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

Coventry City

Nickname: The Sky Blues

Ground: Ricoh Arena (subject to dispute and games in 2019/20 were played at St Andrews, Birmingham)

Stadium Capacity: 32,604

Song: The Sky Blue Song

Cinderella is the proverbial rags to riches story, but Coventry City must be one of the ugly sisters as it’s suffered the reverse – a riches to rags story.

The club spent 34 consecutive seasons in the topflight before relegation in 2001. It was a founding member of the Premier League but has since stumbled from one financial problem to another, culminating in further relegation. It suffered through administration, and due to a dispute with its stadium owners, the club even started 2013/14 playing its home games in Northampton rather than in the Ricoh Arena in Coventry after being locked out of its ground.

It’s been a long time since the success of the ‘The Sky-Blue Revolution’ of the 1960s when the legendary Jimmy Hill became manager.

Jimmy has had every job possible in football except professional WAG. He was a player, union leader, coach, manager, director, chairman, television executive, presenter, analyst and match official. His first managerial role was at Coventry, where he orchestrated the Sky Blue Revolution. He changed the home kit’s colours to sky blue, coined the nickname the ‘Sky Blues’, and penned the club’s song ‘The Sky Blue Song’. Dulux doesn’t do football, but if they did…

‘The Sky Blue song’ was written in 1962 by Jimmy and director John Camkin. It was launched at a home game with Colchester, but the match was abandoned at halftime because of fog. Hill had the words printed in the match programme – a new invention by… you guessed it, Jimmy Hill.

The song is still sung today. In 2012 to celebrate its 50th-anniversary, members of the Coventry squad from the original Colchester game went onto the pitch at halftime and sang it with the fans.

To celebrate his achievements, a seven-foot bronze statue of Jimmy was unveiled at the stadium after £100k was raised by fans.

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

Colchester United

Nickname: The U’s

Ground: Weston Homes Community Stadium

Stadium Capacity: 10,105

Song: Up The U’s

If you are interested in alternative music, then one name will immediately come to mind: Steve Lamacq.

Steve’s tireless championing of new music on his long-running shows on Radio 1 and Radio 6 Music has delivered the first UK radio exposure for Oasis, Coldplay, and every guitar band who’s emerged on the UK alternative music scene in the last 20 years. In-between attending hundreds of gigs each year, Steve has another love: Colchester FC. On 23 January 2006, he combined both passions by playing the team’s anthem ‘Up the U’s’ on Radio 1’s Evening Session.

The song is ironic: Colchester is the setting for the famous nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. During the English Civil War, a sniper known as Humpty Dumpty, due to his large size, sat in the belfry of a church (Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.) He was shot down (Humpty Dumpty had a great fall) and, shortly after, the town was overrun by Parliamentarians (all the king’s horses and all the king’s men/couldn’t put Humpty together again), which is why, instead of singing ‘Up the U’s, an appropriate fairy tale ending for Colchester would find them falling down the divisions.

The club has had moderate success. With a population of just over 100k, it has punched above its weight and regularly features in the top half of League 1. Its greatest achievement was a victory over Don Revie’s all-conquering Leeds United side of the 1970s. A result that put all of the Colchester players involved into the club’s player hall of fame.

The club anthem is ‘Up the U’s’, and Colchester based punk band Special Duties has recorded the song twice.

Special Duties was originally called X-pelled, but they switched names when a box of badges with “Special Duties” printed on them ‘came into their possession’. Allegedly the badges were stolen from a local Colchester school. They changed their name to fit the badges rather than print more badges with X-Pelled written on them.

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