Imagine if this football-powered hit kept its cringy original lyric and title

In the movie Bend It Like Beckham, there are sequences where the young girls playing soccer football seem like they’re about to fly into the air. They’re moving at speed, there’s joy all around, and there’s bright music on the speakers.

A defining song on the soundtrack is Inner Smile by Texas, who were not from Texas but rather Scotland. Texas were already well-established when they released Inner Smile as a single in 2001. A year later, it was on the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack, and that helped take the song beyond the U.K.

An interesting bit of trivia. The song was originally titled Inner Child, which from a distance might sound innocuous… until you catch what it would have meant in the lyrics:

'Cause you make me feel wild
You touch my inner child smile

Umm, ew.

No wonder they changed it!

For the band’s pre-Beckham video, Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri dressed as Elvis, channelling the 1968 comeback special:

The song was cowritten by Gregg Alexander, who has had a sizeable career over the years writing numerous pop hits for others … and also for himself.

Alexander released an album in 1998 under the name New Radicals, which was less a band than a solo project with friends. He wasn’t much into the rock star schtick, though, and shelved the whole thing after just one record, which included the hit You Get What You Give.

Thanks to the internet, his demo for Inner Child — awkward title and all — lives.

You can see from his initial workthrough that the bones of the future hit were well in place long before it found a home in the U.K.:

Spiteri and Texas are still going strong, it seems.

A proper Gen X icon now in her late 50s, Spiteri still has pipes, as this live 2023 version of Inner Smile proves: