Can you hear the people sing?
The chants from the terraces should be treated as seriously as a symphony, says Prof Les Back
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The music of football terraces has been the soundtrack to my life. As a south Londoner, I’m a die-hard Millwall fan, while in recent years, I’ve moved to Glasgow, where it’s just as loud. I’m also a sociologist, and for the last year I’ve been travelling to football grounds all over the country, recording hundreds of songs and chants in different stadia, and exploring what they tell us about our society.
As musician Martin Carthy says in my Archive on 4 programme, football chants are one of our last vestiges of organic folk tradition – songs written by people for people. They are social and democratic forms of expression that have been long overlooked, due to snobbery I think, and
I wanted to treat them as seriously as we would a symphony – obviously less complex but equally interesting. Another musician, Louis Abbott, likens the sound of chants to a murmuration of starlings: one person starts, another continues, not always together in time or tune, but with the sound circulating and swirling just as those birds miraculously fly together.
There is no more archetypal football anthem than Liverpool’s You’ll Never Walk Alone. Even though the song originally came from a musical and is also heard at other grounds, for years it has belonged to the crowd who call Anfield home. In 1963, just as Merseyside was emerging as a global force in popular music, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version went to number one, and Liverpool fans embraced it, carrying it with them to away matches, too.
The song took on a profound resonance after the avoidable tragedy of Hillsborough in 1989, at which 97 people died. To this day, something about the way it’s sung on the terraces signifies important moments of delight but also sadness and togetherness for the community, again resonant after the recent horrific act of violence at the team’s Premier League victory parade.
Football chants provide a social barometer of our time
Football chants provide a social barometer of our time. They belong to one of our largest public arenas where, in an age threatened by toxic masculinity, men (mostly) can gather to find a shared precious anchor, a place to belong, and to express that through joyful, uplifting banter – and, sadly, also offensive, often racist, insults. It’s sad that such behaviour, and rightful concern for where it might lead, steals many headlines and eclipses so much that is positive.
But I take heart from the fact that I’ve seen fans refuse to join in such songs, instead challenging such hostile statements. The most effective way of policing these forms of hate-speech is when fans police themselves and, in a time of hostility shown towards people of different faiths, I delight in the songs honouring such players. It might seem trivial to hear a thousand people sing that Egyptian player “Mo Salah is a gift from Allah” and it doesn’t mean Islamophobia disappears, but it demonstrates a hospitable accommodation that wasn’t there previously.
For good and for bad, football chants are unregulated, which is why they reveal where we are in society. It will always be the fans who decide what or what not to sing, whether to express appreciation or contempt for what’s occurring on the pitch. Pundits have long talked about the team’s “12th man”, the supporters who can be a deciding factor in any game, but that magic lies in the fact they can’t be controlled, as Norwich City exec Delia Smith discovered in 2005 when she tried to corral the crowd: “Where are you? Let’s be having you!” to get behind the team. The fans’ response was mixed – they didn’t appreciate being summoned to sing on demand, and her team lost.
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We don’t sing on demand. We sing to commemorate, to trumpet our glory when it’s going well, to pledge our faith when all hope is lost. At these moments we reveal ourselves in our myriad forms, all members of one unruly choir.
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