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Sun 28 September 2025 6:00, UK
If you grew up playing FIFA in the early 2000s, then you’ll remember that just as exciting as the leaps in gameplay and graphics that came with each new instalment was the new music that soundtracked the menu screens in each new entry in the series.
Steve Schnur, music executive for EA early in the century, was consistently hitting the back of the net when licensing songs like ‘Red Morning Light’ by the Kings of Leon, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ from Morrissey, ‘Tell Her Tonight’ by Franz Ferdinand and of course, one of the classics, ‘Jerk It Out’ by Caesars.
Great songs find their way into people’s ears through more than just playing over the menu screens of football games, though, and in 2002, there weren’t many greater songs in the world of indie rock than ‘Jerk It Out’ by the Scandinavian group Caesars Palace, although it was the only song from their album Love for the Streets that garnered any attention outside their native Sweden. In fact, ‘Jerk It Out’ was such a big track for the (by now re-named) Caesars, that the song reappeared on their next album, 2005’s Paper Tigers.
Though a few more people in the wider world had begun to pay attention to the group, probably thanks to their trademark song being included on the FIFA soundtrack as well as in an advert for Apple’s then-latest iPod, the album still didn’t sell that well or make much of a mark on too many people. At least one person did listen beyond the lead single, though, and fell for the rest of the album as well.
Steve Jones, founding guitarist from the Sex Pistols, seemed to have his ear to the ground in the early 2000s, and could have done a pretty good job choosing music for your favourite football game franchise himself. When asked by Entertainment Weekly for his favourite albums of all time, Jones skewed a lot more modern than you’d expect from an old punk like him when he brought up the names of a few 21st-century albums, including Paper Tigers (his most surprising pick by far, though, is surely a collection of Cliff Richard’s Greatest Hits, seriously).
Perhaps Caesars’ attempt to re-create and recapture a feeling from a bygone age and inject it with a modern attitude struck a chord with Jones in the same way that it clearly struck a chord with audiences who thought that this was the direction in which modern rock should head.
And though a lot was made at the time of the retro feel of Caesars’ then-latest release, and you can hear why, just listen to that organ sound on ‘We Got to Leave’, but looking back now, the sound and feel of the some of the album seems to predate the sound of feel of future indie from bands like The Vaccines, as on the opener ‘Spirit’, as much as it does echo the past. Some songs on the album, like ‘It’s Not the Fall That Hurts’, seem to straddle the worlds, the old and the new, and sound both like a throw-back and a leap-forward in time all at once.
Paper Tigers probably isn’t even the most obscure indie album from 2005 that Steve Jones adored. Alongside more understandable ‘All Time Favourite Album’ picks by Roxy Music (Roxy Music), David Bowie (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars) and Morrissey (You Are the Quarry), Jones also listed the aforementioned Paper Tigers and, released in the same year, Take Fountain by American indie group The Wedding Present (me neither).
If you’ve never heard the album, and you’ve probably never heard the album, then a lot of it sounds a little bit like what you’d get if Franz Ferdinand got together to play a few latter-day Peter Doherty side-band cover tracks, and got them half mixed-up in their minds with the memory of hearing The Smiths playing, drifting in through the walls of another room.
So all in all, what I’m trying to say is, it’s pretty good! Surprising choice for anyone to pick as a favourite album of all time, sure, but not one that doesn’t deserve attention, and definitely more attention than it’s gotten before.
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