Thirty minutes. That is all it took for Rodeo Terrorists to write Saltire (Tartan Army), a football anthem that is already turning heads ahead of Scotland’s World Cup campaign. We caught up with the man behind the project, an English IT manager with a deep love for Scotland, a background building websites for some of the biggest pop acts on the planet, and a very personal reason for releasing this track, to find out how a lunch break idea became something much bigger. We spoke to Rodeo Terrorists to hear the full story and more.

Thirty minutes. You wrote Saltire (Tartan Army) in thirty minutes during a break at work. Walk me through those thirty minutes — were you at your desk, on your phone, humming into a voice memo? What did that half hour actually look like?

By trade I’m really a software developer (even though these days I have responsibility for managing the companies entire IT systems), each day I have a standup meeting with my team to run through the daily tasks and projects and immediately after I often take a quick break. As it was I was talking to a friend in Scotland about promoting another song called ‘Something Right’ and I had that ‘inspiration moment’ of doing a World Cup song. The first verse of Saltire was almost a parody of the first verse of ‘Something Right, which goes ‘We write our own songs, that sometimes are crap, we pencil each line as they fall in our trap’, so I like to think I’m quite good at rhymes, and I took that same lyrical intent into Saltire. I wanted the song to be catchy with a really strong chorus, but also a narrative that was all about football, and once you place a couple of simple ideas for verses around a few ‘footballing’ facts it does  a bit like lego just fall into place.

You’re a fifty-five-year-old English IT manager releasing a Scottish football anthem. That sentence alone is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The Tartan Army is fiercely loyal, deeply proud, and they know when someone is taking the piss versus when someone genuinely loves the culture. How do you expect Scottish football fans to receive a track made by an Englishman?

I actually really hope they’ll love to hate it but secretly they love it, its a bit like the relationship of Scotland & England we love to fight but we so depend on each other in equal measure. In far many ways Saltire is far more taking the pish out of England and their gloriously unsuccessful football team, so its sort of a double double-crossing agent of a song.

Before Rodeo Terrorists, you were building websites for Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Steps — some of the biggest pop acts on the planet. You were right there, inside the machinery, watching how massive releases get rolled out. What’s the strangest or most surreal thing you witnessed working behind the scenes at that level?

I suppose how mundane the music business is, yes its full of glamour, music and ‘amazing’ artists, but its also about the people just working away at their own specialty trying to do an honest job and as a team make a success of the records they made. I don’t want to diminish the ‘role’ the artists play because heck they’ve got the guts to get up on stage and sing (and get all the criticism for it), but in many ways they are just the tip of the iceberg.

The track has this interesting tension in it — there’s a Celtic folk warmth running through the melody, and then this electronic pop-rock punch underneath. It feels like The Waterboys walked into a New Order session and everyone just decided to keep playing. Did you set out to blend those two worlds deliberately, or did the production just drift there on its own while you were building the track? 

Because I’d written ‘Something Right’ which also had a Celtic folky feel, I did use a similar musical narrative when writing Saltire. I have to be clear though I did use AI to record the song,  I’d worked out much of the melodic structure, arrangement and such like beforehand, and then reworked the track back through my home studio. 

You studied in Scotland, and you’ve described the country as a second home. What specifically happened during your time studying in Scotland that turned it from a destination into something personal?

I’m not sure really, Whiskey? England sometimes lacks a real sense of identity but Scotland has it in spades. I’m not at all nationalistic and absolutely abhor the right-wing narrow minded politics but the Scots are loving, funny and hard working, and lastly fiercely independent that we can do this ourselves.

Football anthems are a strange genre. They have to work in a stadium with fifty thousand people singing, they have to work on a phone speaker in a pub, and they have to survive being played eight hundred times in a row without becoming annoying. When you were writing Saltire (Tartan Army), which of those scenarios were you designing for?

I sort of didn’t consider people actually might quite like the tune enough to play it! Its weird because after I’d written & recorded it I went back and listened to a bunch of ‘Football’ songs and I think what works with them is that they are a bit rough and ready in places, so being over polished would spoil the vibe. The chorus I did imagine could be sung in a stadium, hopefully I wont have to teach anyone the words!

You’re using this single to raise funds and awareness for MND Scotland in memory of a close friend. Music and charity can sometimes sit awkwardly together — the fun of the song pulling one way, the seriousness of the cause pulling another. How do you hold both of those things at the same time with a track that’s built around humour and banter?

My friend who died in his forties of MND was a very funny man with an incredibly dry sense of humour. He I think would have told me that the song was absolutely terrible and under no circumstances should it ever see the light of day. But he unfortunately is no longer with us and doesn’t get to call the shots, if there can be a beneficial outcome from the record (other than Scotland winning the World Cup) I would like MND to benefit from it.

Rodeo Terrorists is a hell of a name. It’s provocative, it’s weird, it sticks in your head immediately. Where did that come from, and have you ever had a situation where the name caused you problems — a venue pulling a booking, a playlist rejecting you, someone misunderstanding the intent?

The name comes in part from two of my musical loves, Steve Earle and the KLF (& Extreme Noise Terror) in a nod to country and techno music. My wife of twenty six years & counting hated it at first, but like me she’s come to accept it as part of the bargain, likewise I’ve had pushback of playlists and suchlike, saying ‘you can’t call yourself that, we’re a family podcast etc etc, but then be completely happy to put the Killers or Stranglers in their playlist.

You came back to music as a DIY creator after years in the tech industry. Building websites for global pop stars means you understand distribution, algorithms, metadata, how content travels online — the entire digital pipeline. Most independent musicians are learning that stuff from scratch. How much of your IT background has directly shaped the way you release music as Rodeo Terrorists?

To be honest I had to re-learn all this modern streaming stuff and playlist rubbish like the rest. I indeed do understand how the music business works, and the fundamentals remain the same but the landscape has changed so fast in the last 20 years its almost impossible to navigate. But what I do know is that in-order to get a record recognized you sill need to get it in the press & radio .

Scotland are heading into World Cup fever, the Tartan Army is gearing up, and your anthem is already out there. Best case scenario — where does Saltire (Tartan Army) end up? Give me the dream. Is it the stadium PA system, is it a viral terrace video, is it BBC picking it up before a match? What does the perfect life for this track look like?

If the BBC were to play Saltire it would be amazing, to have it bedded into the national psyche of songs like Three Lions or World In Motion or Back Home would be an excellent result. In someways the Rodeo Terrorists were just a practical joke that became reality, I was managing an indie band in Stoke On Trent and they bemoaned that they couldn’t get on the radio, so I recorded a track on Garage Band sent it into BBC Introducing and it was played that very weekend. Saltire is a little song that’s prepared to take on the world, it might not get there, or even on to the team bus but you can only dream.

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