Many popular songs have made their way on to the football terraces of the world (among them“Seven Nation Army” and“Guantanamera”), but perhaps the best known of these is “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. For more than 50 years, it has been sung by football fans around the globe – at Liverpool FC, whose fans are its best known champions, and also at Glasgow Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord and FC Tokyo. Its avowal of solidarity in the face of adversity provides a tonic for the vicissitudes of the beautiful game.
The song was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for their 1945 musical Carousel. It is sung twice during the show, the second time in the climactic graduation scene, when Louise realises that she does not have to live as an outcast. The song soon attracted accolades — Irving Berlin compared it to the 23rd Psalm. It was first recorded in 1945 by the Broadway cast, but was soon covered by Frank Sinatra, who released it as a single. The film versionof the musical in 1956 took the song to a wider audience. It was recorded by artists as diverse as rock’n’roller Gene Vincentand Doris Day.
In 1963, Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers were cresting the Merseybeat wave. They were managed by Beatles manager Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin at Abbey Road. They’d scored their first number one with Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It”, a song The Beatles had rejected in favour of their own “Please Please Me”. Another Murray composition, “I Like It”, provided a second number one. Emboldened, Gerry Marsden’s band dismissed the advice of Epstein and Martin and rejected John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Hello Little Girl” as their next single in favour of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, which also went to number one. (“Hello Little Girl”, spurned by The Beatles themselves, became a hit for another Liverpool group in Epstein’s stable, The Fourmost.)
In those days, top 10 singles were played over the public address system at Liverpool FC’s ground, Anfield, and the crowd would sing along. After Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” dropped out of the top 10, the fans kept singing it and adopted it as the unofficial club anthem. In 1964 the Liverpool team sang it alongside Gerry and the Pacemakers on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the following year the club’s manager Bill Shankly included the song among his Desert Island Discs on the BBC radio show.
Elvis Presleyrecorded the song in 1967, a homage to his boyhood idol, the rhythm and blues singer Roy Hamilton, whose soulful version in 1954 was his breakthrough hit. Roy Orbisonrecorded it in 1969 in a similar arrangement to his 1961 hit “Running Scared” – another song with no chorus, and which built to an emotional climax over a bolero rhythm.
Pink Floyd wove samples from a field recording of Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” into their song “Fearless”, from their 1971 album Meddle. It provides a stirring coda after the song’s final line, when the subject of the song rises above his fears, looks down and hears “the sound of the faces in the crowd”.
As rock music expanded into arenas and stadiums, the song moved with it. In May 1977, Queen played at the Bingley Hall in Stafford. The group’s guitarist Brian May told the BBC: “We did an encore and then went off. Instead of just keeping clapping, [the crowd] sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ to us, and we were just completely knocked out.” May says that Queen classics such as “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”, which heralded the era of stadium rock, were “in some way connected” with the experience of hearing their fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” took on a fresh emotional resonance in the 1980s. In 1985, Marsden and McCartney were among the contributors to a charity cover versionto raise funds for victims of the Bradford City stadium fire. It was adopted as an anthem by survivors and campaigners following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans died.
In “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, Rodgers and Hammerstein penned the ultimate show-stopper, a modern hymn whose ripples still reverberate around rock concerts and football stadiums.
Do you have particular memories of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’? Whose version is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: AudioSonic Music, Marathon Media International Ltd., Classic Film Scores, JB Production, Columbia/Legacy, X5 Music Group, SBCMG, Vocal Classics, UMC (Universal Music Catalogue), Pink Floyd Records, Voltage Records
Picture credit: David Farrell/Redferns