Football Show: Interview with Niall Quinn from The Hitchers, 20 years after Strachan

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Larry Ryan (0:34)

Hello and welcome to another Irish Examiner Football Show. I'm Larry Ryan, and this week I'm joined by Niall Quinn. Not Ireland's highest paid broadcaster, Niall, but the other Quinnny, the drummer and songwriter with Limerick band The Hitchers. Some of you will probably recognize the intro music for this show. It's coming from Strachan, The Hitchers, 1997 1997 tribute to the little maestro's work in the Leeds midfield. It's a song you'll find listed across the internet in any of those charts of best football related music. Twenty years on from Strachan, Niall's and Cork this week end with another of these projects, Half-Hourst, Half-Biscuit, Half-Man, Half-Biscuit tribute band. They play Fred Zeppelin and Cork on Saturday night.

Half-Man, Half-Biscuit, of course, are one of the first bands to pack their songs with football references. All I Want for Christmas is a Duke of Prague away kit. Probably their most famous venture into that area. So we'll talk to Niall about Strachan and about football songs in general, but first, here's a little bit more of the song.

Fantastic stuff there.

Of course, Strachan goes on to play me Tachik in that game before the end, I think from Gary Macalester's cross. Niall, thanks very much for joining us.

Niall Quinn (3:48)

Delighted to be here.

Larry Ryan (3:50)

Niall, if there was a World Cup of football songs, I'd say Strachan would at the very least make the third place playoff, would he? Maybe the final, would he even lift the trophy?

Niall Quinn (4:00)

There's actually been a couple of those.

I think The Guardian ran one a couple of years back during one of the World Cups. I think we did make it to the last eight or the last 16 or something, but we didn't go further than that.

Larry Ryan (4:14)

Yeah. We might come back to some of the other contenders in a while, but just tell us about Strachan. I mean, the story is a man trying to enjoy a League United masterclass, despite some interference from his other half. Is it an autobiographical tale?

Niall Quinn (4:30)

I doubt it. I would say, going back to when I wrote it, any girlfriends of mine from back along then would probably have been quite delighted if I'd go in and watch the football for a while. So there's very little autobiographical in it. I actually wrote it, the original draft of it, probably a couple of months before Leeds won the title. It was early 92 anyway. And maybe there's a little bit of that feeds into it, that your man's got a lot of skin in it, whatever he's watching.

But the first sort of draft of it that I took to the band, it really wasn't great. It was actually a very sort of second division rip off of Star Something by Teenage Fan Club.

The entire song had the pace of the end of the song, shall we say, the end of the song as it is now, that sort of like rockin out, guitar-y kind of it, so it sat on blocks for a couple of years, and around the time Strachan moved on to be player manager at Coventry, I kind of got nostalgic and worked back into it. And that's how the likes of Gary Kelly ended up in it as well.

Larry Ryan (5:49)

That's right, he was hard to get in there, yeah.

Niall Quinn (5:52)

The line up that's in it, and only because Kelly rhymes with Telly, but the line up that's in the team only played four matches together. And it wouldn't have been in the championship winning season. But yeah, I mean, the band never really took to it back then, but Eric was our guitarist, was the last to join. And he used to hear me doing it on my own, sort of like solo gigs with Acoustics. And he said, there's something in that.

Eric has a great pop sensibility, and he helps sort of sort it out and give it a bit of structure. And he was going to go on, you're really trying to turn what's more of a beautiful south song into a wedding present song here, and you need to go back to first principles and build it and build it, you know?

Larry Ryan (6:36)

So are you actually a Leeds fan, Niall?

Niall Quinn (6:39)

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, like I've always maintained it's not a Leeds United song.