Exclusive:Watch: Belle and Sebastian debut Scotland World Cup song It Only Takes One Lion
The Glasgow band performed their new Scottish football anthem during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall last night on a tour where they played Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister in full on alternate nights to celebrate the 30th anniversary of both albums which were released in 1996.
Belle and Sebastian have written a song for the Scotland national team to mark their return to the World Cup for the first time in 28 years. The Glasgow band played the song called It Only Takes One Lion for the first time live during a gig last night at the Royal Albert Hall. Lead singer Stuart Murdoch introduced the new track that the band have been working on during an international tour where they have been revisiting two albums released back to back in 1996.
Addressing the audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Murdoch said: “So at this juncture, because you guys are obviously so rad, because you're obviously a special kind of an audience, we're going to do something a bit unusual. We're going to play a song that we just wrote.
“We sort of have to do this because we have written a song and it seems so ridiculous to debut it here and to try it out here because it's half written, but we've written a song from the Scottish World Cup to you.
“Nobody knows. It's not the official one because right now Scotland haven't qualified for about 500 years, 500 miles. Everybody in Scotland right now is writing a Scottish football song. There's hundreds of them. So we're just going to throw ours on the pile.
“We're in Village Hall of England here. And I hope that you feel that we are your scrappy little brother when it comes to football these days. So we're not really a threat. We're just there for the party, okay? So I hope people get behind this.
“And so we're going to sing this song and any cheering, because we're actually going to record this while we're doing it. And it might be the record. So any cheering, clapping, just outbursts of anything, you might get on the record. It's called It Only Takes One Lion. Gentlemen of a certain age may not even know what we're talking about.”
The song includes the lines “this is Scotland where you can join an army that’s for peace”, “this is Scotland where everybody knows you start with nothing” and “we play the game and we shoot for the stars.”
Previous songs written or performed to mark Scotland’s appearance at a World Cup include Del Amitri’s Don't Come Home Too Soon in 1998, BA Robertson’s We Have a Dream in 1982 and Say it with Pride in 1990 which featured vocals from Fish, James Grant of Love & Money and Runrig’s Donnie Munro.
Del Amitri will be travelling to the US this June with the Tartan Army, for a run of summer shows including two gigs around Scotland’s first two World Cup group games.
The band will head out to as America co-hosts the World Cup with Mexico and Canada, for an opening date in Milwaukee on 13 June, then performing in Minneapolis and Chicago, before stopping in Providence on 17 June and Boston the next day, which will be one of the main bases for Scotland supporters at the tournament.
Scotland will compete in Group C of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with matches against Haiti on 14 June and against Morocco on 19 June, both matches taking place at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, a 40 minute drive from Boston. Scotland then travel to Miami where they will face Brazil at the Hard Rock Stadium on 24 June.