Vindaloo (song)

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“Vindaloo”

Single by Fat Les

Released

8 June 1998

Format

Recorded

1998

Genre

Comedy, Football chant

Length

3:39

Label

Telstar

Fat Les singles chronology

"Vindaloo"
(1998)

"Naughty Christmas (Goblin in the Office)"
(1998)

"Vindaloo" was a single from 1998, recorded for the 1998 FIFA World Cup by Fat Les. The song was originally written as a parody of football chants, but was adopted as one in its own right and became a cult classic. Much of the song consists of the phrase "nah nah nah" and the word "vindaloo" repeated over and over by a mixed group, occasionally interspersed with lines such as "And we all like vindaloo" and "We're England; we're gonna score one more than you".

The song also has brief verses, spoken/sung by Keith Allen - in a voice sounding remarkably similar to that of the late Ian Dury, and with a tune that owed much to Max Wall's "The Walk" routine.

The song's name comes from the vindaloo, a type of very spicy Goan curry, often eaten in the United Kingdom by football supporters, accompanied with large quantities of lager, after matches, or as part of a "lads night out"^[1].

The song reached number two in the UK Singles Chart in June 1998; it was beaten by "Three Lions '98" by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner and Lightning Seeds, a re-release of football anthem "Three Lions" from 1996 with slightly altered lyrics. There were rumours at the time however that - in a re-run of the events in 1977 surrounding the Sex Pistols "God Save The Queen" - those running the chart kept "Vindaloo" off the Number 1 spot on purpose.

The song sounded a little too much like a "hooligan's anthem" for some observers, but from the point of view of the BBC who commissioned the official UK Music Chart, the band were deliberately walking the ghost of the incident a few years earlier on the BBC's arts & culture programme The Late Show when Keith Allen as a guest on the show got into an extremely heated row with the panel over his view that comedy was now being hamstrung to appease rules of political correctness. Just before storming off the live broadcast, Allen - a veteran of the early 1980s wave of UK "alternative" comedians that had shocked many - had stormed at an Asian member of the panel that was for tighter controls that "It's not a chip you've got on your shoulder, it's a f**king vindaloo!" Allen later explained to press reporters that a vindaloo is as faux ethnic (this piece of Goan cuisine actually originated from Portugal) as those who masquerade as self-appointed spokespeople for ethnic minority communities' rights in order to censor arts and culture according to their own pet prejudices.

The music video for the song is a parody of the video for "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve, which was itself inspired by the music video for "Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack^[2]. The video is recorded in the same street, and features comedian Paul Kaye as a Richard Ashcroft lookalike forcing his way down the street. However, while in the original video, Ashcroft is alone, in the video he slowly gathers a large crowd that starts mocking him, including Fat Les, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, sumo wrestlers, French maids, a French mime, a Max Wall lookalike (as Professor Wallofski), a priest, adults dressed as school girls de a la St Trinian's and many more who dance around him brandishing bags of curry. By the end, Kaye has joined in with the rest of the crowd.