Top of the Pops: what makes ‘Bubbles’ a bigger hit than ‘North London Forever’?
- by Paul Brand
- Filed: Thursday, 17th October 2024
I’m currently reading The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, which is not – alas – an exposé on why Mikel Arteta thinks its okay to employ the dark arts but moans like an old fishwife whenever anything slightly untoward goes against his team.
In fairness to Arteta, I don’t think he’s ever arranged the on-pitch death of an opposition player, which is the trigger point of this 1939 crime thriller.Not being a die-hard fan of murder mysteries, the main joy of the book is as a window on a bygone era, when sportsmen and supporters alike were more guileless and honourable. Sample sentence: "[Arsenal manager, George] Allison opened the door. Outside stood Chulley, the Trojan captain, his shirt and knickers attesting to the hard struggle he had put up in his team’s defence."
In the absence of a Premier League trophy, it could be argued that Arteta’s greatest achievement at the Emirates is also a throwback to 20th-century fashions, namely the introduction of a musical anthem. It was at the manager’s behest that the widely derided song ‘The Angel (North London Forever)’ started to be played over the PA system.
One of the reasons for the derision directed at ‘North London Forever’ is the belief that a club anthem can’t be artificially inseminated in this way. Yet is it really any different to the Upton Park origins of ‘Bubbles’, performed pre-match by a marching band reportedly at the request of Charlie Paynter (influenced by his friend Cornelius Beal, who dubiously adopted it in honour of schoolboy footballer Billy “Bubbles” Murray)?
The acid test will be whether ‘North London Forever’ is still being sung after Arteta has faded from view. Ultimately, supporters determine what is a hit: in the words of folk musician Martin Carthy, “football crowds represent the one true surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition.”
Perhaps the most strikingly unusual thing about the Arsenal’s adoption of ‘The Angel’ is that it’s so out of time and behind the curve. While Carthy’s “folk tradition” remains evident in the constant reworking of pop songs (or even advertising jingles in the case of ‘I Just Sold My Car...’) into terrace chants, most club anthems belong to the days of music hall.
Even ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is a bit of a latecomer, originating with the 1945 stage musical Carousel before migrating to Liverpool in 1963.
‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ is more than 100 years old, even if its footballing connections don’t go quite that far back. The title for longest club-affiliated song is Norwich’s ‘On the Ball, City’, which dates to the turn of the century and is nice for the Canaries, who’ve never won much else of note.
The Seventies penchant for cup songs (‘Blue is the Colour’, ‘Marching on Together’ etc) can be traced back to Jimmy Hill of all people, who anticipated Pop Idol by masterminding an ITV song contest to accompany Arsenal’s march to Wembley in 1971. Brilliantly, the winner was Hill himself, who turned his nose/chin up at all the entries and instead composed the long-forgotten ‘Good Old Arsenal’ (to the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’).
Our Seventies cup exploits also gave ‘Bubbles’ a new lease of life, with the squad recording providing a marked difference to Vera Lynn and Doris Day. And then in 1980 the Cockney Rejects blew some big fuck-off bubbles with possibly the most punk entry of the football music canon.
To quote singer Jeff Geggus (aka Stinky Turner) on being banned from the BBC: “We were just supporting our team. I mean, if someone had said to me a year before that West Ham were going to be in the Cup Final and that we’d be doing a punk version of ‘Bubbles’ on Top of the Pops, I would’ve never have believed them. So of course we were going to be lairy.”
Cockney Rejects aside, football records have never been particularly cool. The Nineties international high point of number ones for ‘World in Motion’ and ‘Three Lions’ was undermined by regional releases such as ‘Come On You Reds’ and ‘Pass and Move (It’s the Liverpool Groove)’ severely testing Sky’s rebranding of the national sport as primetime entertainment.
The street cred of ‘North London Forever’ also suffers for it being packaged as part of Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing documentary and written by the son of Birds of a Feather’s Linda Robson. Nevertheless, I grudgingly applaud it as a rare 21st-century entry into the world of football anthems.
In a hyper-commercial climate, it’s perhaps surprising that the synergy between the football and entertainment industries hasn’t produced more. Or perhaps modern audiences outside of north London are too sophisticated for such pap.
Most anthems were produced in more innocent times. Just as The Arsenal Stadium Mystery has transported me back to an imagined past, music is imbued with the power of time travel, vividly rekindling moments lodged in the memory banks.
And if any of the above has made you nostalgic for a time when marching bands were tastemakers and Bobby Moore could hit a few bum notes on ‘Sugar, Sugar’ without fear of reprisal from social media cynics, then there’s a lot more in Kick It! The Definitive Football Mixtape, released on 24 October but available to pre-order (with free shipping) now.
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