Previously on Football and Music there was a query into what was the oldest football song. The answer was varied and one with multiple candidates who could claim that title.
As a postscript to that there’s this:
As you can see from the featured image and YouTube clip above, it does as it says on the tin – a compilation album of football records from the jazz age.
Nick, who curated this collection explains:
I’m a football-obsessed jazz musician and record collector based in London. To keep busy over the lockdown I’ve been working on a project to digitally restore and reissue some of my football-themed 78rpm records from the 1910s, 20s and 30s.
The album is available via Bandcamp and is a bargain at only a fiver. For that you get 17 vintage songs and a detailed illustrated booklet with the background to the artists and to football at the start of the 20th century.
Going to highlight a few of the tracks here, as well as some of the text from the accompanying booklet:
– The very first one from Sidney Kyte & His Piccadilly Hotel Dance Band, the music sounds very familiar. There are lyrics, a sample:
When Saturday afternoon comes ’round,
Hip, Hooray! When they break away,
The cheers roll ’round the ground.
Oh I do do like to see a game of football…
Extract from the booklet:
This next track even older than the above celebrates going to the newly constructed Empire Stadium.
In 1924 the Lancastrian bandleader Jack Hylton was a rising force on the London scene, and kept in touch with his roots following the fortunes of his hometown side, Bolton Wanderers. Mere months before this record was cut, Wanderers had prevailed over East London’s West Ham United in the inaugural Wembley Cup Final, a landmark spectacle forever immortalised as the ‘White Horse’ Final. And here is Jack celebrating the scene of The Trotters’ greatest triumph on shellac: a coincidence surely, but a happy one worth noting.
A tune now with a celebration of Chelsea winning a cup:
But – as Nick writes…
Three examples there then, with some interesting background about the artists and stories behind the songs. It is worth grabbing the full album which as mentioned comes with a 22 page illustrated, annotated pdf booklet. » Download/purchase here.