‘Let’s Dance’: The hit football single Chris Rea created with Bob Mortimer
From the dreary ‘Back Home’ to the admittedly catchy ‘Meat Pie, Sausage Roll (Come on England, Gi’s a Goal)’, football’s many attempts at breaking into the pop charts are rarely regarded for their musical quality. If anybody could pull off that impossible feat, though, it was the meeting of Middlesbrough’s finest minds, Chris Rea and Bob Mortimer.
Currently sitting towards the top of the Championship table, Middlesbrough FC have seen their fair share of success since their first formation back in 1876, and a particularly memorable spell of footballing mastery saw them reach the final stage of both the League Cup and the FA Cup. So, in an effort to mark that immense success forevermore, the decision was made to create a pop song in support of Bryan Robson’s side, and Chris Rea was the one to do it.
Rea was, after all, Middlesbrough’s greatest pop export, having amassed a plethora of blues-tinged pop successes since his first emergence back in the late 1970s. In fact, Rea’s discography already seemed tailor-made to evoke the pride of Middlesbrough during that period. Instead of creating an entirely new song – perhaps with a strange rap section added into the middle, performed with questionable enthusiasm from one of the squad members – Rea chose to rework one of his old favourites, ‘Let’s Dance’.
Originally released back in 1986 as a B-side to ‘It’s All Gone’, ‘Let’s Dance’ ended up eclipsing the middling success of its A-side, reaching number 12 in the UK singles charts when it was re-released as the lead single from the songwriter’s breakout album Dancing with Strangers. A decade on, though, the single would need something extra to update it for Middlesbrough’s footballing triumphs. Enter Bob Mortimer.
Everybody’s favourite Would I Lie To You contestant would have still been in the throes of his soliciting career when ‘Let’s Dance’ first emerged onto the airwaves, but that had all changed by the time 1997 rolled around. His comedy partnership with Vic Reeves took him to the surrealist heights of Channel 4 during the early 1990s, and the legendary panel show Shooting Stars followed soon thereafter.
As well as being one-half of one of Britain’s most beloved comedy duos, though, Mortimer is also a noted devotee of Middlesbrough FC, having once harboured dreams of playing for the Boro during his youth in the 1960s and 1970s. Even when that dream came crashing down, to be eventually replaced by his comedy career, the club has always remained close to his heart.
Thus, the unlikely partnership of Bob Mortimer and Chris Rea was born, tasked with creating a new mix of ‘Let’s Dance’ – with Mortimer on lyric duties – to spur that legendary Middlesbrough side onto victory. In hindsight, the single is an endearing fever dream of a track, evocative of the strange trend of attempted football-based hits that seemed to crop up a lot during the 1990s.
In the end, the single didn’t culminate in footballing success, with Middlesbrough FC losing to 2-nil to Chelsea in the FA Cup Final, only a month after losing the League Cup final to Leicester City, as well as being relegated from the Premier League in the same season. Ouch. Still, Mortimer and Rea’s bizarre collaboration managed to reach an inarguably impressive 44 in the UK charts, and add an incredibly unexpected chapter to the autobiographies of both smoggies.
Although Rea did not, in fact, reveal the joys of cracking an egg into one’s bath to Mortimer – as the comedian declared confidently on one edition of WILTY – the partnership was sealed by a golden doily which Rea sent to his collaborator in the months after, according to Mortimer’s memoir, And Away….
It might not have generated the final push that Middlesbrough FC needed, but it seemed to strike upon a lasting friendship between the songwriter and the comedian.
