90min Meets: Midfield Workhorse Talk New EP, Best Newcastle Moments, Title Winners, KCOM and More

Is there anything better, as a band full of massive football fans, to hear your own songs being blasted out at stadiums?

Kingston/London-based band Midfield Workhorse have been handed that opportunity this season, with their song "Our Foremost Cartographers" on Hull City's matchday playlist for the duration of the campaign. 

Speaking to 90min on transfer deadline day ahead of the launch of their new EP 'Hokusai’s Last Haiku' on Friday, Del Noble from the band admitted: "This is something which has come about completely by chance! A friend of mine actually works up there and when we were looking at interesting angles to promote the EP, we were looking at some sporting ideas and suggested 'let's see if we can get it played at major football grounds!'

"We had a chat, and he basically said leave it with me and it's now on the matchday playlist for the season so that's pretty cool. As a Newcastle fan, I would have loved it to be at St James' Park, but Hull is still pretty cool in its own respect.

Image by Chris Deeley

"It's quite nice that we're loosely based in Kingston upon Thames, so to go from Kingston upon Thames to Kingston upon Hull is also a really, really lovely, tenuous link that we're going to go with as much as we can!"

Speaking of the topic de jour, Noble launched into Newcastle's transfer dealings - or lack thereof. "It's a difficult one," he said, "because I've always been a pragmatic Newcastle fan and I understand the trials and tribulations, having gone through Champions League football down to two relegations.

Image by Chris Deeley

"I have been one of these rare fans that's been backing Mike Ashley because I know that he stabilised the club through previous regimes financially but it's definitely got to a breaking point for me. We're back in the Premier League, we've got a team of players who only just got back into the Premier League, even though we were champions. 

"It's been difficult because one of our main signings (Florian Lejeune) has been injured in the game against Spurs. We were always looking to centre-backs and to finally get one and then have him out for however many months is a real setback. 

"Aside from that, I think we've been quite shrewd so far but I don't see us staying up if we don't make two or three signings in the remainder of the window, which is, as someone who is generally fairly optimistic about us, it's been tough viewing so far."

Naming the Magpies' 3-2 win over Barcelona in 1997 as his favourite game of all time, he said: "I think the one that's always going to stick out is Faustino Asprilla scoring a hat-trick against Barcelona, that's really good pub quiz knowledge because he was the last person to score a hat-trick against Barcelona, in history.

"Most difficult game to watch, maybe not difficult but the worst one, was when I went up to one of the Europa League games a few years back. It was on Valentines Day and I was single at the time, so I thought I'll go and watch the boys, so I took a couple of days off work to travel up from London on a Thursday night.

"I watched a 0-0 draw, where I thought, by the end of it, Papiss Cisse loved being offside so much he was going to get married to it. It was genuinely one of the worst displays I've ever seen in my life. It was just that classic, really sad, single man's Valentines Day. So yeah, that's a really good memory, that one."

As with any Newcastle fan this season, the spiral came rapidly - and the stories of what Twitter would term the Magpies' 'banter era' flow fast. "This is one of the things where I'm really glad that Arsenal Football Club exists," he groans, "because I think otherwise we'd be the laughing stock, even more than we are now. 

"We've kind of gone from being supposedly everyone's second favourite club to the 'oh god, what's happening at St James' this week' soap opera, but anything we can do, Arsenal can do better. 

"Arsenal FanTV is one of the greatest inventions of all time, ever, they've done that full circle where they've gone into self-parody, and gone back into being serious and trying to reinvent themselves but they just can't because it's Arsenal Football Club, and that's the way the club works.

"What's worse is that the drummer in the band is a Chelsea fan, so I've had to endure this crap from him for however long, and the only times that I've had to give it back is when Cisse scored that unbelievable finish against Petr Cech and I think for a while Newcastle were Chelsea's bogey team."

For the rest of the season - as wide open as any in years - he speculates: "We could win it. We've seen it recently with Leicester City winning that if you get a good, strong set of players, you manage to stay injury free, you get that team together and you get a good manager behind them, and you can win the league if you do that. 

"There's also always going to be the big money teams in there that will throw cash at it and it will work, your Chelseas, your Manchester Citys. I think Manchester United have been doing it the last few seasons and I think it is going to finally happen for them this season."

Midfield Workhorse's new EP Hokusai’s Last Haiku is available from Friday 1st September on Spotify