We all know that ‘Bubbles’ is one of the best and most famous club anthems in world football. But which of these other statements about it are also true:
- *The first verse begins ‘I’m dreaming dreams / I’m scheming schemes / I’m building castles high’.
- *It debuted in Broadway musical revue The Passing Show of 1918, featuring a young Fred Astaire.
- *It has appeared in many other films including James Cagney’s The Public Enemy, Ken Russell’s Women in Love, Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, and Elijah Wood’s Green Street.
- *EMI chose the up-and-coming Cockney Rejects over the up-and-coming Iron Maiden to record the 1980 FA Cup Final single.
- *Fans of yesteryear did a Dick Van Dyke mash-up known as ‘Chitty Chitty Bubbles’.
- *Before becoming a favourite at Upton Park, it was also sung at Swansea’s Vetch Field and the Den!
Full marks if you answered ‘yes’ to all the above. The Millwall connection dates back to 1922, with documentary evidence of it featuring on a marching band playlist. This is basically the equivalent of the Goodison Park PA blasting out Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ before its association with their neighbours across Stanley Park properly developed.
More distasteful to Liverpool FC is that their anthem had an airing at Old Trafford in the wake of the Munich air disaster, five years before Marsden’s Merseybeat band thought to cover it. Such were the nuggets of information I uncovered while writing Kick It! The Definitive Football Mixtape.
It all started with the Amazon bio I had to write for my first West Ham-centric tome. Struggling to come up with a few sentences about myself, I noted that ‘I pay the bills by creating learning resources to help overworked teachers educate the next generation, but I’d rather be writing about important stuff like football, music and film’.
That got me to thinking about how I could combine those interests and a quick Amazon search revealed that there were a couple of good books on the social history of chanting but zilch on the crossover between the football and music industries that has also produced ‘Diamond Lights’, ‘Anfield Rap’ and ‘Fog on the Tyne’.
Fair enough if the mere mention of that ignominious hat-trick of novelty records makes you think it should have remained unwritten. Football and music do not always make happy bedfellows. But there is an undeniable synergy between them.
Moreover, they are twin pillars of British culture, as evidenced by this quote from Britannia Unchained, co-authored by the Right Dishonourable Elizabeth Truss, which serves as the epigraph: ‘The British are among the worst idlers in the world… Indian children aspire to be doctors… the British are more interested in football and pop music.’
Unravelling the knotted history of Billy “Bubbles” Murray, Cornelius Beal and Charlie Paynter was diverting enough but those three names will already ring a bell with most West Ham fans, even if they don’t know the full story behind the song.
And although my first publisher rejected the book pitch on the basis that tribal supporters don’t want to read about the songs of other clubs, I actually found it refreshing to step outside of my West Ham bubble and learn more about the world’s oldest club-affiliated song – Norwich’s ‘On the Ball, City’ – and the competing claims on ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ and ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’, not to mention the exotic qualities of international hits such as ‘Far Away in America’ by Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft and the Village People.
‘Three Lions’ brought together fans of Chelsea, West Brom and Liverpool and I argue – in possibly the most serious analysis that a football song has ever been subjected to – that Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds’ magnum opus is the antithesis of what an anthem should be, regaling us with its subject’s deficiencies rather than strengths, and that it is this contrariness that endears it to the average fan, for whom stoical optimism is the default mindset when virtually every season ends trophyless.
Ironically, West Ham upset the odds – and the ethos of ‘Bubbles – by winning another trophy before the more fancied England men’s football team, catapulting W.H.A.M. Utd’s version of our alternative anthem – ‘West Ham Are Massive’ – into the iTunes chart in the process. Unsurprisingly, that sense of massiveness didn’t last long and we quickly reverted to type.
My appreciation for both football and music first began to develop as the ’80s turned into the ’90s, so ‘World in Motion’ and ‘Three Lions’ are touchstone songs. David Baddiel took issue with the former being described as ‘sonically superior’ to the latter but fortunately deigned to provide a cover quote anyway, describing my own effort as ‘A brilliant ride through the idiosyncratically British sub-culture that is the football pop song’.
The aim was to treat football songs with all the respect they deserve, so if you too have a soft spot for ‘Nessun Dorma’ thanks to Italia ’90 or want to know your ‘Cinnamon Stick’ from your ‘Bobby Moore Was Innocent’, then Kick It! is one for the Christmas list.
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