Revealed: Coldplay's role in helping Birmingham City win again

ALEX McLeish has enlisted the help of one of his favourite bands in an attempt to revive the St Andrew’s atmosphere.

Coldplay’s chart-topper Viva La Vida has been designated as Blues’ new run-out tune, replacing Feel It by The Tamperer, and McLeish and club PR and marketing staff have drawn up a new playlist for the pre-match music.

The UB40 classic Food For Thought is among the songs, the melody from which became a cult favourite among supporters who suddenly started to chant it at the season’s start.

For a while McLeish and Blues have been wracking their brains for ways of encouraging a better mood, of togetherness and noise, around the stadium rather than the anxious negativity that has so often been the case this season.

“Over the years on my travels to Germany and France and places like that I’ve always made a habit of going out and watching the pre-match entertainment,” said McLeish.

“Dutch teams, Belgian teams have been very influential on the crowd, getting them going, and in Germany the other week I heard the [Coldplay] song and thought ‘that sounds fantastic, if I was in the crowd I’d love that’. The crowd interacted with it.

“I thought, after speaking with our team at St Andrew’s, that there were a couple of songs we could introduce and they are trying to think about other things to motivate our support.”

“But,” McLeish conceded, “there’s nothing that motivates more than a performance the players gave us the other night.” Trevor Francis was behind the introduction of Feel It after listening to a selection of potential run-out songs in his car on the way into Wast Hills for training.

And McLeish said it was something he had done before too.

He said: “We like our traditional songs like Mr Blue Sky and Keep Right On. There’s no doubt we will never discard songs like that.

“But you can keep up with some new anthems. We did it at Rangers and we did it at Hibs.”

Blur’s Song 2 was introduced at Ibrox by McLeish, who has recently been appealing, along with Blues’ players, for fans to get behind the side to boost their Championship promotion push.

It’s the punchy sound of Viva La Vida – a Spanish phrase which means ‘long live life’ – which appeals to McLeish, as the opening lyrics are hardly uplifting:

I used to rule the world, seas would rise when I gave the word,

Now in the morning I sleep alone, sweep the streets I used to own.

But perhaps later on in the song, he found one verse appropriate:

Revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate,

Just a puppet on a lonely string, oh who would ever want to be king?

Colin Tattum, Birmingham Mail

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