The Song Remains in the Game

Soccer Digest, Feb, 2001 by Brent Dicrescenzo

Forget "Who Let the Dogs Out?" and the "Super Bowl Shuffle," nowhere is the marriage of sport and song stronger than in the English stands and terraces

IN 1913, WHILE STROLLING UNDER gray Connecticut skies, gray gargoyles, and green ivy, a young Cole Porter composed wanton sing-a-longs for his beloved Yale Bulldogs. Although originally performed in productions for the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the Yale Dramatic Association, the songs found their way to the football bleachers and the throats of a crapulent student body.

Today "Boola Boola," Yale's official fight song, is arguably more performed than Porter standards such as "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." In a primitive precursor to Parliament's "Atomic Dog," the chorus of "Bull Dog" chanted "Bulldog! Bull-dog! / Bow, wow, wow / Eli Yale!" Decades later, grown men chomp Milk bones in the Cleveland Browns' "Dog Pound" and the musical question "Who Let the Dogs Out?" echoes unanswered in American stadiums and arenas. Perhaps it's a tenuous chain of cause and effect, but Porter established several continuing traditions for the intermingling worlds of pop music and sports in New Haven. Nowhere is this romance between song and sport more evident than in English soccer, where Elton John owns a 119-year-old franchise and the traditional Royals have been usurped in the tabloids by David Beckham and his wife, Posh Spice.

Melodies from Porter's bygone showtunes era carry on in cramped U.K. Kops, although these days the lyrics have been altered to ribald braggadocio or taunts.

Wolverhampton Wanderers adopted "Wand'ring Star" from Lerner & Loewe's blithe shoot-'em-up, "Paint Your Wagon," as its rallying cry. The chorus now goes, "I was born under a Wanderers' scarf / Do you know where hell is? / Hell is at West Brom!" Across the pitch the West Bromwich Albion blokes retaliate with the somewhat less sophisticated, "Boing Boing / Albion 'til I die / the Lord is my Shepherd / Slap a dingle / Always -- on the Gold and Black." Charming.

Opposing fans toss easy jabs at the rural Welsh Wrexham club to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marching In." Barmy Arsenal fans, as well as those from nearby Everton and Liverpool, chant, "Oh fluffy sheep are wonderful / They're white, fluffy, and Welsh / Oh fluffy sheep are wonderful," to the Wrexham players, currently wallowing in the Second Division. As the new lyrics will attest, no love has been lost between the Welsh and English since the Anglos and Saxons moved onto the island in the 5th century. The more resigned Wrexham stands fall into renditions of "Que Sera Sera."

Barnsley supporters mock their team's imported talent with a warped take on "Blue Moon" that claims, "Brazil / It's just like watching Brazil." Other teams in blue kits likewise pick chromatically inclined rally songs. Birmingham City go so far as actually singing the blues with the appropriate titled "Singing The Blues"--an ideal choice for a motor city ravaged by economic hardships in the 1980s and a team eternally struggling to climb into the Premiership. City's fans sealed their fate with that fight song. Unless you're Dan Ackroyd, it's hard to get pumped by the blues.

Coventry City's savvy, 1960s manager Jimmy Hill knew better and changed both the team's dull name, Bantams, and dull color, navy, to "Sky Blue." He even composed the upbeat "Sky Blue Song" as part of a bullish, successful marketing campaign. The team slowly crawled from the Fourth Division to the Premiership.

Celebrity Chelsea supporter Graham "Suggs" McPherson, singer for 1980s ska stars Madness, hit the charts in 1997 singing "Blue Day" with the then-reigning FA Cup champions. Ironically the members of current Britpop holdouts the Bluetones claim the red-and-white clad Brentford as their favorites.

Bridging the gap between Broadway and the Beatles is--fittingly--Liverpool, who famously use Merseybeat chancers Gerry and The Pacemakers' cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone." The song changed in context from an easy-going bop to a tearful anthem after 96 fans were crushed in the Hillsborough disaster of 1989.

Liverpool's four most famous sons obviously have their place in stadium cheers. Arsenal praise its own Perry Groves by morphing the chorus of the John Lennon-penned, Ringo Starr-sung "Yellow Submarine" into "We All Live in a Perry Groves World." Charlton Athletic fans transform Paul McCartney's "Mull of Kintyre" into an ode to their stadium, "Valley Floyd Road." The world still awaits anything being adopted from George Harrison's songbook.

The one thing the whole of England can rally behind is its national team. For the 1970 World Cup, 15 years before the Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew's "Super Bowl Shuffle," the England team pioneered the sports team single by cutting "Back Home." (The idea being that the English team, the current Cup holders, would again bring the Cup, ahem, "back home.") Alas, the squad fared better in the English charts than on the pitch. The song went to #1 in the English charts; the team lost a 3-2 heartbreaker to Germany in the semifinals.