Surreal Football Chants

These chants, songs and quips are refreshingly unrestrained by taste or political correctness, because this isn’t humour looking over the shoulder and minding its ps and qs. It’s full-frontal, uncensored British and Irish attitude. It’s Swiftian and Wildean; it’s Python and Milligan. There is an acute sense of the ironic and a profound sense of the absurd. Spike would have been proud of this Parkhead paean to Shunsuke Nakamura: “He eats chow mein. He votes Sinn Fein.” It is utterly knowing yet beautifully faux naif as it sets up two outrageous stereotypes and renders them both completely ludicrous. It’s also pure Glasgow. The guy who heckled Bono at a gig there recently has to have been a football fan. The sainted one did say unto his flock: “Verily, every time I clap a child dies in Africa.” Back it came: “Well, stop clapping then.”

Chants are often forged in the craic factory of the matchday pub, which can be a magical place. Don’t you want to be there right now, that smell of cheap cigar smoke? Sorry Mrs Hewitt. It must have been one famous Scouse piss-up when this beauty emerged: “Don’t blame it on Biscan, don’t blame it on Hamman, don’t blame it on Finnan, blame it on Traoré. He just can’t, he just can’t, he just can’t control his feet.”

Tourettes can be a debilitating condition but you would need a sense of humour bypass not to appreciate “Tim Timminy Tim Timminy, Tim Tim Teroo, you’ve got Tim Howard and he says **** you!” I should mention that one with all the necessary caveats of social context and institutional ignorance but I can’t be bothered. It’s funny.

What is truly phenomenal is the spontaneity of many chants. It is as if an instantaneous telepathic round-robin has implanted the same thought at the same time into thousands of different minds. A friend told me about a Fulham v West Ham game at Loftus Road. They spotted a fat Fulham fan and, of course, all the predictable stuff was thrown his way. They suggested a part of his anatomy may well have been relatively unfamiliar to him, and imputed to him an over-fondness for pastry. He showed them a digit and the Hammers fans noticed no one was sitting in any of the seats near him. Then it happened. “Have you eaten all your mates?” The fat bloke applauded out of sheer respect.

Freud did a lot of work on crowd psychology (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analysis, 1920), but has since been largely discredited (You’re not singing any more). He was ultimately pessimistic about humanity’s chances of liberty. (Sigmund and his brother; they want to shag their mother, na na na na, na na na na). Gustave le Bon (Who are ya? Who are ya?) was another pioneer. The Le Bon model (Yasmin, Yasmin, give us a wave) saw crowds as irrational and meaningless and leading inevitably to subservience. Neither of them ever went to St James’ Park, then.

A current world leader on crowd psychology is Dr Clifford Stott. You can find a lot of his work online and it is absolutely fascinating. I asked him about the amazing spontaneity.

“You have hit upon one of the core theoretical problems in understanding how crowds work,” he said. Blimey, get me! “Spontaneity is explained in terms of actions that capture in a meaningful way how the crowd’s social identity is defined in that place at that time – the more the action, the chant, the behaviour captures meaningfully the nature of the identity the more likely it is that it will be expressed by the crowd as a whole.”