"If it ain't coming home, then neither am I": cocaine and football after 14 years of austerity

Who's got the bag? Literally everyone, apparently

So where do we go from here? Who knows, but I know that I fancy a beer

If you’re feeling down and you’re having it hard, no matter what: make sure you’re having it large

I don’t know when musicians stopped making successful new football anthems — maybe around the same time they stopped making successful new Christmas songs? For some reason both genres ground to a juddering halt a couple of decades ago, possibly around the time Dizzee Rascal and James Corden killed the ‘official cup anthem’ genre dead with 2010’s absolutely dreadful England World Cup track Shout. Which is why 1996’s Three Lions (for normies), 1990’s World in Motion (for hipsters), and 1998’s Vindaloo (for actual football fans) still ring out across the land, every World Cup and every Euros. All are brilliant in their own ways.

Rags The Goat’s Sapnin Girl (43k YouTube views) probably isn’t about to join their ranks in terms of sheer ubiquity or longevity, but it has every right to do so. Because it captures the zeitgeist, a certain kind of English genius, and an unspoken current of adrenaline and ‘fuck it’ hedonism coursing through the blood vessels of this damp little country, in a way few songs have done since the deliciously absurd Vindaloo (“Can I introduce you please, to a lump of cheddar cheese? / Knit one, pearl one; drop one, curl one” deserves a place in the canon of 20th century English poetry).

And what is that zeitgeist? Cops, health workers and teachers look away now, but the answer is cocaine, I’m afraid. Coke and football fandom are the two inseparable, unacknowledged partners in 2020s popular culture. I’m not here to sit in judgement, to condemn or indeed to approve, it’s just an unignorable truth: football grounds and pubs are absolutely teeming with the white stuff these days, to a degree that feels completely unprecedented. Even in lowly League 2, as a season ticket holder at my ““family club”” AFC Wimbledon, there’s often the unmistakable little pinch of a nose by blokes coming out of the cubicles. During one game last season, a lairy guy in his mid-50s — not a Wimbledon fan, I hasten to add, this man was a neutral on a random day out — sat a few rows back from me and talked obnoxiously throughout to (or rather, at) the increasingly weary stranger sat next to him, eventually asking, completely unsubtly, if he “had any bugle”. There’s a weird homophone situation here — our best striker last season was Lebanese international Omar Bugiel. “Bugiel’s on the fucking pitch mate, give it a rest,” the Dons fan next to him retorted.

As with all illegal drug culture, it’s impossible to measure this stuff accurately (people will rarely be honest in surveys, for obvious reasons), or to do deep analysis of the wheres and whys. But cocaine has a strong relationship with beer, and machismo, which is a strong start for an explosion of use among football fans. Perhaps the fact you’re still not allowed to drink alcohol in sight of the pitch, because football fans are still treated like delinquent children, has spurred more use of coke. That draconian rule — famously absent in the Bundesliga, among others — dates back to the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act 1985. As I get into in my next book, MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World, that same year, The Sunday Times called football “a slum sport played in slum stadiums, and increasingly watched by slum people who deter decent folk from turning up”. The authorities have long hated and feared crowds of football fans. Trouble and arrests at matches have sunk to historic lows in the last decade — the Euro 2021 final aside, infamously (more of that in MULTITUDES) — but that’s in spite of what’s going on in the toilet cubicles, in the pubs before and after the game.

Sapnin Girl is brilliant in part because it articulates the unsayable truth that cocaine, beer, football and lad culture are now inseparable. It’s a hilarious 3-minute piece of white-boy Geezer Grime (see also: Phenomenal’s Straight Cockney, or Dogzilla and Devlin’s Where’s All The Beer?), over Ruff Sqwad and Wiley’s impeccable Together instrumental — and the perfect homage to getting what Black grime MCs affectionately refer to as getting “white-boy wasted”.

Almost every single line is about doing packet. He’s in and out of the cupboard all night. Rabbit, rabbit. His mate John’s had a terrible time with his missus, she’s keyed his car and cut up his clothes. He can’t go home, so here you are John, stay here and have another go on that — bosh. Meanwhile the girl Rags is chatting up on the chorus of Sapnin Girl, he’s not really on a chirpse, when he asks her “you alright? Your mate alright? Cuz we’re alright” — he’s not enquiring after her health, he’s asking if she’s sorted. He’s not trying to take her home, because he doesn’t want to go home, and nor does she. It’s a classic musical cipher: on the face of it, it seems to be about getting laid — but it’s not: that’s just a cover for the much more important business of getting wasted.

A considerably more well-known figure than Rags the Goat, the garlanded Mike Skinner, had a go at nailing this same nihilistic atmosphere of ‘fuck it’ hedonism — this same structure of feeling, if you will (I will) — during the first Covid lockdown, with Who’s Got the Bag (21st June). All that pent-up angst, all those missed nights out, all that collective anxiety that we might never ever have fun again, the desperate FOMO of the caged social animal — missing pubs (remember the deeply poignant viral video about going to the pub for the first time after lockdown?), missing parties, missing gigs, missing clubs, missing festivals, missing football matches, missing crowds of strangers — all of it was cathartically unleashed in that summer of 2020. Unfortunately Skinner’s effort was a funny but ultimately quite rubbish little sketch of an idea. But not to fear, because Rags the Goat has finished his thought properly.

Sapnin Girl is the perfect anthem for a country broken, exhausted and immiserated by 14 years of Conservative austerity and Covid, and the perfect anthem for England somehow, implausibly, making it to the Euros final on Sunday. Like it or not, it’s the perfect anthem for the state we’re in. Everything’s fucked — may as well stay here John, have another go on that. Bosh.