Why Do British Soccer Teams Walk Out to These Terrible Songs?

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK, which explains why the term "football" is used in the URL.

There’s an untouchable thrill about the half-pissed throb of the crowd, the pie-tinged taste of anticipation, and the chills that run up and down one’s spine when 11 athletes—who, if you’re watching your local team come to represent where you’re from and who, to some extent, you are—trundle down the tunnel. Even if you’re not that into it, going to soccer is an experience of totality. When it’s at its best, those 90 minutes of frustration, regret and, sometimes, sheer joy provide more internal oscillations than a lifetime with the Oedipus complex.

Yes, the jumpers for goalposts innocence of football has been lost to financial fraudulence, institutionalised racism, flagrant homophobia, oozing sexism and a conservative refusal to change. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Players still accidentally tackle referees, defenders take free kicks to the groin, animals and streakers occasionally run riot on the pitch and, as we’re about to closely assess, teams continue to come out to crude entrance songs like a batch of deaf models prancing down a grassy catwalk.

Employed correctly, music can be a proper weapon. It has the power to make you shit yourself or drive you forth with fiery pride. It can fill you with anxiety like a swelling bladder of self-doubt, or derail your concentration like a two-footed tackle to the brain. And nowhere is this more effective than in the tribal arena of sport, where a well-picked song can set the tone for a rigorous afternoon of psychological domination, booming through the PA like “Ride of the Valkyries” from a fleet of apaches silhouetting across the skies of Apocalypse Now's opening scenes. Except it’s Burnley, not Vietnam.

For reasons only known to the lads in charge, most British teams walk on to records that have as much impact as a convoy of Puntos playing “Spanish Flea” as they descend on an Aldi carpark. Footballers aren’t traditionally viewed as paragons of taste—as exemplified by the England team’s World Cup soundtrack and the questionable indie expert era of Tim Lovejoy, former Soccer AM banter boy turned fearful foodie—but even that is transcended by the sheer surreal nature of the songs chosen to walk out to on match days.

While the Transatlantic sport counterparts in the NBA or NHL might come striding on to firework displays and stomping psyche-outs like “Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson (used by Toronto Maple Leafs), or the regional reference steez of “California Love” by Tupac (like San Francisco 49ers), soccer in the UK is trapped in a much more stringent time warp of post-war sentimentality: where military strength, rusting machismo, bait blockbuster movies and eccies-in-the-stands anthems are the enduring orders of the day. After all, this is a world where the thought of getting a computer to tell you whether the ball had crossed the line was viewed as the apocalyptic beckoning of some sort of Skynet singularity.

The fact that our nation’s teams, those disparate collections of men who happen to share both a shirt and the ability to make or break your weekend, can walk onto the pitch to the records below and receive nothing but unfaltering applause and adulation, is indicative of something. Does it allude to the lack of young people in grounds, forced out through high ticketing prices, so none of them can turn to the person next to them and say “Fuck’s this racket?” Or is it just furthering the depressingly prescient notion that professional soccer, no matter how youthful its appearance, is still closely protected by the old guard?

For now, here’s a few of the biggest, most novelty vibe-killers that soundtrack three o’clocks all over the country. Prepare to be unnerved.

The way Tranmere Rovers proudly call themselves the Super White Army suggests they don’t often assess their public perception on face value, and it’s fitting that the League 2 dwellers proudly wiggle out to the warbling synth theme tune from a long dead 70s American detective show called The Rockford Files.

Apparently, in the 1970s, the show would be on at the same time as Tranmere played, and the song would humorously symbolize how everyone could have been watching it in the warm comfort of their home instead of coming to see their beloved Rovers get mundanely decimated by Southport on a cold, wintery night. Which, in hindsight, is actually quite a complex and sarcastic joke to roll out on a weekly basis in front of 15,000 people for 45 years.

If they updated the song for 2015 based on the same stipulations, it would be the theme to Ben Shepherd’s ITV gameshow Tipping Point. Banger.

It’s hard to think about 60s British television programs now without expecting the words Operation Yewtree to turn up somewhere, but that hasn’t stopped the theme song from old TV show Z Cars being a cult hit in the stadiums. For some reason, both Everton and Watford think the hollow rolling drums, nursery rhyme melody and heartbroken sailor backstory make it the perfect “you want some of this!?” match day hype tune and not at all like the scene music for niche Tudor porn.

Considering football teams review their walk out song at the start of each season, it’s surprising how few have managed to find something even relatively modern. Fulham FC tried it once, flirting briefly with a Lost Prophets tune until… Step in fearless futurists Dagenham & Redbridge who have brought the reluctant world of football music kicking and screaming into the year 2010 with Chicane’s Sigur Ros tribute “Poppiholla”—a plinky plonky sub-ringtone dance track for those who like their Bovril with a spoonful of trance. It’s the worst marriage of music and football since Diana Ross took a penalty at World Cup 94.

When trendcasters portrayed their shiny and verbose images of the year 2015, with its driverless cars, man bangles, smart bras, and Bjork albums, nobody mentioned that thousands of people in Greater Manchester would still be standing to attention and applauding the music from 1964 RAF films on a weekly basis.

It seems for some football teams, nothing gets the blood pumping quite like a marching military tune straight from the era of “They don’t like it up ‘em.” I mean, you can just imagine how absolutely psyched up Bolton’s South Korean midfielder Lee Chung-yong must get when he hears the opening notes of the theme from 633 Squadron bellowing out across the Macron Stadium.

You know when people in films stab themselves in the leg just to show how volatile they are? That’s basically the second city’s boys in blue's approach to the pre-match banger. The thought of their fans and players staring you down while four minutes of the most fabulous pop tune of 1998 plays out must be one of the most disorientating tactics used in world football. Maya’s coarse-throated “WHHHAT”’s must ring round the stadium like the infernal fire alarm in hell.

For a lot of these clubs, you can imagine the association with military music is some sort of rear glance reference to “the war” days, back when football was genuinely innocent, the goalkeeper smoked twenty woodbines in the first half and Jimmy from the bakers would play up top. However, how Notts County and Spurs headed for the sentimentality and traditionalism of marching songs and ended up with “Duel of the Fates” and “The Imperial March” from Star Wars leaves me bemused, and leaves both sets of players walking out onto the pitch like confused bad guys at a school fucking panto.

Nothing says it’s time for kick off like a dated techno-pop tune called "Ready to Go" that says “I’m ready to go” 11 times in three and a half minutes.

Ah yes, the mighty Wigan, storming the pitch to the sounds of Russell Crowe bringing Ancient Rome to its knees. There’s nothing quite like the pugnacious battle orchestra of Gladiator echoing around the DW stadium to rouse the 4,000 people that have bothered to turn up to the 25,000 venue. Maybe something from 300 would have been more appropriate.

Now, I’m not saying soccer teams up and down the country should be playing the latest Stormzy track on arrival, but something from the last 30 years, which is genuinely motivational and blood pumping, would surely be far more representative of the young and progressive role that a football team can play in a city, rather than subjecting everyone to this twice reincarnated 1971 Tony Christie song. Unless they play this sarcastically, because you’d never end up in Chesterfield on your way to Amarillo… in which case, hats off.

You can follow Joe on Twitter here: @cide_benengeli