You don’t need to be a football fan to find the sound of a crowd singing together profoundly moving. And you don’t need to be a Liverpool FC fan to find the Kop end singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” a breathtaking spectacle. When the club clinched the Premier League title in late April, the crowd, players and management united to sing a jubilant rendition of football’s most famous terrace anthem.
The song, written for Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel but popularised by Merseybeat greats Gerry & The Pacemakers in 1963, was adopted by the red half of Liverpool after the band’s singer Gerry Marsden presented then-manager Bill Shankly with a pre-release copy of the single. Since then, layer upon layer of meaning has been grafted onto the song. Every generation has added to its resonance in the collective consciousness, through Shankly and Paisley, via Fagan and Dalglish, onwards into the Klopp and Arne Slot eras.
It’s a song sung in victory and defeat, joy and sorrow. Since the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, it has also been a conduit for grief and remembrance – a reminder that the quest for justice for the 97 who lost their lives continues, a message to the dead and bereaved that they will never walk alone as long as fans sing the song. And, as fans around the world made clear following the horror at Liverpool’s victory parade last month, the community of voices remains strong.
The song also became a Celtic fan favourite, and since the late 60s has provided a soundtrack to many of the club’s biggest moments. And when Celtic provided a hand of friendship to Liverpool in the aftermath of Hillsborough, the 60,000 fans who attended a fundraising match for the victims’ families at Celtic Park joined each other in an emotional rendition as the teams took to the field.
Professor Les Back is a sociologist, musician and lifelong Millwall FC fan. In a new Radio 4 documentary, he argues that football chants are modern-day folk music. It is a compelling idea, one he says is inspired by a folk great.
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“One of the English folk musicians I admire most is Martin Carthy,” says Back, professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow. “He coined this phrase that football chants are ‘one of the last vestiges of a living folk tradition’. It was an inspired insight… and we’ve run with it.”
In the grand tradition of folk song collectors Cecil Sharp in the UK or Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger in the US, Back has traversed the country’s football clubs – from Hibernian to Dulwich Hamlet via Newcastle United, Norwich City, Celtic and Rangers – recording football chants and discussing their importance and meaning with fans and players.
“More than 20 years ago, I was involved in the early days of the Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football campaign,” Back says. “I did a research project that resulted in a book called The Changing Face of Football. I’d always been fascinated with the way singing is a representation of community, and how ideas around belonging and place are manifest in the sound of the crowd.
“I was fascinated by the songs but frustrated by the public conversation around football culture and the way the obsession with football hooliganism dominated the public debate.”
On the ball
The first recorded football terrace song was On the Ball, City – a beloved anthem of Norwich City. “Making the documentary, I learned that the song predates the club,” says Back. “It was written as an anthem for the city – a popular representation of not only football culture, but of the city of Norwich before Norwich City was formed. Now it’s embroidered into the shirts and everywhere in fan culture.”
Football chants are songs like no other. There is humour and defiance, solidarity and strength, creative swearing and caustic wit. “That’s what I love about the music of the stadium,” continues Back. “It can be utterly profane or thoroughly sacred, in the sense of a belief in a shared human faith, tradition and heritage. The balance is what makes football culture such a fascinating place.
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“I was interested by songs about place, songs about players and songs improvised in the moment, drawing on stocks of knowledge from pop music.”
The way songs spread through a community is another tie to the folk tradition. From the Hibs crowd adopting The Proclaimers classic “Sunshine on Leith” (voted the UK’s favourite football anthem by Radio 6 Music listeners in 2018), to Dulwich Hamlet’s “Hills”, these are songs informed by shared cultural references, belted out by a powerful union of voices.
“Football songs usually start with one or two people in the crowd,” says Back. “I spoke with fans about what it’s like to have the courage to call a song, and the buzz when thousands of people join in.
“One of the people in the documentary is the fantastic Scottish musician and football fan Louis Abbott, lead singer of Admiral Fallow. Louis said it reminded him of Gaelic psalm singing – where someone leads and others follow, slightly behind. In a football ground the voices swirl like a sonic version of a murmuration.”
No one likes us, we don’t care
As a Millwall fan, Back has had a close-up view of the way football clubs and their fans have been stereotyped. He’s also seen how the crowd can turn these perceptions into powerful anthems.
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“’No one likes us, we don’t care’ is the most defiant song,” he says. “Millwall became a symbol of everything hateful about English football. There is something about the recognition of that from fans and defiantly turning it back against the world that I love.”
Not that Back is blind to problems within football culture and the way they mirror or amplify issues in wider society.
“The idea that there is a linear shift to a more inclusive, open-minded version of football culture would be naive,” he says. “That line between playfully profane and insulting and hateful can be crossed. But there are subtleties that aren’t captured in the public conversation. There is a more inclusive, more playful sense of what football culture is now. Fans also police themselves more, reserving the right to say, ‘I’m not singing that any more.’
“Liverpool fans sing about Mo Salah as being a ‘gift from Allah’. Could you imagine references to Allah being something positive in a football ground 25 years ago? It doesn’t mean there isn’t also hateful and Islamophobic sentiment around. But what you hear in the songs is the ordinary assimilation of difference, whether it’s religious, cultural or racial.”
Les Back and Louis Abbott in Glasgow’s Cathkin Park, home of Third Lanark before they folded in 1967. Image: supplied
Coming home
Talk to any football fans in the modern era, and club ownership is likely to be a concern. From the Glazers at Manchester United to the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United, many fans are in constant antagonistic dialogue – through songs – with the club hierarchy.
“Something that came up across the country is the assertion that the team doesn’t belong to the people who’ve bought the club. It belongs to the fans. We heard it in Newcastle very strongly,” Back says.
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“The songs belong to the fans too. And some are close to what we might understand as protest music, part of the folk tradition of protesting on behalf of those being wronged. So I don’t think it is wildly speculative to think about football chants as part of a folk music.”
Outside the Gallowgate end at St James’s Park, Back met John Finnegan, who leads the crowd through “Coming Home Newcastle” before every home game.
“Across the street another charismatic Geordie had a collection bucket for the food bank,” Back recalls. “You watch that solidarity, see that sense of shared fate or shared fight – these things are like ordinary miracles. And the music has that magical quality.”
Whether your team is top of the league or fighting for survival, the song remains the same. These are songs of celebration, defiance, collective history, protest or calls to action. Songs whose meaning evolves over time as they pass down through generations.
“Bert Lloyd, one of my great heroes, wrote the best book ever written about English folk music,” says Back.
“His definition of folk music was very open: ‘Folk music is the music of the unlettered.’ And there is no better way than to describe a football crowd – a crowd of the unlettered.”
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