Sing when you're winning

Football chants: they're a bit like radio jingles. Throwaway yet informative, simple yet to the point. And funny; aimed at players, mostly, but often directed at the fans sitting in the opposite end to you. A prime example of the former: remember when Peter Crouch (6'-7") played for Liverpool? He's big, he's red, his feet stick out the bed, it's Peter crouch, Peter Crouch. And the latter: when the away fans inform the home fans that they don't think much of their ground and sung to the tune of When the Saints - My garden shed is bigger than this, my garden shed is bigger than this.

And like any catchy song that eventually becomes an earworm, it's the alchemy combining a turn of phrase and a memorable tune. In fact, and I'm probably going out on a limb here, but you'll probably find that 90% of all the best chants rely on just a handful of tunes. Think of a chant you heard last Saturday afternoon and I'll lay money on it being hung around one of these songs:

Knees Up Mother Brown

Sloop John B

Winter Wonderland

Guantanamera*

The Hokey Cokey

Son Of My Father (God Bless Giorgio Moroder)

This Old Man

Amore

She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain

Glory Glory
Go West
Kiss Him Goodbye

There are, obviously, notable exceptions. When Rio Ferdinand famously failed a drugs test, Fulham fans came up with His name is Rio and he's watching from the stand to *that* tune by Duran Duran.

But my personal favourite has got to be one from the seventies (of course) and was a rather succinct tribute laid at the door of Billy Bremner (587 appearances/ 91 goals for Leeds Utd 1960-1976).

Na na na na, na na na, na na na na na BILLY! BREMNER! to the opening bars of this:

* When Rangers keeper Andy Goram was diagnosed with mild schizophrenia, the chant Two Andy Gorams, there's only two Andy Gorams could often be heard at grounds north of the border.

One song to the tune of another

The Man in Black

The Other Man In Black

MashUps: regular readers will know I'm rather partial to them. The Number One Son, on the other hand, can't abide them; that said, he does rather like that one where Hall and Oates get jiggy with Metallica.

I think he may like this one too. As with a lot of them I put up here, this one's been out a while but I've come to it late. Ring of Smoke (see what they did there?) is very clever, not least because they've dispensed with that riff: you know, the one played by the (other) man in black - the one they don't allow you to play in guitar shops. And yet it works. Perfectly.

Leo - definitely

Space Truckin'

When members of a pop group are prefixed by the word Messrs. you know right from the get go that the combo in question are most probably rockers. And if said combo had a definitive lineup then, like the humble Ford Cortina, they will have a Mark. So whenever Messrs. Gillan, Blackmore, Paice, Lord and Glover are mentioned in rock circles, everyone's on the same page: we're talking Deep Purple Mark 2.

But I'm not here to reignite the debate that probably still rages in rock clubs around the world about who was the best vocalist or banjo player; I haven't got time for all that nonsense. No, I'm here to set the record straight on something else entirely.

You see, for years I've been under the misapprehension that Machine Head - the 1972 long player brought to you by the above mentioned Messrs. (and an album I was spoon fed from an early age) - was but a three card trick. Namely, (the ubiquitous) Smoke On The Water, Highway Star and Jon Lord's Hammond heavy Lazy.

But I was wrong. So very wrong. Listening to it now, forty years after its release, the scales have fallen from my eyes. The stand out track is blindingly obvious. Isn't it?

Any fool knows that Maybe I'm A Leo knocks the rest of the album's oeuvre into a cocked hat.