Can the progressive British Left learn to love football?

I'm sitting here having come across the opening night concert for the World Cup - one of the performances was John Legend dueting with Angelique Kidjo on a cover of 'Move on up', wow.  Other acts included Shakira, Alicia Keys and Black Eyed Peas.

While thinking about football, I remembered the piece this week by Gary Younge which touches on lots of interesting points about which team to suppport in the World Cup if you're young, British and black. For him "as a young black boy in 1970s Hertfordshire, English patriotism was inextricably bound up with far-right politics and racism, not least in the beautiful game." Lots of his points struck a chord with me - I remember my brother (we're brown, Brit-Asian btw) playing football in the 1970s, in Northolt (a north-west London suburb) only to find that the next day, some of his seemingly-friendly white 'team mates' would be be rolling with the NF skinheads trying to catch him and spit at him. Younge seems to have made peace with football and has found a way of suppporting England which makes sense to him. And actually my brother is a big England supporter now. Though if India (or Barbados for Younge) were in the competition (fat chance), what then? Let's not go there - I'm sure the coalition govt would come up with some test 'a la Tebbit' once they'd finished teaching spouses English.  Read Younge's article here.

As a counter to Younge's piece reconciling himself to supporting England, Laurie Penny has written today on why she despises the world cup - "Who cares about a bunch of misogynist jocks tossing a ball around? Football is commodified nationalism that excludes more than half the population."  She makes a lots of points with which that I totally agree.  Just because it's easy to target Penny as a 'humourless parody' (in the words of some knee-jerk commentators) does not mean that her points have no validity - the point about the South African women's football team player having been raped and murdered is a deadly serious one.

John Legend plays Brixton, London

Last Monday night my husband finally got to enjoy his Christmas present – two tickets to see John Legend’s sold-out gig at the Brixton Academy and luckily he took me. It was a fantastic night of listening to sublime music and watching a great talent at work. John Legend – one-time church choir leader, now singer, songwriter, pianist, producer and label-manager (deep breath…) – returned to Brixton again, working towards confirming the definition of his adopted surname (he was born John Stephens in Ohio 30 years ago).

He headed a great live show, though a little full-on visually with constant huge screen in the background giving us a suitably cool take on the man. Sometimes grainy black-and-white footage of JL, giving him an air of history and authority, and sometimes just psychedelic 60s-type revolving graphics, and often beautiful, etheral women. He played through his well-known back-catalogue from his previous two albums (including the best-known ‘Ordinary People’ in the encore) and promoted his third, ‘Evolver’. The musicians and backing singers (including the feisty one with the seemingly sprayed-on trousers) gave great support, helping build up many of his moments-of-life songs to a rousing cresendo.

And I know it’s a sleb cliché but he did speak movingly, towards the end of the gig, about the charity in which he’s involved, helping African villages and, especially the Show Me Campaign.

Interestingly, Legend was a crucial cultural figure for the Obama campaign when he worked on the 'Yes We Can' video which became a huge viral hit on YouTube, and he also played at several Obama campaign stops.

David Sinclair’s TimesOnline review of Legend's gig on 9 March managed to captured the seductiveness of JL and his set, though ends a little unfairly, in my view - you can read it here.

If you’re curious, or just plain sycophantic, you can see some photographs from the gig here. And an interview with the man in the Mail on Sunday by Angus Batey last July 2008 here.

I, for one, enjoyed a now all too rare evening gig sans les enfants - I mean, we were out past midnight forgodsakes! Priorities have changed, an'all that, but it was good to be reminded about the richness of London's cultural offerings, and the great music which we've seen over the years.