Shine on you crazy Diamond Lights

Thirty-seven years ago today, a song that changed the course of popular music was released to an unprepared public. Looks like m’former podcast co-host had something he needed to get off his chest.

By the late 1960s, professional footballers were starting to present wider society with an ever-growing problem. For decades, these liniment-soaked, toothless, knuckle-dragging herberts had been seemingly content to be treated with the same care and regard for their future prospects as a side of beef at Smithfield Market; their cultural utility judged solely on how imminently the country was likely to be in need of a large standing army of fit and able-bodied young men.

And then, when their thirties rolled around and their knees inevitably gave out, they would – finally – slide silently into gainful employment. Half of the pubs around the UK had an England cap hanging behind the bar; in some places they kept the hard boiled eggs in it. What on earth went wrong? Marxist agitators like Johnny Haynes and Jimmy Hill didn't help, of course, giving football players everywhere the idea that they deserved to be paid money for their labour.

But the real problem was England winning the World Cup in 1966. All of a sudden, government ministers, Daily Express-reading housewives and even the late, lamented Her Majesty Our Queen all knew these people's names. Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst appeared in television adverts encouraging everybody to go to the boozer, while further north an even bigger problem was brewing with the arrival of George “Georgie Best” Best. Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, football players were big stars.

Eventually society discovered the solution to this problem was to pay them all an extraordinary amount of money while simultaneously demanding physical and technical mastery well beyond a level of absolute perfection. It was the ideal result; footballers would either be ensconced in their state-of-the-art training facilities, in their Cheshire mansion houses or in a fully chromed bullet-and-bomb-proof four tonne black SUV somewhere in between. With the possible exception of match days, no-one would ever need to see or hear from them ever again.

This brilliantly elegant resolution, however, took upwards of three decades to evolve, and in the meantime there were some painful moments for us all to have to endure. For a time during the late 1970s and early 1980s, you could scarcely go into a tie shop, listen to the radio or turn on the TV without seeing a football player gurning about, trying to extract the maximum benefit from the rare gift that society had bestowed upon them. These were tough days.

Perhaps the apotheosis of our collective struggle came in the spring of 1987. Something happened here that was so horrible that society at large came to a largely tacit agreement that it must never be allowed to happen again. It could well be that the silent cultural mobilisation it brought about created the modern footballing universe. I am, of course, referring to the release of the song Diamond Lights by Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle.

Or rather, by Glenn and Chris, because the pair were not trading on their names, fame or status. They would never do that. This record was designed to stand on its own merits. It was art, and its creators artists. When the Spurs duo had hawked their recording around the labels, they had done so without any reference to the fact it had been recorded by two international footballers. When it was eventually picked up by Record Shack Records and released on 1st April 1987, it was done so with the catalogue number “KICK1”, the only outward sign of any artifice whatsoever.

It had come about in a similarly organic manner, too. Throughout the entire process, celebrity or prominence was always of secondary importance to the art itself. Indeed, the only leg up the pair received came from the entirely coincidental benefit of both being sponsored by Budget Rent-a-Car. If you can, for a minute, try to disregard any mental image you have of Glenn Hoddle driving a Budget-sponsored car around North London in the mid-1980s while definitely not looking like a total prick. It isn't particularly important here, even though it is something that almost certainly happened.

The key issue is that Budget's personal sponsorship of Hoddle and Waddle opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed to the likes of everyday peons like you or I. Specifically, it got them invited to the company's annual awards dinner in Coventry. “At the end of the night there was a band on,” Waddle subsequently recalled for The Guardian. “By this time we'd had a few too many and ended up on stage with the group. A friend of ours who was there told us it sounded all right...”

This friend, it turned out, had another friend: Bob Puzey. Puzey was a moderately successful songwriter and record producer at the time – his big hit had been writing I'm In The Mood For Dancing for The Nolans and he had also written a hit for The Dooleys.

This experience of writing pop songs for 11-person groups with wildly variable levels of singing talent would serve him surprisingly well when dealing with football players. Hoddle and Waddle subsequently repeated their karaoke performance for Puzey at his house in Barnet. According to Waddle, Puzey's reaction was very much similar to that of their mutal friend's. “He said it sounded all right”.

Together with Puzey, Hoddle and Waddle recorded Diamond Lights, a song Puzey had written about his wife. The exact status of Puzey's marriage at the time remains unknown and therefore cannot be speculated over, although it seems reasonable to note that the peculiarly tense and trilling synth pop ballad begins “Eyes that freeze like ice/Cold electric blue those diamond lights/You were hard as stone/Solid stone for me”. Mrs. Puzey sounds like one hell of a woman.

It is the nature of art that, once released into the wild it can and will take on a life of its own. Unexpected consequences become the norm and, right on cue, Diamond Lights by Glenn and Chris entered the UK Top 40 at number 30 on 18th April 1987. It would eventually ride as high as number 12, spending six weeks in the Top 40 and eight weeks in the chart in total. But by this stage, the cat was well and truly out of the bag.

Tottenham Hotspur's very own midfield duo had a record in the charts. There was a photograph of them both on the cover and, just in case you missed that, the single (unimaginatively backed on the 'B' side with an instrumental version of the song) was also available as a picture disc. Top of the Pops surely beckoned.

The programme's producers struck while the iron was hot, inviting the pair to perform on the 23rd April edition while their record was still a new entry. And a studio performance it had to be, because the song's promotional video was, in Waddle's words, “so bad they wouldn't use it”.

He was not wrong. In the video, Hoddle and Waddle turn up to “Diamond Studios” in their black Ford Escort Cabrio, top down, through a sea of local youngsters who are—in a sly nod to the performers' actual day jobs—playing football in the car park.

The duo, pursued by a mysterious spectral woman in black, make their way into the studio and perform their song lit by a single spotlight in the midst of a sea of black vinyl flooring. Occasionally their muse, cheekbones and all,  flits back out of the spirit realm clad in white chiffon (or, if you prefer, like diamonds made from light) to do some barefoot Kate Bush dancing. It serves as a welcome counterpoint to Hoddle and Waddle's moves, which tend towards the finger-clicking and walking-in-place favoured by your dad at a wedding.

Even for the time, it looks cheaply and quickly made. Hoddle, a pop star at last, looks like he's having the absolute time of his life. However, Waddle's face throughout is a mask of pained embarrassment, a man who is doing his best to suck up all of his many deep misgivings and placated by the thought that, 'hey: at least when this shit is in the can we'll be able to forget all about it'. At least, his eyes scream, now I won't have to do this on Top of the Pops. 

On Top of the Pops that night, 23rd April 1987, were The Smiths, Kim Wilde and Junior, Five Star, Starship, Tom Jones, Madonna and Terence Trent D'Arby. The latter even met the pair backstage, as they poured themselves into the Miami Vice clothing that had been provided by a friend of Hoddle's from their boutique in Gants Hill. “Terence Trent D'Arby said hello and that he liked our song,” said Waddle. “We didn't know if he was taking the piss, because he said it all sincere”.

Equally hard to read was Gary Davies, the show's presenter that night, who seemingly managed to introduce the song with a straight face. The shockwaves from what happened next still resonate throughout both music and football history. The two men have wildly differing memories and experiences of the night, a fact that is immediately betrayed by their countenances on stage. 

In white, Glenn Hoddle looks like a man in a dream. No human who has ever lived has been so delighted to be on Top of the Pops. In counterpoint, the man in black to his left is willing the ground to swallow him whole. No human who has ever lived wanted to be on Top of the Pops less than Chris Waddle. He stands, chin pressed into his windpipe, eyes on the floor, praying for the sweet embrace of something, anything, that is not this. 

Waddle remembered the whole affair as the most nerve-wracking thing he'd ever done – his demeanour after missing the penalty in the World Cup semi-final three years subsequently would be markedly more upbeat – while Hoddle loved the whole thing. “It's one of the greatest things I ever did,” he would reflect years later. “I'm glad I did it and I learnt a lot from it”.

Mind you, it certainly didn't do their record's prospects any harm: the following week it had risen thirteen places to number 17 and the week after that it peaked at number 12. “It was bigger than we thought,” Waddle recalled to The Guardian. “At away grounds people were bringing records for us to sign rather than Match or Shoot.” 

If nothing else, this rather sweetly demonstrates that Chris Waddle finds the British football-supporting public as hard to read as he does flighty auteurs like Terence Trent D'Arby, because I can absolutely promise you, Chris, that those people WERE taking the piss. Even Graham Kelly, a man not known for the quality of his banter or his one-liners, made joking reference to the single when he interviewed Hoddle for the England job in 1996. For most people, this would represent their lowest ebb, but Glenn Hoddle is clearly made of sterner stuff.

Alas, the pair's follow-up single, the fittingly-titled It's Goodbye, fell victim to Hoddle's transfer to AS Monaco. Shorn of the opportunity to promote it properly, it could only achieve a highest chart position of number 92. And in spite of Waddle joining Hoddle in the south of France soon afterwards following his own move to Marseille, the pair never recorded together again. Without knowing it, they had arguably set in motion the chain of events that have mercifully made modern football players unknowable, hermetic, millionaire recluses.

“After a few beers I still like my karaoke, though you won't catch me singing Diamond Lights”, was Waddle's final verdict on the matter, talking to The Guardian in 2009. Which suits me just fine, as I consider this to constitute a legally-binding written contract. And let us ritually cement this new covenant with the addition of millions and millions of pounds into footballers' bank accounts, now and forever. Amen.