By Matt Slater - BBC Sport
Some people are just greedy.
It is not enough for them to be adored, famous and
paid handsomely for just one thing, they want more.
Thankfully, being properly good at two things is
quite rare. Take football and music, for example.
Many have tried both, but when you look for gems
among the back catalogues of these renaissance
figures you are probably left with John Barnes's rap
from World in Motion, Rod Stewart's trial for
Brentford and the moments before One Direction's
Louis Tomlinson was crunched by Aston Villa's
Gabby Agbonlahor.
But that was before Kevin Walker.
Kevin who? Kevin Walker, the winner of the
Swedish version of Pop Idol and new midfielder for
Djurgarden in the country's top division, that's who.
"Yeah, there's been a lot happening," said Walker,
cheerily over the phone from Stockholm.
"I've been a professional footballer for a while now,
but music came into my life much later and now it's
a passion. I just want to enjoy it all for as long it
lasts."
He said this with a strong Irish accent on account of
his dad being Pat Walker, a former Gillingham and
Republic of Ireland Under-21 player who took his
boots to Scandinavia in 1983 and liked it so much
he stayed, keeping himself busy by managing six
clubs in Sweden and Norway over the last 20 years.
Walker's interest in music grew after he began
playing guitar while recovering from blood poisoning
Marrying a Swede probably helped, too, and
explains why Kevin, and his brother Robert, another
footballer, can speak Swedish with Swedish
accents. Or so he assured me.
"Definitely, but I speak French like Del Boy," he
admitted.
Having a dad with a Uefa pro licence explains the
football, then, but the music is a different story, a
story with echoes of Julio Iglesias.(external)
Julio who? Oh, come off it, Julio Iglesias the perma-
tanned, best-selling Latin music artist in history and
owner of a private airport in the Caribbean, that's
who.
But before all that, Julio was a law student who also
played in goal for Real Madrid's B team until a car
crash left him unable to walk for two years. During
his time in hospital, a nurse gave him a guitar to kill
time. The rest is adult contemporary music history.
Walker's tale is that he came down with blood
poisoning whilst on a Swedish U21 camp in Belgium
in 2009.
Hits recorded by players
1979: Kevin Keegan - Head Over Heels in Love
1987: Glenn Hoddle & Chris Waddle - Diamond
Lights
1990: Paul Gascoigne - Fog on the Tyne
1990: Paul Gascoigne - Geordie Boys
1993: Ian Wright - Do the Right Thing
1999: Andy Cole - Outstanding
He had already played for Sweden's U17s (making
his debut against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin)
and U19s, and had just broken into the first team at
AIK, one of Swedish football's most famous names.
The illness wiped him out, costing him an entire
season, but it did introduce him to the guitar. The
rest is Swedish light entertainment history.
Having been reluctantly persuaded to perform at an
open-mic night at a local casino, a wobbly video of
Walker's performance found its way to the
producers of Swedish Idol 2013.
They knew a crossover hit when they saw one,
particularly one with an interesting back story,
flowing locks and a ready-made fan base.
"I just thought 'why not?', but I had no ambition
back then, and I had never been on stage before,"
Walker explained.
"But it just went mad. Before I knew it they were
rearranging my games to fit in with the show, and I
was singing at the princess's birthday party and
doing duets with Robbie Williams.
"I think I got the hang of it in the end.
"But I never missed a training session and I played
every minute of the season."
That campaign ended last month with promotion to
the top flight for Walker's team, GIF Sundsvall, and
a move to Djurgarden, 11-time Swedish champions
and the third best-supported club in the land.
Walker describes himself as a "hard-working
midfielder, who can spot a pass and score goals",
and a "singer-songwriter with a modern take on it",
and he has a recording contract with Universal to
prove it.
So this is no Tomlinson-to-Doncaster-style stunt,
and he is considerably more convincing as a pop
star than Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle ever were.
Their Diamonds Lights might have reached number
12 in the charts in 1987, but it has been a regular in
"the worst record ever" polls ever since, and their
performance on Top of the Pops was described by
one reviewer "as a timeless classic for all the
wrong reasons".
At least Waddle had the self-awareness to be
embarrassed by it, Hoddle later referred to it as
"one of the greatest things I ever did".
'A musician's life is a lot easier'
Few agreed with him, and legend has it that when
he was interviewed for the England job nearly a
decade later, FA chief executive Graham Kelly
asked him if he had "any skeletons in the closet…
apart from that record with Chris Waddle".
Of course, it is a bit unfair to pick on "Glenn and
Chris" when there are Kevin Keegan's "Head Over
Heels in Love" and Paul Gascoigne's "Fog on the
Tyne" to dissect, and who can forget Andy Cole's
1999 classic "Outstanding"? Oh, you all can.
From the other direction, no pun intended, nobody
has really got that close to combining a music
career with a sideline in soccer.
Westlife's Nicky Byrne spent a couple of years in
Leeds United's academy as a goalkeeper, but his
ability to sing close harmonies on chat shows
proved better than his command of the six-yard
area.
Indie guitar great Johnny Marr(external) had trials
with Manchester City and has claimed Brian
Clough's Nottingham Forest were "sniffing about",
but the fact he wore eyeliner on the pitch probably
reveals he knew where his true calling lay.
The same can be said of Stewart and his famous
flirtation with football.
"A musician's life is a lot easier," he later wrote.
"And I can also get drunk and make music, and I
can't do that and play football."
So Walker, the tough-tackling troubadour, is in a
subset of one, making him the only man who can
really answer what is better: scoring a goal in front
of thousands, or hearing thousands sing the words
to one of your songs back at you?
"Ah, they're two completely different things," he
revealed.
"And I'm privileged to do both."
Some people are just greedy.
It is not enough for them to be adored, famous and
paid handsomely for just one thing, they want more.
Thankfully, being properly good at two things is
quite rare. Take football and music, for example.
Many have tried both, but when you look for gems
among the back catalogues of these renaissance
figures you are probably left with John Barnes's rap
from World in Motion, Rod Stewart's trial for
Brentford and the moments before One Direction's
Louis Tomlinson was crunched by Aston Villa's
Gabby Agbonlahor.
But that was before Kevin Walker.
Kevin who? Kevin Walker, the winner of the
Swedish version of Pop Idol and new midfielder for
Djurgarden in the country's top division, that's who.
"Yeah, there's been a lot happening," said Walker,
cheerily over the phone from Stockholm.
"I've been a professional footballer for a while now,
but music came into my life much later and now it's
a passion. I just want to enjoy it all for as long it
lasts."
He said this with a strong Irish accent on account of
his dad being Pat Walker, a former Gillingham and
Republic of Ireland Under-21 player who took his
boots to Scandinavia in 1983 and liked it so much
he stayed, keeping himself busy by managing six
clubs in Sweden and Norway over the last 20 years.
Walker's interest in music grew after he began
playing guitar while recovering from blood poisoning
Marrying a Swede probably helped, too, and
explains why Kevin, and his brother Robert, another
footballer, can speak Swedish with Swedish
accents. Or so he assured me.
"Definitely, but I speak French like Del Boy," he
admitted.
Having a dad with a Uefa pro licence explains the
football, then, but the music is a different story, a
story with echoes of Julio Iglesias.(external)
Julio who? Oh, come off it, Julio Iglesias the perma-
tanned, best-selling Latin music artist in history and
owner of a private airport in the Caribbean, that's
who.
But before all that, Julio was a law student who also
played in goal for Real Madrid's B team until a car
crash left him unable to walk for two years. During
his time in hospital, a nurse gave him a guitar to kill
time. The rest is adult contemporary music history.
Walker's tale is that he came down with blood
poisoning whilst on a Swedish U21 camp in Belgium
in 2009.
Hits recorded by players
1979: Kevin Keegan - Head Over Heels in Love
1987: Glenn Hoddle & Chris Waddle - Diamond
Lights
1990: Paul Gascoigne - Fog on the Tyne
1990: Paul Gascoigne - Geordie Boys
1993: Ian Wright - Do the Right Thing
1999: Andy Cole - Outstanding
He had already played for Sweden's U17s (making
his debut against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin)
and U19s, and had just broken into the first team at
AIK, one of Swedish football's most famous names.
The illness wiped him out, costing him an entire
season, but it did introduce him to the guitar. The
rest is Swedish light entertainment history.
Having been reluctantly persuaded to perform at an
open-mic night at a local casino, a wobbly video of
Walker's performance found its way to the
producers of Swedish Idol 2013.
They knew a crossover hit when they saw one,
particularly one with an interesting back story,
flowing locks and a ready-made fan base.
"I just thought 'why not?', but I had no ambition
back then, and I had never been on stage before,"
Walker explained.
"But it just went mad. Before I knew it they were
rearranging my games to fit in with the show, and I
was singing at the princess's birthday party and
doing duets with Robbie Williams.
"I think I got the hang of it in the end.
"But I never missed a training session and I played
every minute of the season."
That campaign ended last month with promotion to
the top flight for Walker's team, GIF Sundsvall, and
a move to Djurgarden, 11-time Swedish champions
and the third best-supported club in the land.
Walker describes himself as a "hard-working
midfielder, who can spot a pass and score goals",
and a "singer-songwriter with a modern take on it",
and he has a recording contract with Universal to
prove it.
So this is no Tomlinson-to-Doncaster-style stunt,
and he is considerably more convincing as a pop
star than Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle ever were.
Their Diamonds Lights might have reached number
12 in the charts in 1987, but it has been a regular in
"the worst record ever" polls ever since, and their
performance on Top of the Pops was described by
one reviewer "as a timeless classic for all the
wrong reasons".
At least Waddle had the self-awareness to be
embarrassed by it, Hoddle later referred to it as
"one of the greatest things I ever did".
'A musician's life is a lot easier'
Few agreed with him, and legend has it that when
he was interviewed for the England job nearly a
decade later, FA chief executive Graham Kelly
asked him if he had "any skeletons in the closet…
apart from that record with Chris Waddle".
Of course, it is a bit unfair to pick on "Glenn and
Chris" when there are Kevin Keegan's "Head Over
Heels in Love" and Paul Gascoigne's "Fog on the
Tyne" to dissect, and who can forget Andy Cole's
1999 classic "Outstanding"? Oh, you all can.
From the other direction, no pun intended, nobody
has really got that close to combining a music
career with a sideline in soccer.
Westlife's Nicky Byrne spent a couple of years in
Leeds United's academy as a goalkeeper, but his
ability to sing close harmonies on chat shows
proved better than his command of the six-yard
area.
Indie guitar great Johnny Marr(external) had trials
with Manchester City and has claimed Brian
Clough's Nottingham Forest were "sniffing about",
but the fact he wore eyeliner on the pitch probably
reveals he knew where his true calling lay.
The same can be said of Stewart and his famous
flirtation with football.
"A musician's life is a lot easier," he later wrote.
"And I can also get drunk and make music, and I
can't do that and play football."
So Walker, the tough-tackling troubadour, is in a
subset of one, making him the only man who can
really answer what is better: scoring a goal in front
of thousands, or hearing thousands sing the words
to one of your songs back at you?
"Ah, they're two completely different things," he
revealed.
"And I'm privileged to do both."
posted from Bloggeroid
Comments
Post a Comment