The Football Attic's Hit Parade: We Can Do It

The more you delve deeply into the history of football teams and their commercially released music, the more you realise that few clubs have ever created an original song from scratch. Even Jimmy Hill's 'Sky Blue Song' was a rewritten version of The Eton Boating Song, and that from a man regarded by many as a pioneer of football. Is there nothing new under the sun?

Liverpool Football Club were only following a precedent when they released 'We Can Do It' in 1977, just as they were entering a truly golden era of success. The song was a reinterpretation of 'I Can Do It' by The Rubettes, which reached number 7 in the UK charts during March 1975. Liverpool's version, as you'd expect, reflected the collective team ethic of the Anfield club rather than dwelling on a childhood love for rock and roll music.

Opting for a slightly slower tempo and a lower pitch than the cap-wearing popsters before them, the likes of Clemence, Thompson, Neal et al warbled proudly of their history and footballing capabilities. And because, presumably, someone thought they matched the stereotypical profile of 'dumb football players', the lyrics were suitably simple enough for them to sing, too.


In short, the phrase "we can do it" crops up 45 times during the three minutes and ten seconds of this musical masterpiece. That's once every 4.2 seconds. Even Jimmy Case could have managed that, let alone Kevin 'Head Over Heels In Love' Keegan. It's fair to say this was never going to win a Brit Award, but then again a cover of 'Chanson d'Amour' by Manhattan Transfer was never going to be sung by The Kop's masses either.

This was very much Status Quo territory; a relentless guitar-strumming stomper, uncomplicated and easy to sing along to. It was also notably popular, peaking at number 15 in the charts in May 1977. Though the team didn't appear in person, the song did get heard over the closing credits of Top of the Pops at the end of that month, following an illustrious line-up that included Kenny Rogers, Bryan Ferry and The Stranglers. And Dave Lee Travis. Imagine that for a moment, if you will.

Two days before such an honour was bestowed upon them, Liverpool beat Borussia Mönchengladbach in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome to win the 1977 European Cup Final. It was to be Kevin Keegan's swansong in the famous red shirt, after which he moved to Hamburg. It was hardly coincidence that his departure as a future musical heavyweight in his own right heralded eleven barren years during which Liverpool FC enjoyed no chart success whatsoever. It wasn't until 'The Anfield Rap' came along in 1988 that the pride of (one half of) Merseyside was restored, and even then, the jury's still out where that particular point is concerned.

For now, though, we respect the ability of one club to take someone else's song, get it sung by a couple of dozen top football players and get it into the upper reaches of the Top 40. A magnificent achievement, and one that could only be matched in this case by John Barnes wearing a cap back to front. Staggering.

-- Chris Oakley

See also:

• The Football Attic's Hit Parade: No.1 - Glory Glory Leeds United
• The Football Attic's Hit Parade: No.2 - We're Gonna Do It Again

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The Football Attic's Hit Parade: We're Gonna Do It Again

It's a warm welcome back now to Dave Burin who continues our series on the great and not-so-great musical exploits of football teams down the years...

Who, or what, is Stryker?  He remains the Ali Dia of the mid-'90s rap scene, having somehow bumbled his way into the studio for Manchester United's 1995 FA Cup Final song, despite by all appearances, having no musical career before or afterwards. Much like the Stig, Stryker's identity is uncertain and possibly secretive. One Channel 4 documentary which focused on football songs claimed that he was an Arsenal fan from North London, though this has never been formally verified. And so, after 20 years of silence from this most enigmatic of one-time shouty football-themed novelty rap creators, We're Gonna Do It Again is the total sum of everything the world knows about Stryker. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If Stryker did indeed write the lyrics to this bizarre musical hotchpotch, it might be fair to infer that he's gone into hiding. Like the music world's Salman Rushdie, Stryker probably has a bounty on his head from several United fans with long memories, still outraged by their club's name being associated with lines like

"Because we're up there - cream of the crop
You gotta get up early to keep us from the top."

Despite the Reds' dismal display in the ensuing final (they were beaten 1-0 by Everton), what this United squad put their name to on record was undoubtedly more shameful than anything they produced on the Wembley turf.



So, besides the lyrics sounding like a public schoolboy's painfully polite attempt at trash talking, what does Stryker and Man United's cliché-ridden hit (it reached #6 in the UK Singles Chart) actually sound like? Well... there's an aggressive, tuneless drum machine which doesn't fit the melody, and has very likely been left switched on in the background entirely by accident. There's a wall of inoffensive though slightly off-putting guitar wailing in the background. At some point a keyboard seems to drift into the forefront briefly, before fading away - in what is an entirely apt metaphor for Brian McClair's on-field performances.

Around the 2:37 mark, our host clearly decides that things are getting a bit too authentic, that somehow it might be nice to alienate those hardcore Reds who, unaware of what awaits, are queuing up to buy this on cassette (or, for the really trendy individuals, CD). So, he tells us "we'll leave you with a message, Man U for the cup". It's an abbreviation used only as a derogatory term by opposition fans, and lazily by clueless pundits. However, I'd be here for rather too long if I tried to quibble over terminology with a man who spells the word 'Stryker' as if he's only ever heard the word when said aloud by Andrei Kanchelskis.

And yet, for all that, I kind of like it. It's unpolished, it's rather naff, it's full of lines which seem like they might have been scribbled on the back of a shopping list or scrawled down as Stryker woke up at 3am, his head buzzing with puns that don't quite rhyme.  In an era of overly-slick, characterless club songs, or annoyingly ironic efforts (I'm looking at you, I'm From Wigan Me!), there's something decidedly fun and unashamed and cheerful about Stryker's effort.  Now, enough faint praise...onto the B-side.


The best way I can describe the B-Side as is 'listenable'. It is, more importantly than that, incredibly lazy. In 1994, United had reached Wembley with the sounds of Come on You Reds, a catchy collaboration with Status Quo, ringing in their ears. It was the first football club single to reach #1 in the UK Singles Chart. In 1995, they chose as their B-side... Come On You Reds (1995 Squad). That's right. This vastly different version was recorded by the same club just a year later, meaning that at least two different players were involved in recording this completely necessary re-recording of the previous year's cup final song. No version exists online of the '95 track, though if you listen the '94 version and just imagine something exactly the same, you'll know what it sounds like.

Objectively, United may have done better to simply re-release the '94 cup song, and not rope (supposedly) Arsenal mad Stryker out of his (alleged) North London home to rap about "scoring our way to victory". Still, We're Gonna Do It Again is a relic of its time, and for better or worse, it sounds exactly like a mid-'90s attempt at coolness from a football club desperate to repeat its chart success. The tinned drums are dreadful. The vocals are dire. The lyrics are ridiculous. And yet, it's destined to bring a smile to my face every time I hear its refrain:

"Here we go,
Here we go,
Here we go."

I can indeed say that this largely-forgotten hit holds far happier memories than the cup final itself. Just don't expect me to be so kindly nostalgic the next time an anonymous rapper tries to rhyme 'victory' with 'tree'.

-- Dave Burin

Our grateful thanks, as ever, to Dave Burin for a fine guest post. Want to write about football nostalgia for The Football Attic? Get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!

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The Football Attic's Hit Parade: Glory Glory Leeds United

And before you ask, that apostrophe in the title was put there to prevent all kinds of misinterpretation, for this is a new series looking at the world of football and its variable attempts to create music that sells in vast quantities.

Oh for sure we had 'Three Lions'. We even had 'World In Motion'. But what about those songs that barely grazed the lower echelons of the Top 40, or those stamped 'Rejected' by the producers of Top of the Pops?

Here at The Football Attic, we consider it our duty to remember all football songs, acknowledging their merits and failings with the sort of impartiality that an Eastern European voting in the Eurovision Song Contest can only dream of.

And so we begin with Glory Glory Leeds United, a song that was released in 1968 after Leeds won the 1968 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and League Cup, although some argue it was unleashed on an unsuspecting public prior to their appearance in the 1970 FA Cup Final.



Either way, it treads the well-trodden path that is 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', a song that uses the music from 'John Brown's Body' and containing the familiar chorus 'Glory, Glory, Hallelujah'. Inherently catchy, it formed the basis for many other football team songs down the years, not to mention one particularly notorious offering by The Goodies in 1974.

Leeds United's own version was sung by Ronnie Hilton, and here an entirely correct approach to recording football songs was adopted, namely to keep the involvement of any football players strictly minimal.

Hilton, born Adrian Hill in 1926, was a British crooner who reached the peak of his success in the 1950's by singing cover versions of popular American hits of the day. Once considered one of the top singing talents in the UK, his success was eventually tempered by the incoming rock and roll bandwagon led by the incomparable Elvis Presley. Come the 1960's, Hilton was looking for other ways to put his vocal expertise to good use, and towards the end of the decade he was lucky enough to be approached by a football team with a song and no singer.

Glory Glory Leeds United was the song, and it gave a potted profile of the team's recent successes, the captain, the manager and even the fans in all of its two minutes and forty-three seconds. It even dared to mention rival players and teams in the opening verse:

Manchester can rave about the Summerbee and Best
And there's Liverpool and Arsenal and Spurs and all the rest
But let us sing the praises of the lads we love the best
As Leeds go marchin' on 

Glory, glory Leeds United
Glory, glory Leeds United
Glory, glory Leeds United
They're the greatest football team in all the land

And so the relentless march continued with a comic-book description of Billy Bremner:

Now little Billy Bremner is the captain of the crew
For the sake of Leeds United he will break himself in two
His hair is red and fuzzy and his body's black and blue
But Leeds go marchin' on

By now you're probably getting the general gist, but suffice to say the last verse provides a final rousing mention of the boss and even the noisiest parts of the Elland Road ground:

In the Paddock and the Scratching Shed let's hear the voices sing
Let's get behind United and make the rafters ring
We're a team we can be proud of and Don Revie is the king
As Leeds go marchin' on 

 ...all of which tells you everything you need to know about the song, in essence. Yes, the players can be heard singing on the record, but only for the boisterous chorus which is probably very wise, given the tunefulness of most football players' voices.

Yet if you thought the A-side of this record did well with its various football references and rough, chucking-out-time-at-the-pub-like harmonies, you'd be well advised to check out the B-side, We Shall Not Be Moved. Once again written and sung by Hilton and based on an old standard, this one has even greater player participation and mentions half the First Division league table in the process.

But let's not peak too early. This is but one fine example of the football song. More will follow, you can be certain of that...

-- Chris Oakley

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Retro Random Video: Rod Argent plays Top of The Pops

Imagine, if you will, a time in Britain when the theme to a World Cup programme on TV could be written and performed by someone you've never heard of. Certainly that used to be the case before the BBC and ITV went all out for ratings supremacy by enlisting the help of top acts like Jean Michel Jarre and Luciano Pavarotti.

Knowing which musicians could conjure up a tuneful melody to enhance the viewer's pleasure of some far-flung tournament was a skill in itself. Luckily one man was often on hand during the 1970's and 80's that could envisage the Latin passion of a World Cup in Argentina or the searing heat of Mexico. That man was Rod Argent - a man who would enter a Football Attic Hall of Fame if one existed - and his first association with football TV themes came in 1978.

Argent, under the name of Rodriguez Argentina (Rod Argent - geddit?) was part of the group San Jose that performed 'Argentine Melody (Cancion de Argentina)', the BBCs World Cup theme that year. The piece of music was released as a single on the back of positive viewer feedback and it reached number 14 in the UK charts.

Few World Cup themes from British TV can claim to have been so successful, but Argent had success eight years later with another top tune, ITV's 'Aztec Gold', which got to number 48 in the UK singles chart.

Anyway, if you're still unsure who Rod Argent is (let alone what he looks like), here's a rare chance to see him perform on Top of the Pops back in 1978 - the master at work, albeit in a silly hat.

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Retro Random Video: Man United NOT appearing on Top of the Pops

We've seen it so often before, the sight of a football team appearing on Top of the Pops, singing (or rather 'miming') badly to their latest chart hit (if indeed 'hit' is the word we're looking for there).

But in 1983 there was one occasion when a football team were due to appear in the BBC studios to perform their song but didn't. This was because Manchester United, the team in question, were rendered unavailable on account of their participation in the 1983 FA Cup Final replay at Wembley against Brighton & Hove Albion.

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Charlie George for Christmas No.1!

It's at this time of year that someone launches a half-cocked campaign to get an utterly redundant song to number 1 in the UK charts for Christmas. Pathetic, futile behaviour and the sort of thing that fools no-one as they attempt to find some sort of spiritual meaning from the festive season.

But that's not going to stop us launching our own campaign - good god, no!  Yes, it all starts here, folks - it's time to put Charlie George at the top of the Christmas charts!

Our vision is to release a '45 (do they still make those?) featuring two songs that take the former lank-haired Arsenal legend as its subject.

On the A-side, 'I Wish I Could Play Like Charlie George', a song that begins with the plaintive ponderings of a small child building slowly to a tumult of ragtime exuberance leaving no-one in any doubt as to the virtues of the great man.



On the B-side, we propose 'The Charlie George Calypso', a Caribbean melody sung by what sounds like half a dozen North London types you saw down the pub on your last visit. Don't be fooled, however. With lyrics like "Have I seen Jesus Christ back on Earth? / No it's Charlie lying flat on the Wembley turf" this is a sure-fire hit backup to our main A-side gambit.



So let's get the message out there, people. Tell the world that Charlie George is the only true message we need this Christmas. Spread the word by getting on Facebook and use the hashtag #charlieatxmas.

And if that doesn't put paid to any plans Simon Cowell's got inside his head, nothing will.

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Chris O's Favourite 5... Football TV Theme Tunes

Continuing our 'Favourite 5' series, here's my best five TV theme tunes for British football shows (in no particular order of preference...)

'Jellicle Ball'
(World Cup Grandstand, BBC 1982) 


A rip-roaring in-your-face toboggan ride of a theme tune, composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the musical Cats. It’s a great theme tune because it encapsulates all the drama and excitement usually associated with a World Cup. The quiet start quickly explodes into a bold and (literally) brassy fanfare that hints at the urgency to succeed and the memory of erstwhile defeats. The final euphoric flourish, however, is born of a growing, repetitive momentum resulting in ultimate glory and a realised sense of exaltation. (That’s except for viewers in Northern Ireland.)

‘Jubilation’
(The Big Match, ITV 1980) 


Another fanfare to kick this one off, this time to herald a symphony of blaring synthesisers and twanging guitars. Like Jellicle Ball, the biggest virtue of this piece is its relentless pace that somehow symbolises the pace of modern football. The six-note signature phrase is wonderfully catchy and crops up at the beginning, end and several points in between, fitting in beautifully with the dynamism that Jeff Wayne used throughout. And yes, we are talking about the same Jeff Wayne that composed the musical version of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, along with countless other musical pieces for TV and radio. Why here’s another one…

‘Matador’
(World Cup ‘82, ITV 1982) 


In many ways, this ITV theme tune from the 1982 World Cup just doesn’t work. It’s slower and more ponderous than my first two choices, has a moody feel to it which is perhaps at odds with the action-packed nature of the game and leans more than a little on the sounds of Mexico rather than host nation Spain. For all that though, this is a beautifully crafted tapestry of Spanish guitar, electric guitar, pan pipes, a melodious string section and Jeff Wayne’s ubiquitous synths. Probably not everyone’s cup of tea but certainly evocative of that wistful feeling back in 1982 as we waited for one of the British sides to do well under the blazing Spanish sun.

‘Tutti Al Mondo’
(World Cup ’90, ITV 1990)


Staying with ITV (why did their theme tunes always outrank the BBC’s in my mind?), here’s a wonderful composition by Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke that was used by the commercial station during Italia ’90. While the Beeb went for the safe operatic option with the Pavarotti-fest Nessun Dorma, ITV were altogether more creative by using this energetic fusion of both operatic and contemporary styles. This piece seemed to have everything: soaring vocals, crashing drum sequences, synth stings… all set to a beguiling rhythm. Scandalously overlooked, this was the perfect accompaniment to a World Cup that seemed mediocre by comparison.

'Argentine Melody'
(World Cup Grandstand, BBC 1978) 


And as if to prove that Rod Argent was no stranger to this sort of thing, here's another contribution of his, this time for the BBC back in 1978. Once again, we go through the list of national musical stereotypes, this time for Argentina: Castanets? Tick… Accoustic guitar? Tick… Yet for all that it's a positively harmonious romp through the foothills of Patagonia that seems to work delightfully despite being a little too slow to complement football coverage on TV. Working with Andrew Lloyd Webber (who wrote and produced the piece), the song was was released as a chart single 'performed by San Jose featuring Rodriguez Argentina'… or 'Rod Argent' for short. Who says musicians don't have a sense of humour?

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'All The Way' (England Football Team), 1988

Officially the second worst England Football Team song ever*, this was released as a rallying call for Euro '88.

When the First Round of said tournament was over, England's record in Group B read 'Played 3, Lost 3.'  Whoever had the bright idea of calling it 'All the Way' must have had a very oblique sense of humour indeed...

(* The song peaked at number 64 in the UK charts, just two places better than 'We've Got The Whole World At Our Feet', released for Mexico '86.)

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