Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Dunfermline Athletic

Nickname: The Pars

Ground: East End Park

Stadium Capacity: 11,480

Song: Into The Valley

Dunfermline Athletic run out at East End Park to The Skids song ‘Into The Valley’, Which has also been used by Charlton Athletic and, for a brief time, Bradford City when it was in the Premier League.

The Skids were formed in 1977 in Dunfermline. The band’s (now sadly passed on) Stuart Adamson went on to form Big Country, while another founding member, Richard Jobson, went on to become a noted TV presenter, producer, and filmmaker. Into The Valley was their biggest hit – and what a hit it was. Fast, thrilling, exciting, no wonder Dunfermline fans adopted it – it was the exact opposite of a Saturday afternoon at East End Park.

The song does have a local connection. While Richard Jobson has said that the song was about a friend killed on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland and the recruitment of Scottish youths by the army, Dunfermline fans believe that the song refers to High Valleyfield, an area near Dunfermline known locally as ‘The Valley’.

The club is nicknamed the Pars, and one theory about why it has this name is that it was short for ‘paralytic’. The players were meant to be renowned for their drinking, so they were called the Paralytics, shortened to Pars.

In recent years, fans have needed a strong drink. Financial problems led to relegation from the top-flight, while subsequent administration and another relegation to the second division followed, after the team was docked points. In July 2013, a fan-led consortium rescued the club after it looked like it might have been the next club to go out of business.

Since the 1950s, fans have left Eastend Park after the game to the sound of Jimmy Shand and his band’s ‘The Bluebell Polka’. The track was Jimmy Shand’s biggest hit, getting into the Top 20, becoming the first (and only) Scottish traditional dance band to have a top 40 hit. It was produced by George Martin, who produced all The Beatles’ albums. 

 
Jimmy Shand had an eventful life. He was born near Dunfermline, in East Wemyss in Fife. He was a miner who got blacklisted from working in the mines due to playing benefit gigs for striking miners. As a musician in the fifties, he’d release a record a month and was the first person to do proper tours up and down the UK, laying down the blueprint for the rock bands of the 60s. As far as we can tell, the club adopted the song following its chart success and, just like Crystal Palace and Liverpool, chart success has led to terrace longevity.

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Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Dundee United

Nickname: The Terrors (and not The Arabs (see below))

Ground: Tannadice Park

Stadium Capacity: 14,229

Song: Love Is In The Air

For the 2014 Scottish Cup final, then Dundee United player, Ryan Gauld, was treated to a special version on an old classic. ‘Gauld’, sung to the tune of ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet, was designed to inspire the Tangerines — and their midfielder — for the cup final against St Johnstone. Sadly, it didn’t work. St Johnstone won, and Gauld left Tannadice soon after in a move to Sporting Lisbon.

It’s sad that the song didn’t catch on as it was another cup final anthem – ‘Love Is In The Air’ that came to define United.

‘Love is in the Air’ has been sung at Tannadice for nearly 20 years. It’s commonly thought to have been adopted by fans during the Scandinavian invasion of the 90s when the club acquired a clutch of players from Norway and Sweden. Back then, in honour of Swedish striker Kjell Olofsson, it was sung as ‘Olof’s in the Air’.

The song achieved tipping point and unofficial anthem status after Dundee United’s famous 1 – 0 victory in the Scottish cup final over Rangers in 1994 – Dundee United’s first ever Scottish cup triumph. And fans – known as Arabs – have been singing it ever since.

Arabs is a strange nickname as the club was originally set up for Irish immigrants. In 1909, a group of immigrants, led by bicycle dealer Pat Reilly, decided to form a new club – then called Dundee Hibernian – as a focus for the local Irish community. It chose an area of Dundee at Clepington Park as a ground for the new club. Pat had one problem. Clepington Park was already used by local side Dundee Wanderers. Undeterred, Pat had a quick word with the landlord and, after agreeing a higher rent, Wanderers was told to live up to its name, and find a new home.

Wanderers was livid. It had been based at Clepinton Park for 19 years only to be evicted by a club with no history, no place in any league and, at this point, no manager. Though Pat Reilly sorted that out too by appointing… Pat Reilly.

In a final act of (understandable) spite, before Wanderers left Clepington Park it dismantled a grandstand and wooden changing rooms along with the fencing which enclosed the ground. Wanderers even removed the goalposts so that all that was left was a grass field. In return, Pat Reilly, changed the name of the ground/field to Tannadice Park (named after the nearest street and entrance to the ground) so that no trace of Wanderers remained.

Today, there are few traces of Dundee United’s Irish origin. The name was changed from Hibernian to United in 1923 and the original green colours were changed first to black and white and then to its current tangerine orange. 

While no one knows exactly how the fans got their nickname as the Arabs, the most common reason given is that in the 1960s, after a particularly icy spell, United hired a tar burner to melt the ice on the pitch. However, tar doesn’t just melt ice, it also burnt all the grass beneath.

Undaunted by a lack of a playing surface, United ordered several lorry-loads of sand, spread it around, painted some lines on it, and played several games before the grass grew back. When the team started winning on this unconventional surface it was described as having taken to it like Arabs.

The name stuck and even after the grass returned, Dundee United’s fans started to dress up for big games and cup final appearances. Hence the fans are now ‘the Arabs’ and not the team – and why in Scotland you’ll find Arabs singing a Nordic inspired song.

Buy the Sound of Football from Amazon.

Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Dundee

Nickname: The Dark Blues

Ground: Dens Park

Stadium Capacity: 11,506

Song: Up Wi’ The Bonnets

In 2008, Scottish comedy legend, and Glasgow born comedian, Billy Connolly, caused controversy when he claimed in The Scotsman newspaper that people from Edinburgh were just not funny.

“I don’t know why. I think it’s about immigration, because I don’t find Edinburgh people all that funny,” he said. “They’re very interesting and nice, but you wouldn’t point to funny as being one of their features.” 

Billy must have been deliberately provocative because as a stand-up and folk singer in the sixties and seventies he would have shared stages with one of the greats of Scottish comedy, an Edinburgh comic called Hector Nicol. And he would have thanked Hector, because, without Hector, Billy would not have had a stand-up act – Nicol was one of the first comics to introduce blue material to his routines.

Hector wasn’t just famous as a comic, he was also an actor and, before his death in 1985, he was a regular on Scottish screens in the soap series Take The High Road, which was like a Scottish Emmerdale Farm, or Emmerdale Croft. But Nicol’s lasting legacy was not his jokes or his performances but his songs. Hector was a prolific song writer for football clubs.

For Hibernian he wrote ‘Glory Glory To The Hibees’, a song and tune ‘borrowed’ by Manchester United today, for Hearts he wrote ‘The Hearts Song’. He also wrote ‘The Terrors of Tannadice’ for Dundee United and ‘Up Wi’ The Bonnets’ for Dundee.

Ironically, Nicol, despite his east coast home, was actually a fan of St Mirren, based in the west coast in Paisley, the town where he was born – though he never, as far as we know, wrote a song for them.

‘Up Wi’ The Bonnets’ sings of the pride fans feel at watching the players play in its traditional blue shirts.

“You can sing of your glories of teams you have seen,

like the Saints and the Dons up in old Aberdeen,

but in all this wide world there’s just one team for me,

that’s the brave(bold) boys who wear the dark blue of Dundee“

(Source: Hector Nicol)

But although Dundee’s best days are behind it, as the 21st Century has seen the club yo-yo between the SPL and the lower leagues while battling financial problems, its greatest moment came in 1961 when Bob Shankley (brother of Liverpool’s Bill) led Dundee to its one and only league title. The title winning team is commemorated in the final verse and is remembered before every home game as the team walk out to Nicol’s song:

“For there’s Robertson, Penman and Alan Gilzean,

with Cousins and Smith there the finest you’ve seen,

a defence that is steady heroic and sure,

Liney, Hamilton, Cox, Seith and Wishart and Ure“

(Source: Hector Nicol) 

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