Back There Back Then; the runout music your club deserves: a prologue
If there's one thing I've learned from four and half decades of live football-watching, it's what music should be playing as your football team takes to the pitch.
I’ve not been keeping count, but I've been to just over thirty games this season, and these have been played at something like twenty or so different grounds. There have only been a couple that I haven’t written about. At the end of the summer, we went to see Steyning Town play Whyteleafe and I didn’t write it up because we’d actually been there the previous week to see Steyning play Maidstone United in the FA Cup. I didn’t write up the Crawley Town vs Salford City League Two match that I went to in January on here because it was last month’s Match of the Month for When Saturday Comes. Dibs is dibs.
But I’ve got around and, over the course of this season, I already knew that I’d prefer some grounds (indeed, some days out) more than others, and that there are themes that they’ve had in common. I don’t think that I’ll ever, for example, be fully onboard with artificial playing surfaces, though after more than one weekend when the only matches on have been played on them, I’m more reconciled to them now than I was at the end of July.
Nothing will be enough to put me off going to a ground altogether, but there are certain effects that I prefer over others. For obvious reasons, I like a ground that’s near a railway station. But much of it is really about ephemera or aesthetics. One of the very worst things about grounds with 3g pitches is that they’re frequented by goalposts with wheels built into the side of them, and you should all be fully aware of how I feel about that sort of thing by now. I like a ground with a big stand and/or old-fashioned floodlight pylons. And so on and so on.
But this isn’t entirely about bricks and mortar, wrought iron or pylons. It’s also about a state of mind. I love a club with an eccentric raffle prize or a frightening looking mascot, or an over-opinionated PA guy (and I’ve heard at least three of those so far this season). Continuing on that theme, I also a sentient PA guy. Playing Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure at the end of their home defeat by Salford City was a cap-doffing moment for Crawley Town.
All of which brings me onto run-out music. Of course, teams don’t ‘run out’ onto the pitch at the start of matches any more. They walk out. Or meander. It is one of the peculiarities of the modern football is that this form of entrance has taken hold at all levels of the game. In the Premier League, I understand it. The PA guy there can obliterate any noise that 40,000 people can make, while clubs tend to see the pre-match ritual as being one that they create and in which the supporters participate, rather than something that originates from the stands. There’ll be fireworks and music so loud that local seismographs will probably twitch. There’ll be a tifo. It’s an event.
But in, say, the Southern Combination Football League Division One, in front of 80-odd people, half of whom are there as much as an excuse for some afternoon drinking as anything else, and with a forty-year old PA system crackling out a rendition of Right Here Right Now that is mostly only audible to dogs, it all starts to feel somewhat different. Don’t get me wrong, I love crappiness. Crappiness is endearing. But at this level of the game, there’d be nothing wrong with the players actually running out onto a pitch and hopelessly punting some training balls in the vague direction of the goal before a match. I do appreciate that this is an argument that I can never win, by the way.
Across much of football, then, the ‘runout’ has become the ‘walkout’, and perhaps this explains the success of Right Here Right Now as the walkout music of choice in the 21st century. It builds slowly, in a circular fashion, like a whirlwind of strings and electronica. It’s… appropriate for that sort of thing. But it’s also highly derivative. I can’t say for sure how many times I have heard it this season, but if I’ve been to about 32 games this season, I’d unsurprised if it was 28 or 29. (In the 1980s and 1990s, before it came along, the nearest equivalent was Simply the Best by Tina Turner, but that has regrettably faded from use in recent years.)
Whether running or walking out, at some clubs the music often hasn’t changed in years, while at others it might change every year or two. Some clubs go with something vaguely orchestral. Fanfare For The Common Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer has retained a degree of use into the 21st century, while others have gone for other pieces with an air of foreboding, such as Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner or Dance of the Nights by Prokofiev. Other clubs have something local or traditional, while others still have something that people assume there’s a reason for being it played, though no-one can actually remember what that reason might be.
And in the lower divisions, the tyranny of Right Here Right Now is very real indeed. I doubt whether Fatboy Slim will ever see a single penny in royalties from these pirate PA guy broadcasts (and he doesn’t need more money anyway), but he can rest assured that, the length and breadth of the nation, his music is the soundtrack to five to three on a Saturday afternoon. If you don’t hear it as the teams take to the pitch, you will have heard it in the ten to fifteen minutes beforehand.
A couple of Saturdays ago at the National League match between Dorking Wanderers and Ebbsfleet United, I was sold a dummy. Right Here Right Now started blasting over the PA system but then, at the very last minute, it switched to Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now by McFadden & Whitehead. It turned out that there was some stoppin’ Dorking on that occasion (Ebbsfleet won 4-1), but this whole incident did start me thinking about runout music again and how many clubs might still be stuck with obviously inferior choices.
Obviously, being a 51 year-old man, I can do better. I can give your club the runout music it deserves. So, over the next four weeks, I’m going to go through all 92 Premier League and EFL clubs and give them all the runout music that is right for their club. No, you’re right. It is none of my business. No, you’re right again. I doubt if any of these will be taken up by the clubs concerned. Yes, you probably are right to point out that I should seek some sort of external help for what is clearly abnormal behaviour.
But that’s not the point. You are, after all, talking to the man who ranked 50 goalposts and 40 footballs. That is the point. One day, long after the end of civilisation, someone will come across this piece and translate it, and they will come to understand that some of us strived for better. The campaign to make Right Here Right Now ‘Back There Back Then’ starts… right here, right now. Well, next Thursday, if you want to be more precise about it.