Gerry Marsden: You’ll Never Walk Alone – a football coronavirus anthem, but not in Singapore

“Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.” So goes the late Gerry Marsden's famous refrain of You’ll Never Walk Alone, a song associated with Liverpool Football Club, football in general, and now the coronavirus pandemic. The song has been in the headlines of late. First for becoming an anthem of the fight against Covid-19 across Europe. The BBC reported last month that the official UK charts compilers had the song as top of the coronavirus lockdown playlist – based on the increase in plays on streaming services. Emotional watching this. So much respect for NHS staff at the best of times, but at the moment, putting their lives on the line to protect us from this virus, wow! Total heroes. #YNWA #NHSHeroes pic.twitter.com/VJlA4WrsXO — Mary K Foy (@marykfoy) March 26, 2020 A Dutch DJ had already led a Europe-wide simultaneous playing of the song on radio stations, while Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said he was brought to tears by a viral video of people singing the club standard in tribute to NHS workers. And then came the Singapore government’s Virus Vanguard campaign, which was quickly shelved after complaints and an online petition from Liverpool fans angered by its “Must Always Walk Alone Man”. According to the now-deleted backstory, MAWA Man is “a fanatical Manchester United fan who grew up in the ’80s when Liverpool kept winning titles and he was constantly taunted by his two Liverpool-supporting brothers. This made him despise everything Liverpool, including their motto You’ll Never Walk Alone (YNWA).” So how did those four words (and in turn four letters) come to symbolise everything about Liverpool Football Club? It starts, as with all good stories, on Broadway. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote the song for their 1945 musical Carousel, based on the 1909 play Liliom by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, where it features in a pivotal second act scene and the show-stopping finale. The song was covered by the biggest stars of the day, including Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. It made its way across the Atlantic and the definitive version was recorded by Merseybeat band Gerry & The Pacemakers and reached the top of the UK singles charts in 1963, spending four weeks at No 1. Their hit was sung on the terraces of Anfield that same year, with some saying it was because the top 10 tunes of the time were played over the stadium PA, with No 1 just before kick-off. The story goes that they sang along to the No 1 for weeks and then carried on after it fell out of the charts. Marsden, who died on Sunday aged 78, of Gerry & The Pacemakers, told that to The Independent on the 50th anniversary of the song. “When it went out of the top 10, the Kop were singing, ‘Where’s our song? Where’s our song?’,” he said. In his autobiography Anfield Iron, Tommy Smith said manager Bill Shankly made it the club song after Marsden had played it for him. Tim Marshall, the BBC journalist and author of Dirty Northern B******* and Other Tales From The Terraces: The Story of Britain’s Football Chants, wrote that the earliest recording he found of Liverpool fans singing the song was a 1964 game. Video from an episode of the BBC’s Panorama from that year survives. “By the 1965 League Cup Final between Liverpool and Leeds, the great commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme is confident enough to name-check it as “the Liverpool signature tune” and the even greater Liverpool manager Bill Shankly had chosen it as one of his songs on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs the month before the final,” Marshall wrote. A year later, with Celtic meeting Liverpool in a European Cup Winner’s Cup semi-final, the song made its way back to Scotland with the returning supporters. It still rings out on European nights at Celtic Park to this day and it has made its way around Europe – and the world – in the intervening years. Several sides in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium sing or play it, while it has reached Indonesia’s Bali United and FC Tokyo in Japan. Rare footage of AC Milan fans singing You'll Never Walk Alone in tribute to the 96 Liverpool fans that died in Hillsborough. Absolute class. pic.twitter.com/oyR8VwQoKX — - (@AnfieldRd96) February 8, 2018 Former FC Tokyo player Yuto Nagatomo held up a Japanese flag with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” written on it after making his Uefa Champions League debut in 2011, a message to those back home who had just been affected by the tsunami and an earthquake. German side Borussia Dortmund have adopted it, singing it in the run-up to kick-off each match. It has also become something of an unofficial slogan as well as an anthem for the club – fans hit full voice when news of a supporter’s death came during a game in 2016 with the club tweeting “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Fans famously sang along at Anfield ahead of their Europa League semi-final meeting in April 2016. Liverpool, under former Dortmund boss Jurgen Klopp, triumphed 4-3 on a night that began with a minute’s silence to mark the 27th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. Hillsborough, the 31st anniversary of which was marked this week despite the UK’s coronavirus lockdown preventing the usual meeting to commemorate the death of 96 Liverpool supporters, cemented this as Liverpool’s song. Just days after Hillsborough, AC Milan fans sang You’ll Never Walk Alone at the San Siro as they watched their team play Real Madrid in the European Cup semi-final. Their supporters in the Curva Sud sang it again in April 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary as Milan played Catania in Serie A. Very honoured to have been lucky enough to shake a true, true legends hand #inspirational #legacy pic.twitter.com/sAOc4F3Aum — Rob Jones (@RobjonesLFC2) December 5, 2013 Marsden himself sang it ahead of the 1989 FA Cup Final at Wembley, where Liverpool played Everton, and it was sung by the crowd at the same stadium almost a year later at a concert for Nelson Mandela in April 1990. “In the chilly night air at Wembley Stadium, tens of thousands of pop music fans gave their loudest and longest ovation to a man who’s never had a song on the charts,” wrote the Los Angeles Times at the time. “In fact they sang to him, belting out the Broadway show tune turned British soccer standard You’ll Never Walk Alone for anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.” Mandela met Liverpool players ahead of a pre-season friendly in South Africa in 1994, where he was given a club shirt, and the freedom of the city that same year. When he died in 2013, many tributes from Liverpool supporters contained the message “YNWA”. Liverpool players past and present would speak about the meaning of the song and its words – which adorn the club badge and the Shankly Gates at Anfield – in Walk On, a documentary released ahead of the 25th anniversary in 2014. It has taken on a life of its own in the intervening years and global prominence, not least because of Hillsborough. That was the reason cited when Hong Kong Liverpool supporters protested veteran Beijing loyalist legislator Tam Yiu-chung using the words “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in Legco to encourage the police during the Umbrella movement of 2014. Liverpool fans argued that words so synonymous with the club’s fight for justice for the 96 – and years of fighting the police for the truth of what happened that day – was not appropriate. Hong Kong football fans also belted out the song when they met in Victoria Park as part of anti-government protests last September. “This means more”, is a more recent motto used by Liverpool – and one they have been widely criticised for – but when it comes to You’ll Never Walk Alone, perhaps it is apt.