Walk into any ground in England on a Saturday afternoon and you'll hear something that sounds spontaneous but rarely is. A song rises from one end, gets picked up by three thousand voices, dies away, and comes back twenty minutes later when someone scores. That noise has a history as long as the game itself, running through brass bands, music halls, hooligan firms and Italian ultras curvas, before landing on the terrace as we know it today.

This is not a tidy, straight-line story. Chants borrowed from hymns, from pub songs, from adverts, even from nursery rhymes, and they mutated as they moved between grounds. Understanding how a chant gets from a colliery brass band in 1900 to a chorus of forty thousand people singing about a striker's hair transfer tells you something real about how English (and increasingly global) football culture actually works.

Brass Bands and the Earliest Matchday Noise

Before there were chants there was brass. Most professional clubs formed in the 1880s and 1890s grew out of works teams, cricket clubs or church sides in industrial towns, and those towns already had brass bands attached to collieries, mills and chapels. Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday both had bands playing on the pitch before kick-off well into the 1900s, a habit borrowed straight from the local colliery band circuit rather than invented for football.

Newcastle United's St James' Park had a band marching around the perimeter as late as the 1920s, and match programmes from that era list the band's repertoire alongside the team sheet, something no club would bother doing now. The noise these bands made was formal and pre-arranged, nothing like the loose, crowd-led singing that came later. It filled the gap before kick-off and at half-time, not during play.

What the brass band era did establish was the idea that a matchday had its own soundtrack, separate from ordinary life. Fans who grew up going to games with their fathers in the 1910s and 1920s were used to organised music being part of the ritual, so when spontaneous crowd singing did start to appear on the terraces from the 1920s onward, it had a ready-made audience that already expected sound to be part of the occasion.

How Music Hall Songs Became Terrace Standards

The real shift came when fans stopped waiting for the band and started singing themselves, usually music hall numbers everyone already knew from working men's clubs. Newcastle's "Blaydon Races," written by Geordie Ridley in 1862 about a horse race day out on Tyneside, had nothing to do with football originally, but by the 1920s Newcastle United fans were belting it out on the way to St James' Park, and it is still sung there now, over a century later.

The most famous crossover of all happened at Anfield in 1963. Gerry and the Pacemakers released "You'll Never Walk Alone," a song lifted from the 1945 musical Carousel, and it sat at number one in the charts that autumn. Liverpool fans, who already sang chart hits on the Kop as a matter of habit, picked it up within weeks. Bill Shankly reportedly heard it and decided it belonged to the club permanently, and it has been sung before every home game since.

This pattern repeated at other grounds:

• West Ham United adopted "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," originally a 1918 music hall song, after it was reportedly linked to a schoolboy player nicknamed "Bubbles" in the 1920s.
• Manchester City fans took "Blue Moon," a 1934 Rodgers and Hart standard, and turned it into a terrace anthem from the 1980s onward, long after the song had faded from mainstream popularity.
• Port Vale sing "The Wizard of Oz" theme tied to a local nickname for the ground, showing the pattern held even at smaller clubs.

What these songs share is that none were written for football. Fans simply reached for whatever was already lodged in the local memory, whether from a working men's club stage or the radio, and repurposed it because the tune was familiar enough that thousands of strangers could join in without rehearsal.

The Shift Toward Chants Aimed at Rivals and Referees

By the late 1960s and through the 1970s, terrace singing changed character. Instead of communal, affectionate songs about the club, a harder strand of chanting developed, aimed outward at opponents, rival fans and match officials. This period overlaps with the rise of organised hooligan followings at clubs like Millwall, Leeds United and West Ham, and the chants grew rougher to match the mood on the terraces.

"Who's the wanker in the black" became a fixture aimed at referees from roughly the 1970s onward, simple enough to be shouted without a tune, which made it spread faster between grounds than melodic songs did. Chants mocking a rival club's ground, town or recent results also multiplied in this period, often built on local knowledge, a rival's factory closures, a nearby town's reputation, or a previous season's relegation.

Referees became a particular target because the chant gave a crowd something to do in the dead moments of a match, a missed tackle, a contentious offside, a delay for treatment. Unlike anthem singing, which needed the whole crowd to know the words in advance, insult chants could be started by a small group and picked up within seconds because the structure was so simple, usually four or eight syllables repeated twice.

Call and Response and Why It Spreads Fast in a Crowd

The mechanics of how a chant actually travels through forty thousand people are worth looking at directly, because they explain why some songs catch on instantly and others die within a minute. A call and response structure, where one section starts a line and the rest of the ground answers, works because it only demands that new listeners memorise half the phrase before joining in.

English terraces picked up this structure partly through contact with continental ultras culture in the 1990s, particularly Italian curva groups who organised chanting with drums and designated capo figures standing with their backs to the pitch, conducting the crowd. Clubs like Celtic's Green Brigade and sections of Millwall's support later adopted similar drum-led, call and response patterns, borrowing directly from what English fans had seen on European away trips.

A few practical reasons explain why call and response spreads faster than a standard verse-chorus song:

1. Short phrases, usually under ten words, are easier for someone three rows back to catch and repeat within seconds.
2. Repetition removes the need for anyone to remember a second verse, so newcomers to the ground can join by the second cycle.
3. A clear rhythmic pulse, often a stamped beat or a drum, keeps thousands of separate voices synchronised without a conductor.
4. Visual cues, someone turning to face the crowd, arms raised, work almost as well as a drum in grounds without amplification.

This is also why away ends, often the smallest and most tightly packed section of a ground, tend to produce louder, more sustained chanting than a home end four times the size. Fewer people means a chant reaches full volume faster, and the tighter packing makes the physical stamping and clapping more audible to everyone involved.

Bootleg Songs, Bootroom Jokes and Local In-Jokes

Away from the big anthems, most terrace chanting is built on local in-jokes that rarely survive outside the ground where they started. A striker's odd pre-match ritual, a manager's comment misheard on local radio, or a rumour about a player's diet can turn into a chant within a single home game and then vanish within a season if the player moves on.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, before mobile phones and streaming, these songs travelled through cassette tapes sold outside grounds by fanzine sellers, often recorded straight off the terrace with a handheld microphone. Fanzines themselves, cheaply photocopied and sold for pocket change on match day, printed new lyrics weeks before they were properly sung, effectively workshopping chants in print before the crowd tested them live.

Some enduring examples of the in-joke tradition:

• Arsenal fans singing about Dennis Bergkamp's refusal to fly, turning a well-known personal quirk into a standing joke that outlasted his playing career.
• Chants referencing a manager's touchline coat, a chairman's business troubles, or a groundsman's pitch, all details only meaningful to supporters who followed the club closely that season.
• Local rivalries built on geography rather than football, a canal, a motorway junction, a shared bus route, turning ordinary town features into shorthand insults.

These songs rarely get written down properly, and clubs and historians researching them usually have to rely on older fans' memories rather than any official record, which means a lot of terrace history from before the 2000s is genuinely at risk of being lost.

Why Some Chants Outlive the Players They're About

Most chants are disposable by design, tied to a single player, a single season, a single feud, and they fade once the subject leaves the club. But a small number outlast everyone connected to their original meaning, and it is worth asking why. "You'll Never Walk Alone" has survived several generations of Liverpool teams, several managers and multiple stadium redevelopments, because the sentiment, solidarity rather than a specific result, doesn't age the way a joke about one player does.

"Blue Moon" at Manchester City works the same way. It was adopted decades before the club's modern success, sung through relegations and lower-division seasons in the 1990s, which is precisely why it still carries weight now. Fans who were there for the harder years treat it as proof of loyalty rather than bandwagon noise, and that history gives the song staying power a newer chant simply cannot match.

The comparison below shows the rough pattern:

The common thread among the long-lasting ones is that they were never really about football results in the first place. They describe belonging to a place and to a crowd, which is a feeling that doesn't expire when a transfer window closes.

Common mistakes

A few errors turn up repeatedly when people try to trace or retell terrace chant history, and they're worth flagging.

• Assuming a chant was written for football. Most club anthems, from "Blue Moon" to "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," started life as unrelated stage or chart songs, and treating them as football-specific compositions gets the history backwards.
• Dating a chant to when it became famous rather than when it started. "You'll Never Walk Alone" is often assumed to date from the Shankly glory years of the late 1960s, when in fact fans adopted it in 1963, before Liverpool had won the league under him.
• Treating hooligan-era insult chants and older anthem singing as the same tradition. They come from different periods and different motives, one communal and affectionate, the other confrontational, and blurring the two flattens a genuinely interesting shift in terrace culture.
• Relying on a single fan's memory as fact. Terrace chant origins are passed down orally far more than they are documented, so claims about "who started it" should be treated as local folklore unless a fanzine, programme or recording backs it up.

Next steps for anyone digging into local chant history

If you want to trace the chants at your own club properly rather than relying on secondhand claims, a few practical approaches work better than guessing.

• Track down old fanzines, many clubs have supporter archives or local libraries holding bound copies, and cross-reference printed lyrics against the date they appear.
• Talk to supporters who have followed the club for thirty years or more, and ask specifically when they first heard a chant, not just who they think started it.
• Check local museum or heritage trust collections, several English clubs now have dedicated heritage projects that record oral histories from long-standing fans.
• Where a chant references a real event, a strike, a closure, a local scandal, verify the underlying fact through a local newspaper archive before repeating the story as settled history.

None of this needs to be formal research. A notebook, a few conversations in the concourse before kick-off, and a willingness to check a claim against a printed source will do more to preserve accurate terrace history than any amount of assumption, and it keeps a genuinely local tradition from being flattened into a generic football cliché.