Hailing football’s chants in a million

MANY of the chants that boomed round Hampden during the epic Celtic-Rangers encounter in the CIS Cup this week had nothing whatsoever to do with 22 men kicking a ball about a field. They’re the kind that irk fans from outwith the Old Firm and provoke the retort: "Can you sing a football song?"

But where do real football songs come from? It’s a question posed by Sing When You’re Losing, a new BBC Scotland Ex:S documentary, but not really answered. As in TV searches for Bigfoot, the producers have failed to identify the Big Voice at the back of what used to be called the terraces who dreams them up.

For instance, who is the wag who can claim the credit for this inspired reworking of Winter Wonderland, to celebrate Bobby Petta’s slug-to-butterfly makeover at Celtic under Martin O’Neill? ...

His name is Bob

Bobby Petta

He was sh***

Now he’s better

We took him to mass

That made him world-class

Walkin’ in a Petta wonderland

In the 1930s, when Hampden bulged with crowds of 140,000 and more - and Glasgow, according to soccer historian Bob Crampsey, "seemed like the capital of the footballing world" - the supporters all sang from the same hymn-sheet, with lyrics to traditional songs being handed out at the turnstiles.

Another of the programme’s contributors, comedian Andy Cameron, remembers a ditty popular at Ibrox in the 1940s and 1950s when fans - and players - put in a shift at the factory before games ...

Every other Saturday’s my half-day off

And it’s off to the match I go

Happily we wander down the Copland Road

Me and my wee pal Joe

The comic Lex McLean later made a record of the song. Lex had an acid tongue - his jibes about his namesake George from the stage of Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre were reckoned by many to have helped hasten the end of the goal-shy centre-forward’s Ibrox career - but this was tame stuff. If chants were ever nasty back then, no-one in the documentary can remember any of the words.

In the 1960s, fans started nicking songs from the hit parade, and You’ll Never Walk Alone and Hey Jude have become enduring Parkhead anthems. Humour, it seems, didn’t turn up in songs until the following decade. This was the beginning of the era of regular World Cup misadventures for the national team, of 6ft 2in Jim Holton and Wee Jinky, whose boating malarkey helped inspire the chant:

We drink beer, we drink wine

We’re the Scotland forward-line

Na na na na etc

SOME of the talking heads in the programme, including Off The Ball’s Tam Cowan, remember how, in their youth, chants were given their first airing on supporters’ buses en route to away games. But just who are fitba’s answers to Hal David and Steven Sondheim? ...

Cowan reckons they don’t sing ’em like they used to, before the advent of all-seater stadia. Denied freedom of movement by season-ticket regulations, and isolated from his mates, the chief rabble-rouser feels inhibited. "He probably finds himself surrounded by a family of five like The Waltons with two grannies sitting behind him and Stadler and Waldorf from The Muppets on either side," quips the funster.

In recent years, fans have discovered irony, incorporating old standards, nursery rhymes and show-tunes into their repertoires, and the more improbable the choice of song, the better. Aberdeen have One Man Went To Mow, Hearts have My Way ... and during the 1998 World Cup, at the Scotland-Norway game in Bordeaux, the Tartan Army belted out 127 choruses of Doh A Dear from The Sound Of Music. "We almost missed the Morocco match as a result," remembers Cowan.

Scotland’s World Cup performances have waned, but that hasn’t silenced the kilted hordes. If anything, they make even more noise now. Phil Differ, writer of Only An Excuse, takes a dim view of this.

"They’ve lost their critical faculties," he says of the Tartan Army. "Despite Scotland losing, sometimes really poorly, they’re always hap-hap-happy. When the team do badly, the fans should let them know about it."

Maybe it’s a good thing the chant-starters stay anonymous; that way they become legends in their own half-time. But I’d like to see them get the credit they undoubtedly deserve - for "D-I Canio" (to the tune of Ottawan’s D.I.S.C.O.), for "There’s only two Andy Gorams" (in response to The Goalie’s "psychological problems") and - most of all - for "Get intae them!".

That one is surely worthy of an Ivor Novello Award - and think of all the royalties it would earn its composer.

Ex:S - Sing When You’re Losing, 12 February, BBC1, 10.35pm

Taken from the Scotsman