THE CROWD – “You’ll Never Walk Alone”
Band Aid and USA For Africa had established one form of the charity single: a stellar alignment. The biggest names available, coming together on a solemn and unique occasion, performing a specially-composed song that spoke to the magnitude of the situation. This was all fine but it couldn’t scale down. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” set out a more typical working model – a shock troop of names, a just cause, a song everyone knew.
And so it is that John Otway, Motorhead, Kenny Lynch, Rick Wakeman, Peter Cook and many more* find themselves on a #1 single together. For all that most of the musicians making up The Crowd were pretty unfashionable, the very name of the group underlines that this wasn’t about individual profile raising. It was a shocked and rapid response to an immediate tragedy – the Bradford City stadium fire – and unlike the blockbuster charity hits we’ve discussed it’s hard to find too many cynical motivations for this one, and why would you want to look?
Well, at a mean pinch you could raise an eyebrow at organiser Gerry Marsden’s song choice: it’s not just Liverpool fans who sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” but the track has no particular associations (that I’m aware of) with Bradford City. As a song of solidarity, though, “YNWA” clearly works, and its proven value lies in the kind of mass singing a record like this requires. The earliest songs sung on the terraces were – so the legend goes – hymns, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” fits that bill too: sung by thousands it’s an article of faith, and at the same time the proof of that faith. And it’s only fair to mention that like any ritual – particularly in the era of the football club as global brand – there’s always a danger of it being packaged and exploited as kitsch.
If anything then, there’s too much soloing on this recording, and too small a crowd: it’s not horrible to listen to but it doesn’t stir the emotions either. It sounds cheap and hurried, and in charity terms those are positives, even if the result ends up like a group of football fans gathered round a cruise ship Casio. Like most charity records from this point it did its job then discreetly shuffled to the back of the collection, becoming a tiny part of a disaster’s wider story, and leaving no mark on pop’s.
*It’s worth pointing out that my only source for the line-up is Wikipedia, and of course anyone can add anybody into that: caveat lector.
3
I don’t think we’ve covered this yet, but The Crowd didn’t reach Number One until after Heysel. Did the record not receive a significant sales boost following the second disaster, which was then sufficient to send it to the top? And if Heysel hadn’t happened, would this have topped the charts anyway?
Relevant dates: Bradford May 11, Heysel May 29, The Crowd listed as Number One for the week ending June 15 (which fits the theory of a post-Heysel sales surge). So it’s a grim coincidence that when a Liverpool-related football disaster happened, there was a Liverpool-related football disaster record already in the shops…
There were plenty of middle-class people watching football before 1990, as those who went to football before 1990 will know. But the 90 World Cup was a watershed in terms of media interest, which led to a perception that middle-class people had only now started following it. I’ve interviewed Michael Nyman several times, and he always talks about the group of contemporary composers/musicians – Gavin Bryars, John Tillbury – he used to go to Loftus Road with. Gavin Bryars wrote a paper for some musical journal in the early 70s analysing tonal differences in the “Rod-neeee” chant from the Loft, accirding to whether the Rs were winning or losing.
There’s a case to be made that Bobby Robson is the father of Britpop. England performances in 90 WC lead to new respectablity of patriotism and upsurge in “working class culture” spawning greater cultural acceptability among media of expressions of Britishness, which three/four years later leads to Britpop.
Michael Nyman also dedicated his newest composition – Memorial – to the victims of the Heysel tragedy. It was premiered a couple of weeks later.
And Nyman wrote a concerto about Stan Bowles.
interested to read the responses to the glastonbury 86 anecdote, especially andy pandy’s comment about soul/dance weekenders at 67, which effectively makes the point that if we’re talking a music/football divide in the 80s we’re only talking about some musics, and some audiences.
some interesting assumptions to. Hard to interpret a collective cheer, obviously, but my take at the time was not that the crowd cheering argentina 2 england 1 was registering their anti-thatcher/revolutionary defeatism, or even, particularly, that they wanted england to lose. More of a ‘who cares?’ response; anti-football, if anything.
but obviously there were lots of people, middle class or otherwise, who went to football and glastonbury. Me, for one – oddly the 85/86 season was when I started going to games again, after a 5 year absence. The team I’d grown up watching, charlton, lost their ground to financial mismanagement; this rekindled my sense of attachment, and I started going to away games around northwest england where I was living (along with really not very many other people). It was another 13 years before I saw them win a game.
Don’t think I’ve ever actively wanted england to lose, but I’ve often found it next-to-impossible to support them with all the media furore around tournaments.
Heysel was the spur at NME for deputy editor Danny Kelly to recast a significant part of the front of the paper that week, right on deadline if I recall correctly, for various contributors, including him, to write angry heartfelt responses to it: he knew instantly it was a hugely important moment, and wanted NME to have its say.
He and then media editor Stuart Cosgrove were both fervent football fans, both smart working-class writers of different ages and backgrounds (Cosgrove somewhat older, a Scot, a militant casual with an academic background: he has a PhD in radical left theatre or something similar). They ended up as leaders of different factions in the HipHop wars of yucky memory, but this point were as one in the line NME had to take. Hard exactly to analyse the influence of this moment, esp. as football is hardly my own area of expertise or interest, but I think it *may* have helped it become a lot less of a taboo subject for some pop-cult commentators. (By which I mean, they were always fans, but now they felt they had permission to say so.)
Of course the earlier moment in the story of NME’s cultural intervention via football is when Danny Baker broke Bob Marley’s toe playing football with him, thus changing the course of pop history.
cosgrove still going strong on scottish tv/radio as a football pundit and officially-most-famous fan of St Johnstone
Richard Jobson was a big footie fan, I had a beer with him once and he was talking about how he went home to Scotland every weekend to play in a local team.
But has there ever been a better synergy of football and music (and lefty politics) as Chelsea’s Pat Nevin? Labour supporter, fan of Joy Division, collector of modern art. The fact that he was a “cultured” winger with silky feet only added to his cult appeal.
I used to have a theory that Skids “Into The Valley” (lyrics: R.Jobson)was about an impending football match. Maybe it was!
#76 Mike from an English point of view Heysel was a tragedy WE CAUSED. No English fans died there. It was no reason to buy the Crowd record except perhaps as a guilty refuge – ah well we’ve had a disaster too kind of thing.
I always want Trevor Hicks and his gang to mention Heysel when they appear in the media but they rarely do.
#85 Well, basically this is what I’d like to get to the bottom of (not being a football follower myself, and hence lacking context). Agreed: no English fans died at Heysel, and The Crowd’s single was clearly flagged as a post-Bradford fund raiser. And yet it looks like there was a sufficent post-Heysel sales spike to lift The Crowd to #1. So what was the motivation for purchase? To honour the memory of the Juventus fans? To sympathise with the trauma felt by the Liverpool fans? As a collective act of atonement? All or none of the above?
Re 86: I recall the general post-Heysel feeling being of deep shame, as a football fan, and I can’t believe it was different on Merseyside, apart from for the traumatised fans who were in the stadium. So this being at no.1 is just a strange coincidence; it went in at 52, then 4, then 1, pretty regular chart pattern (assuming it didn’t have a full week’s sales on release) for this kind of record.
They play Into The Valley pre-match at every game at Charlton for some obscure reason. Or because they play at The Valley.
I think its a bit harsh to say “we caused” Heysel. The ground, stewarding and policing were also partially (for which read mainly) to blame.
#88 With respect Pete they weren’t the ones charged with involuntary manslaughter.
According to Wikipedia, by the time the royalties for this were collected, the appeal had actually closed! (And the money was given to Bradford Hospital’s Burns Unit instead, hurrah) This suggests to me that the “disaster-means-a-single” reflexes pop developed in the later 80s weren’t yet fully formed, so it’s not surprising that there appears to be a slight time lag between the fire and this topping the charts.
Terrible joke. Ian Rush being interviewed on telly:
So what about what happened at Heysel, Ian?
It was never a penalty.
Charlton came out to “when the red red robin comes bob bob bobbing along” on saturday, no sign of Into The Valley (although i def heard it 6 years ago last time i was there, and on the telly in the intervening period, maybe they just play it a bit earlier now…)
As far as I can tell, the #52 placing was for the first two days of sales only (Friday & Saturday). The #4 placing was for sales during the week of the Heysel disaster (which happened on a Wednesday). The #1 placing was therefore for sales during the first full week after Heysel.
#83 – The thing about Pat Nevin was that he was arrogant or ignorant enough to assume that all Blues supporters were Labour voters. This by the law of averages was, of course, bollocks. I remember Hunter Davies’ seminal footy classic “The Glory Game”, which was an account of following Tottenham through the 1971-72 season. In one of the indexes, Davies interviewed the squad one by one and one of the questions concerned how they voted. Many (including Pat Jennings for very good reasons) claimed no interest. Others openly supported the tories, who were then in government. The only player who expressed any political views at all was the young Steve Perryman who when asked the question said something like: “Labour, of course. Aren’t all the players Labour?”
I can’t believe Nevin was ever naive enough to assume that. Especially given that when he was playing Chelsea were notorious for having a large NF element at games, I used to see people selling the NF paper ‘Bulldog’ outside the ground.
You’re right about “Bulldog”. But it certainly would not be incorrect to say that many people who bought this magazine were from a demographic who were otherwise Labour supporters and certainly nor Conservatives. The same persists today with the BNP scoring spectacular successes in Labour heartlands, whilst floundering badly in middle class areas. Perhaps what I meant to say about Pat Nevin was that he didn’t seem to realise that many Chelsea supporters voted Tory.
Sure, I didn’t mean to suggest that Labour voters couldn’t possibly also support the NF. Sadly I know from experience that’s not true.
#12: Bit late to this but to answer some of your questions, Geldof and Ure gave up all their songwriting royalties for Band Aid direct to Ethiopia Famine Relief. EMI were publishing Rogers/Hammerstein for ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ so I guess they decided that as the song was used in a number of different non-charitable versions it would be more straightforward to only donate royalties for that one recording (rather than have to separate out every showing of ‘Carousel’ etc).
‘We Are The World’ is still partially controlled by Jackson’s estate so it’s anyone’s guess what happened to that.
In general, publishing royalties take around 3-4 months to process and get the cash out to the owners, so if the situation is time critical then relying on a charity record’s songwriting royalties is probably not ideal.
##88-89: I’m the last person to defend hooligans, since the activities of those bastards have blighted the way people like me want to watch football for 40-odd years – but it’s true to say that the actions of Liverpool fans at Heysel were the catalyst for what happened and not its sole cause. They were guilty of riot and affray – the lunkheaded territorial “take your end” mentality displayed in many a domestic ground – but the deaths were caused by the collapse of a wall under the pressure of innocent (mainly) Italian fans trying to get away, in a stadium which was widely seen as unfit for purpose.
Mike is right about the chart positions in relation to the dates at #93 – it was at 52 in the chart announced on the day before Heysel, climbed to 4 and then to 1, but I don’t see any reason to suppose that the two were connected. I did however see an interview with a grim-faced supporter who happened to have been to both the Bradford City-Lincoln game and the Liverpool-Juventus game. His last two football matches had seen 94 dead.
Mike MCSG – what do you want Trevor Hicks and what you call “his gang” (innocent people who’ve lost members of their families, don’t forget) to say about Heysel? If somebody was a Liverpool hooligan they bear some responsibility for Hillsborough – the fences and the police’s attitudes, which were among the chief causes of the disaster, were a result of years of experience of all clubs’ hooligan fringes – but there’s no reason why Heysel should be used as a counterweight to the Hillsborough families’ grief.
“there’s no reason why Heysel should be used as a counterweight to the Hillsborough families’ grief”
Quite right. Post 85 displays a breathtaking ignorance to put it politely. Smacks of somebody with an anti-Liverpool agenda for whatever reason.
And Lee, at 91, you are right – that is a terrible joke, and would no doubt cause Ian Rush, as well as the families of those who died, great offence were any of them to read it.
Not much to add here, apart from we’re 5 years away from the point where football and popular culture become irreversibly fused. These are the swansong days of the working class game, before it’s rebranded as “The Beautiful Game”. The class distinctions within society of the ’80s are less firm than ever with social mobility becoming part of the Tory agenda. Football will become the chief beneficiary as new money begins to swamp the upper echelons of the game. Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough will force transformation of old and delapidated stadia. The weak will fall by the wayside and the strong will only become stronger. There will be insurmountable divisions between the haves and the have-nots.
The “Bulldog” sellers at Stamford Bridge were figures of disdain and derision for most. There were a small collection of individuals who would “seig heil” from The Shed End at games and lob bananas at Paul Cannoville, Chelsea’s first black player. Most of these morons were to fade away into embarrassing memory. Of greater concern were “The Chelsea Headhunters”, elements of that firm can still be seen around Fulham Broadway on matchdays still. The Chelsea of the ’80s were a basket-case club, lurching from one crisis to another. Avaricious developers circled around Stamford Bridge like vultures, after the Mears family were forced to sell the club and the massive debts that came with it to Ken Bates for £1. Bates fought on 2 fronts to save the ground and the club from extinction. It was a time when Chelsea were on the back pages of the redtops for all the wrong reasons. The hooligan element kept at bay by THAT electric fence, that threatened to alienate the loyal supporter. Lack of silverware and quality on the pitch, meant the Blues were London’s least fashionable club, a far cry from the swaggering Kings Of The King’s Road of the ’60s and the multi-millionaires of today.
Those lads off the Clem Attlee estate, the Battersea boys, and those who travelled in from Sutton, Kingston, Surbiton, Woking and Guildford, Latchmere, Cortez and Mickey Greenaway (RIP) skanking to “The Liquidator”, represent for me, from my Chelsea perspective, the time when football belonged to ordinary fans like me. Supporters of other clubs will have similar reminiscences, but most will agree that when The Crowd reached #1, it heralded the end of the working class game and the seed of the corporate monster was sewn.
thefatgit @ 101
Not much to add here, apart from we’re 5 years away from the point where football and popular culture become irreversibly fused
You mean where the captain of the England football team enters into marriage with a member of a high-profile girl group? Nah! We’re more than a quarter of a century past that!
Rosie, you misunderstand. Think Italia 90. Bunny is watching so I can say so more.
I’m getting old, thefatgit, and I’m afraid that when I recall Italia ’90 what comes to mind is the third act of Turandot, which is of no interest to Bunny, and England making heavy weather of a game against Cameroon. And, as it happens, of spending a weekend on a groundbreaking (because Internet organised) narrowboat tour of London waterways.
Allow me to jog your memory, without incurring the wrath of the Bunny:
ex Watford and Liverpool centre-forward with a penchant for rockin’ the mic…oops, may have said too much!
Erm, you’ve got me there. Are you thinking of a chap with the same name as a Thamesside community near Richmond? Is he bunnyable? I shall have to wait and see, I expect.
I still think pop and football were fused on the day when, the Everly Brothers (and not the Beverley Sisters) being number one with All I Have To Do Is Dream, Billy Wright of Wolverhampton Wanderers and England married Joy Beverley.
FatGit @ 101
As a boy growing up along what is now the Western corridor of the M25 Chelsea hold a special place in my memory as they did for so many other working-class kids from London and the Home Counties.
From at least as early as the second half of the 60s right through to the time we’re talking about every satellite town within about 40 miles of central London in a westerly direction had a “Chelsea mob”. Actually most of those towns would also have fans who would faithfully get the train to travel to West Ham, Spurs, Arsenal but nothing like the numbers or the hold that Chelsea had. I reckon back in the ’70s where I lived about 75% of all grafitti mentioned Chelsea/CFC etc!
I was always an Arsenal fan (comes from being 6 when they’d just won the double) and used to go to Watford with my dad, uncles etc but used to keep up with Chelsea because another uncle who lived with us for a bit was a regular at Stamford Bridge – in fact he managed to get a football in a cabinet signed by all the glory early 70s Chelsea team to raffle for the local team he played for which was proudly displayed in our house for a couple of weeks – he bought half the raffle tickets to win the thing too to no avail.Before my football memory really starts I was told when Watford drew Chelsea in the semi-finals of the 1970 FA Cup there were major ructions in the family!
But yes to me Chelsea WERE football in some ways in my neck of the woods in the denim jacket and knotted scarf days of the early 70s and thats why even as a non-Chelsea fan it pisses me off when people possibly in an effort to show how much of an “authentic” supporter they are go on about Chelsea fans all being post-Abramovich glory-hunters when anyone who really knows football knows that they were getting mid-30,000′s crowds before the Russian millions arrived and although not winning much compared with certain other teams had been looked on as a “big” club for decades before he arrived (even when along with Leeds sniffing around the lower (old) 2nd division with also like Leeds very low early-mid80s crowds).
Spot on AndyPandy! I got into Chelsea as soon as I could kick a ball, all because my best mate had a telly and watched the 1970 cup final at his house. His family were Leeds fans, but I was wearing blue that day and I am reminded by my mum that I was brought back home that day singing “Blue Is The Colour”. My recollection is hazy, but I was glued to the radio in our house when Chelsea won the replay. That was it, Blue for life, for better or worse.
My dad is Plymouth Argyle, and it always annoyed him I didn’t follow suit.
My dad originally being from the Wiltshire also followed Swindon and although I don’t remember him going to the Chelsea/Watford semi-final
I have quite clear memories of all his side of the family coming up to our place in 1969 to got to Wembley for the League Cup final Vs Arsenal (I’ve read articles on this since and it was all this “invasion of the Wiltshire yokels” stuff)and going down town shopping with my mum, younger cousin and aunty whilst the rest went to the match.I’d just turned 4 and that’s probably my first conscious memory of a match excluding the old man watching the Big Match on Sunday afternoons!
Small world AndyPandy, my mum’s from Salisbury. My dad’s a Devonian.