Thirty years on, Republica cash in on the anthem that almost wasn't a hit

An anthem built on Cockney rhyming slang and an Atari ST

Republica’s Ready to Go has had a strange afterlife: sung by 40,000 people at the Stadium of Light when Sunderland beat Chelsea last season, performed pitchside at a Fifa World Cup, and reportedly a fixture on Olivia Rodrigo’s world tour setlist. Thirty years after it was released, the band are marking the anniversary with a UK tour beginning on 16 October, and singer Saffron, guitarist Johnny Male and their bandmates have used the moment to lay out, in some detail, how a self-funded Shoreditch studio project became one of the decade’s more durable earworms.

The account, told to the Guardian, is refreshingly light on mythology and heavy on mechanics. The band built their own studio space before Shoreditch was the postcode of choice for anyone with a laptop and a trust fund, and ran the whole operation on gig money ploughed straight back into outboard gear. Vocals went down on an 8-track digital recorder; guitars were sampled into an Akai S1000 because their Atari ST computer only handled MIDI. It is, in other words, a portrait of a band learning studio production in real time, with whatever kit they could afford, a far cry from the algorithmically informed, major-label-funded sessions that shape most chart hits now.

The unglamorous truth about “authenticity”

There’s a useful corrective here to any tidy creation myth. Saffron admits the song’s most memorable couplet very nearly wasn’t the one that survived: a stronger lyric about staying in bed all day lost out to “your T-shirt’s dish dirt” because she wasn’t concentrating on the final take. The dyed red hair, now inseparable from the band’s visual identity, came from a passing suggestion at the hairdresser’s, not a marketing meeting. Jarvis Cocker’s maxim about a hook and a haircut being enough to make a pop star gets an admiring nod, but it’s worth noting that the maxim only works if the hook actually turns up, and by the band’s own telling that took a hundred mixes and a good deal of studio arguing to arrive.

There’s also a pointed, if understated, observation about the gender economics of the mid-90s guitar-and-dance crossover scene: getting gigs as a woman-fronted band was hard, and Republica’s survival depended on being one of the few visible female-led acts in a landscape otherwise stacked against them. That the band still wishes there were more women in bands today is a modest but telling piece of industry commentary, decades on.

The nostalgia circuit, and who actually benefits

None of this changes the fact that a 30th-anniversary tour is, at root, a business decision about a legacy catalogue with proven sync value, stadium singalongs, World Cup appearances, a co-sign from one of the biggest pop stars alive. Anniversary tours of this kind are now a well-worn revenue strategy for acts whose one enduring hit outlives everything else they released, and Republica are transparent enough about the economics of their earlier years, ploughing gig income into gear rather than paying themselves, that it’s hard to begrudge them cashing in on a song that clearly still fills venues.

What the interview doesn’t answer, and what matters more to the wider live circuit than any one band’s origin story, is what a tour like this actually pays support acts, crew and venues in 2026’s tighter margins. The song may still be a battlecry. Whether the tour’s economics are as democratic as the studio that made it remains, as ever, the harder question.