losing an hour, and alongside the super tight schedule Spike arrived the next morning on very little sleep.”
MR: What happened on the day of the recording session?
SH: “The next day we went out to the studio called the Sol Studios which back then was owned by Jimmy Page. I arrived at the same time as Spike did after he’d driven down with the multitrack slaves.
“There were a bunch of people milling around at the gates, obviously word had got out. I thought they were there for New Order but it turned out they were there for the football players.
“Spike immediately went into the control room to start organising. When the football players arrived and got off the bus and one of their staff gave each one a bottle of champagne as they went in - so things started to get a little loose right off the bat!
“I could tell I would have to get this thing going fast, but everyone was in great spirits, the players were really excited as not many of them had been in this kind of environment before. It was me, Spike and the team, then [lyric-co-writer and actor/comedian] Keith Allen came, Steve and Gillian.
“Barney [Bernard] Sumner and Factory’s Tony Wilson had been at Dry Bar in Manchester the previous night until late, then drove all night in questionable condition. I asked Barney if he’d got any sleep. He said he’d been curled up in the foetal position on the back seat on the journey and said he thought he was going to die.”
MR: How did some of the key elements like the ‘Express yourself’ chant and John Barnes’ infamous rap come about?
SH: “We did several takes of the ‘Express yourself’ chant, and the team held it together pretty well. They weren’t singers but I wanted it to sound like what it was, a bunch of guys giving it big ones! Then we did the ‘Love’s got the world in motion’ section. We did two versions, the original we did was ‘We’ve got the world in motion’, then ‘Love’s got the world in motion’. At this point, we weren’t sure which to use so we recorded both.
“Keith was huddled with the band finishing lyric ideas for what would become the rap section, while I finished recording the chants with the footballers. The champagne was really kicking in by that point.
“My original idea for the rap was that each player would do a couple of lines, then another would take over so it was a team effort. But when we started trying that, it became clear we needed a plan B
“I’m sure 95% of rappers wouldn’t be able to play left wing, and by the same token not many footballers could rap either. The initial tries were a bit shocking. Then we got to Barnes, and had a feel for it. It wasn’t done in one take, (unlike the myth), but he was a trooper (and we recorded several takes, with the rest of the team cheering him on. Then, when we got back to London, I assembled it into what you hear now.”
MR: There were some other elements too, like the crowd noise - when was that added?
SH: “I was looking for something to vibe-up the middle section of the record, so I went down to Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road, and found this VHS tape of the England team’s greatest moments. It had the 1966 World Cup win on, so all the voiceovers and crowd sounds were taken from the original broadcast and became part of the record.
“The original outro chant was ‘E is for England!’ ‘but Tony Wilson and I thought it was just asking for trouble and the BBC might not play it, so we went for "We're playing for England" instead. And then ‘England’ magically became a three-syllable word, resulting in the ‘En-ger-land’ chant. That was me, Barney, Keith, friends, and whoever else we could find around Mayfair Studios to make it sound like a crowd giving it their best.
“There was still some debate about whether it should be ‘We’ve got the world in motion’, or ‘Love’s got the world in motion’ even after it was mixed. I had to leave for LA the day after we finished mixing, but I got a call later that week from Spike saying Barney wanted to go with the 'Love's got.." version. Spike had to go back and cut in these sections from the ‘We got the world in motion’ version, which sounded better overall mix-wise, and had already been mastered.
“Then it went to get mastered again, and that's the record we’ve been hearing every four years for 36 years. It's crazy, considering we were flying by the seat of our pants at the time, how it's taken on a life of its own. We had no sense of how history was going to treat any of that music.”
MR: What is your relationship like with the song now?
SH: “It’s regarded by some as the best English football record ever - and I find it funny that it was made by an American who knew nothing about the game.
“It also seemed a little crazy then for New Order to be involved in a football song. It was audacious, there were a few raised eyebrows about it going in but when it arrived, it did the business.
“But I look back on it fondly now. We pulled it off, which was essential at the time, though I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first. It was seeing the response over the years, and how football fans often seem impressed that I worked on that record that puts it all in context for me. 'En-ger-land' indeed!
“Not too long ago, Spike was at a pub up north with some friends and some of them let a group of football fans in the pub know that Spike had worked on the record. Grown men were coming up to him with tears in their eyes, saying how he would never fully understand what the song had done for them over the years. The entire pub gave him a huge toast. That’s the kind of effect it still has. Crazy!
A gallery of Stephen's photos of the session:
