As with many of Elvis Costello's early songs, the meaning of I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea was beyond the understanding of mere man, writes Frank McNally.
I used to think it was about the fashion industry - long synonymous with that part of London - which had made a victim of the "Natasha" mentioned in the first verse: "She gave a little flirt/ Gave herself a little cuddle/ There's no place here for the mini-skirt waddle/ Capital punishment she's last year's model/ They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie".
Then I thought it might be about plastic surgery, because of the "men in white coats", one of whom "thinks of all the lips that he licks/ And all the girls that he's going to fix". But if he's a plastic surgeon, I wondered, why is licking his patients? What are the "new orders" and "warders" in the second verse? And who the hell are "Gus" and "Alfie"? Elvis didn't tell us. Just when we hoped he would explain everything in the third verse, he instead repeated the bit about Natasha, and told us again that Chelsea didn't "move" him and he didn't want to go there.
Whatever it was about, the song had added resonance for me because, a few years before it came out, when me and my school contemporaries were making that vital decision that would affect the rest of our lives - which English soccer team to support - I had chosen Chelsea. Leeds and Arsenal were both in for my signature too. But what swung the decision was the arrival at a crucial moment of a hand-me-down Chelsea strip from a cousin in Dublin. The die was cast.
Most men I know have a similar attachment to an English club and some who are otherwise sane take it very seriously, consummating the relationship with regular trips to games and speaking of their teams in the first person plural. After the age of 12, I could never match such enthusiasm for clubs with which we had no logical connection. And yet, until recently, I still felt vaguely concerned about Chelsea's results, a vestigial reflex from a time when I would dread going to school after we lost to Leeds.
It was Roman Abramovich who finally cured me, and I'm grateful to him. Not that his brash commercialism is anything new in English soccer: he has just pursued it to its ultimate conclusion, creating a club where absolutely nothing matters except winning. And in doing so, he has given me some inkling of what those song lyrics meant.
Genius that he is, Elvis Costello can hardly have foreseen the Russian takeover. I think he just got lucky with "Natasha". But as a motif for the relentless pursuit of fashion and cosmetic perfection, Chelsea the football club has crystallised Chelsea the suburb. Players bought at ridiculously inflated prices and then discarded like last year's hemlines. No place for Damien Duff and his mini-skirt waddle. Ballack is the new Black, and so on.
Elvis Costello was right, I finally realised. Chelsea doesn't move me either.
Meanwhile, just when I need a new soccer team to support, the European champions have begun this season with the logo of UNICEF on their chests. Unlike lesser clubs, Barcelona never sell the front of their shirts in lucrative sponsorship deals (except for the Nike swoosh, which is as contagious as athlete's foot). On the contrary, the "deal" with the UN children's charity will involve an annual donation from the club.
It has been described as "an initiative with soul" by Barcelona's president and it's hard to disagree. True, the same man tried to cut a deal in China last year, promoting Beijing, until the famously democratic club membership vetoed him. It's possible there is a cynical motive behind helping poor children in Africa, such as the hope that more of them grow up and buy replica shirts. But on the face of it, it seems a classy thing to do.
I used to be suspicious about Barcelona's popular appeal outside Spain. The Catalans had a certain socialist chic as the historic rival of Real Madrid, Franco's team. And, as a city, Barcelona's romantic image was immortalised by George Orwell's memoir of the civil war, Homage to Catalonia.
The only part of that book I remember clearly is a (perhaps unintentionally) funny passage about Gaudí's famous Sagrada Familia, which Orwell does not even name. Noting that the anarchists had destroyed most of the city's churches, he wonders why they spared a "hideous" modern cathedral, with spires like "hock bottles", as a work of art. He concludes that they offended against taste by not blowing it up while they had the chance.
But one of the book's general themes, I recall, was that infighting between the different republican factions in Barcelona was a bigger threat than Franco. Some of the same flakiness seemed to affect the city's biggest soccer club, historically.
Democracy is a good idea in real life, we all agree, but successful football teams tend to be run on more fascist lines, which is why Holland has not yet won the World Cup.
Now, with a Dutch manager in charge, the Catalans are rewriting all the rules. They're the European champions. They win playing beautiful football. And they think that money isn't everything. I definitely don't want to go to Chelsea any more. I want to go to Barcelona.