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

Blackburn Rovers

Nickname: Rovers

Ground: Ewood Park

Stadium Capacity: 31,154

Song: The Wild Rover (Trad)

Blackburn Rover’s anthem is, naturally, ‘The Wild Rover.’ It’s probably the most widely performed Irish song around the world:

“I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on this seat right here.

So there’s no point in saving for a rainy day, ‘cos I’m a wild rover, and here I will stay.

AND IT’S NO NAY NEVER, NO NAY NEVER NO MORE!

‘COS I’LL STAY A WILD ROVER FOREVER AND MORE!“

(Source: trad.)

The song tells the story of a young man who has been away from his home for many years. Returning to his former alehouse, the landlady refuses him credit; until he presents the gold he gained while he was away. Finally, he sings that his days of roving are over, and he intends to return to his home and settle down.

To some, it’s a temperance song because it celebrates the end of his wild days. To others, it’s a drinking song, another drink before heading home. But, to Blackburn fans, it’s the perfect choice because Rovers fans were once known for their ‘wild adventures’ on the road – or, to give ‘adventure’ another name, hooliganism.

Today, football hooligans are more often found on satellite television shows presented by English actor and Eastenders’ landlord, Danny Dyer, than rioting in row D of the family stands of Premiership grounds. However, fans of Danny’s shows might not be aware that football hooliganism is not a modern phenomenon – it’s older than most clubs in the football league, and the first record of crowd trouble is linked to Blackburn Rovers.

Teams from the Home Counties surrounding London dominated footballs early years. The first team to break this southern monopoly was Blackburn after they won the FA Cup in 1884.

The Blackburn fans had a bad reputation. For one game in London, they terrified the locals by being “northern” (working class). A newspaper at the time, The Pall Mall Gazette, described them as:

“A northern horde of uncouth garb and strange oaths – like a tribe of Sudanese Arabs let loose.” 

It was unfair to pick on Blackburn’s fans for being northern and working-class when its opponents that day weren’t just ‘northern’ – they were Scottish. Moreover, Blackburn was due to play Queens Park from Glasgow.

This wasn’t the only incident. In 1888, Preston refused to play a match against Blackburn because the club didn’t want to face Blackburn’s fans.

Preston and Blackburn have long been rivals, and there’s no love lost between the two sets of fans. Both groups of fans have an unusual tradition. When they are relegated, they bury a coffin decked out in the club’s colours. Once the side is promoted, they go back and ‘raise’ the coffin.

Unlike most teams, Blackburn Rovers has only ever had one design to its home kit. The distinctive blue and white halved jersey is widely acknowledged as the “town colour.” Although the design has remained the same, the side in which the colours fall has often changed. This is because blue resided on the wearers left since 1946. Before that, blue and white often switched over almost yearly.

In recent years there has been unrest between fans and the club due to unpopular decisions made by the club’s owners. The owners tried to get the fans back by consulting them over a choice of music for the team to run out. The options are the regular selections of stadium anthems, but they missed a trick by not including some of the more unusual Blackburn inspired songs.

First up is the metal band Frenzy with their simply named tune – Blackburn Rovers. A song about watching Blackburn play on TV. It’s not just metal bands who like Blackburn. The Norwegian band Seven released a song called ‘Blackburn (Always In My Heart)’. The true story of a former band member who lost his heart to Blackburn Rovers, and lost his girlfriend. And then, heartbroken, we can only assume he went to the pub and got very, very drunk while singing ‘The Wild Rover’.

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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

Birmingham City

Nickname: The Blues

Ground: St Andrews

Stadium Capacity: 29,409

Song: Keep Right On To The End Of The Road

Birmingham City’s official song is ‘Keep Right On To The End Of The Road’ by Harry Lauder. However, it should be called ‘Keep Right On To The End Of The Canal’ as Birmingham has a longer canal network than Venice. Unlike Venice, Birmingham has twice been voted Europe’s least romantic city. Yet with a canal network that gives it the nickname “the Venice of the north,” perhaps it’s Venice, the city of love, that should be known as ‘the Birmingham of the south’*?

Birmingham was the first English club to participate in a European competition when it played in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup competition. It was also the first English club side to reach a European final, although they lost 4 – 1 to Barcelona. Birmingham was also the second English club to participate in the European competition by reaching the final the following year. However, again, it lost to foreign opposition when Roma beat it.

In 1956 Birmingham became the first team to reach the FA Cup Final without playing any games at home. In the build-up to its semi-final match, one of the payers, Alex Govan, revealed that his favourite song was ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’. Alex Govan said about the song:

“I thought no more about it, but when the third goal went in at Hillsborough, the Blues fans all started singing it. It was the proudest moment of my life.”

The song has a sad history. It was inspired by a tragic event in the First World War and was written after the singer and entertainer Harry Lauders’ son, Captain John C. Lauder, was killed in action at the Somme.

Harry received a letter from an officer in his son’s company. The letter described his son as a leader of ‘great gallantry’ who, in his dying words, had ordered his troops to ‘carry on. Those words inspired Harry to write ‘Keep Right On To The End Of The Road’ as a tribute.

*Although this ‘fact’ is widely quoted, it may be the work of an imaginative member of the Birmingham tourist board.

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

Barrow

Nickname: The Bluebirds

Ground: Holker Street

Stadium Capacity: 5,045

Song: No official song or goal music.

In September 2020, The Mail, a local newspaper covering Barrow-in-Furness and the eastern Lake District, published a world exclusive. A woman had met a comedian at a wedding, and the Mail had the breaking story of how, at this wedding three years previously, the comedian, Jon Richardson, posed for a photo with a woman – and “It was lovely.” 

We tell this story to explain perhaps that nothing much happens in the Barrow-in-Furness. But in May 2020, there was genuinely big news. After nearly 50 years of being out of the football league, Barrow won promotion back into League Two after being promoted as champions from the National League. It was an outstanding achievement but, sadly, happened in silence as the COVID-19 pandemic meant no fans in the ground to celebrate. 

If there had been, they would have devised an ingenious song to sing. While their most famous chant is “All Bluebirds Are Blue,” the club’s small but passionate support is known for creating one-off songs, such as the time the traveling fans turned down a wedding to head for Histon, only to fall 3-0 behind. According to Levi Gill, Bluebird Trust director:”  ‘gone to the wedding, we should have gone to the wedding’ to the tune of Guantenemara sent a loud and clear message to the bench of our feelings.”

And, if they’d gone to the wedding, they might have met Jon Richardson.

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

Barnsley

Nickname: The Reds

Ground: Oakwell

Stadium Capacity: 23,287

Song: Cocoon

Barnsley has spent more seasons in the second tier of English football than any other club. In the 1996/97 season, Barnsley reached the top level of English football for the first time in its history. A song was released to celebrate the occasion called ‘Up & Up.’ Unfortunately, it should be called ‘Up & Down’ as the club was relegated the following season.

Its solitary year in the top division saw the signing of Macedonian international striker Georgi Hristov. Hristov was signed to help Barnsley score on the pitch, but he had trouble scoring off it. In an interview with a Belgrade sports magazine, he said:

“I’m finding it difficult to find a girlfriend in Barnsley, or indeed settle into a decent way of life. The local girls are far uglier than the ones back in Belgrade or Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, where I come from. Our women are much prettier. Besides, they don’t drink as much beer as the Barnsley girls.”

This prompted the response from the Barnsley fans that “Barnsley women are the prettiest in the country,” which country was never confirmed.

Hristov would have known which town had the prettiest girls if he’d carried out some basic research before joining Barnsley – or he could have just watched the telly. For years, ITV filmed a show inside northern nightclubs called The Hitman and Her and hosted by northern soul expert, pop producer, model railway enthusiast Pete Waterman (The Hitman), and ex-children’s TV presenter Michaela Strachan (Her).

Each week The Hitman and Her broadcast live from a club in the north of England. If Hristov had tuned in, he would have seen what the women of Barnsley looked like on a Saturday night. First, though, he would have discovered another connection to Barnsley: the club plays The Hitman and Her’s theme tune – ‘Cocoon’ by Timerider – when players run out at the start of games.

(The song also features in the 80s Britflick The Fruit Machine, which wasn’t half as good as its proposed sequel and prequel The Time Machine or its porn version: The Sex Machine.)

The song has become derided in recent years, but older fans still remember it fondly for soundtracking their promotion in 1997.

One song that Hristov would have known while at Barnsley was the town’s official anthem. It’s called ‘The Barnsley Anthem.’ It remembers the mining struggles of poverty in Barnsley in the early 20th century. Families were so poor that they were forced to hide in their cellars from threatening bailiffs. So why would he know the song? Well, after his comments about Barnsley women, he’d need to know the best place to hide on a Saturday night.

“We’re all dahn in t’ cellar-‘oil where muck slarts on t’ winders,

We’ve used all us coil up and we’re reight dahn to t’ cinders;

If bum-bailiff comes ‘e’ll never finnd us,

Cos we’re all dahn in t’ cellar-‘oil where muck slarts on t’ winders.“

(Source: trad.)

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