You Can't Take Carlisle From the Boy

I got some response - all of it thankfully positive - about the column I wrote last summer itemising some great football books. One thing a few of you seemed particularly thankful for was the way I pointed out some overlooked gems long fallen to the status of bargain buys on the internet via sites like Amazon.

Since one or two of those people asked if I'd come up with another list around Christmas time I'm devoting this column to a few ideas for Christmas presents for the person who claims to have every kind of football item. I'm guessing that person may not be familiar with the stone-gone novelty pop classic that is 'Jack Charlton's Geordie Sunday'.

This gem and several other football records and recordings that almost beggar belief were crammed onto the album Bend It 91, released 18 years ago. The Bend It series ran for four editions and crammed classic football kitsch into collections running well past the one hour mark.

Some of the cuts were obvious choices; 'I Wish I Could Play Like Charlie George' and other ill-advised outpourings of fan-love had been doing the rounds on compilation tapes for some time, so the chance to own laser-etched top quality recordings was welcomed by a hard-core of listeners who'd sought this stuff out for ages.

The Bend It collections were unleashed by the aptly named 'Exotica' label, home to a range of strange and - well - exotic sounds, the label's main claim to fame is a series of 'Exotic Beatles' albums where everyone from the terminally feckless to the gifted but misguided rub shoulders as they murder the greatest catalogue in popular music.

By contrast the Bend It series offers up a range of well-meaning but generally hopeless works chronicling the football greats of an era noted for embarrassing haircuts and the first stirrings of football as a major commercial operation.

Alongside unconvincing endorsements for shoddy merchandise - particularly George Best attempting to sell sports coats and grooming products - you get 'Disco Johan Cruyff' (Bend It 92), '1 0 For Your Love,' by that well known pop sensation Franz Beckenbauer (Bend It 93) or two lower-league classics 'Come On The Fish' by Fisher Athletic and Bury's 'Up The Shakers' (Bend It 94).

In this strange company the odd appearance of Brian Clough advertising Shredded Wheat or a dance orchestra or competent pop band plodding through a novelty number in praise of a football hero is the nearest thing to easy listening you are likely to find.

As a chronicle of an era of football novelty merchandise and the random joys offered as those with more ambition than talent attempt to make music it's hard to beat the Bend It compilations. Though one album fit to peel paint in its blistering awfulness, Sing! by the England World Cup squad of 1970 was also set loose on CD in the 1990s.

For sheer consistent listening pain, it does leave the more varied compilation stuff behind. The work is credited to Jeff Astle and the 1970 England World Cup Squad, in tribute to the starring role played by the cheery West Brom forward on the album. His contribution to the actual campaign for World Cup glory in Mexico, on the other hand, amounted mainly to training.

By the time Sing! was reissued Astle had already become a fixture on Fantasy Football his role ably promoted by West Brom mad Frank Skinner. The stunningly awful reworkings of pop classics like 'Sugar Sugar' and 'Puppet on a String' can still stop a normal person dead in their tracks. This truly is an item of football merchandise unlikely to be owned by a person who claims to own everything.

Predictably the Bend It collections were able to mine a small but significant amount of work linked to major clubs and major names, the same cuts subsequently appearing on specific collections devoted to Manchester United, George Best and Eric Cantona.

Packed full of low-fi seventies tack and George's own naïve sounding attempts to present himself as the stylish young player about town, The Best Album is probably the pick of the bunch. It's also a throwback to a pre-internet era when the kind of random efforts to express love and devotion were done via pop records, pin up posters and the scribbling of names in biro on your own skin.

Most of the above remains available as new, but you can also hunt around online and get lucky with the purchase of a Christmas present that is unlikely to be forgotten for a long time.