A song from a New York musical, based on the work of a Hungarian playwright,
is an unlikely choice for a football chant.
And yet that actually is the origin of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
But, while it’s sung by many fans today at several different clubs,
how did it become associated with Liverpool?
Quickly, the origin story.
At the start of the 20th century, Ferenc Molnar, a Hungarian author,
journalist and playwright, produced Liliom, a play about a doomed love affair. It had two
settings — a merry-go-round in Budapest, and Heaven. It wasn’t a success. However,
in 1945, the brilliant American songwriting duo, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
requested rights to base their latest musical, Carousel, on Molnar’s original.
For this new musical, one of the songs Rodgers and Hammerstein created was You’ll Never Walk
Alone. Lyrically, it’s a reflection on hard times, death, human defiance and faith.
Structurally the song is slow and melancholy but,
penned just as World War II was ending, it appears to have caught a mood.
Neither aspect of the song suggested pop music or football terrace but within 20 years,
it had passed through the former and onto the latter.
The vehicle for this transition was the Liverpool band, Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Gerry was Gerry Marsden, born in Toxteth, just to the south of Liverpool’s city centre,
in 1942. The band were signed by promoter Brian Epstein, whose other group were The Beatles.
In 1963, Gerry and the Pacemakers released How Do You Do It? and it
soared to No 1 in the UK pop charts. They followed it with I Like It,
which also got to No 1. The sound of Merseybeat had taken off and at Anfield,
the PA system would play the top 10 in the charts as a countdown to kick-off.
There is famous footage of the Kop swaying and singing The Beatles’ She Loves You in 1964.
Gerry and the Pacemakers now needed a third song for a hat-trick of No 1s and Marsden
proposed YNWA to Epstein and George Martin, the musical arranger for the band and The Beatles.
Speaking in 2001, Marsden explained: “I first heard Walk Alone around 1960
on a record. I liked it, I liked the presentation of the song.”
“We put it in our show — and we played rock ‘n’ roll. Every time we did Carousel,
the audience stopped and watched and clapped and I thought: ‘That’s nice, that’.
Gerry and the Pacemakers released YNWA in October 1963 and the song stayed at No 1 for
a month. This gave the Anfield crowd time to get used to the song lyrically
and melodically and the sweeping power of an almost gospel tune embedded itself quickly.
In another interview, Marsden said: “When it went out of the top 10 they
took the song off the playlist and then for the next match the Kop were shouting:
‘Where’s our song?’. So they had to put it back on.
The Pacemakers had added tempo to the opening bars via a gentle, skipping drumbeat from Gerry’s
brother Freddie, though the Anfield crowd version remains closer to the slower original. By 1965,
a UK television commentator would describe YNWA as Liverpool’s “signature” song.
Its arrival chimed with the rise of not just Merseybeat, but Liverpool FC under
its charismatic agitator of a manager, Bill Shankly. In the 1963-64 season — the season of
YNWA — Liverpool won the league for the first time in 17 years. They won it again in 1966,
on top of an FA Cup triumph in 1965. With Everton league champions in 1963
and FA Cup winners in 1966, the city, its music and its clubs were gaining a global profile.
On tour in America in the summer of 1964, Shankly’s squad were invited on the Ed Sullivan
Show, the biggest programme in the United States, to join the Pacemakers. It was Marsden’s idea.
“We got the whole team on stage and we sang Walk Alone on the Ed Sullivan
Show,” he recalled. “Coming off, Bill Shankly said to me: ‘Gerry,
my son, I have given you a football team and you have given us a song’.”
Praise got no higher.
YNWA was here to stay. As Liverpool developed into a European force in the 1970s and early 1980s,
this was the constant soundtrack to their dominance. YNWA had become a part of the club.
When Shankly died in 1981, Marsden sang a solo version of the song at
his memorial and when the Shankly Gates were erected a year later in tribute,
the words You’ll Never Walk Alone were incorporated in iron at the top.
The song was always on at Anfield and it would intermittently break out into
the broader culture. BBC DJ John Peel, a Liverpool fanatic — his children’s
middle names include Anfield, Shankly and Dalglish — would occasionally play
the song as sung by the crowd and credit it to the ‘Anfield Road Choral Society’.
Peel also played Aretha Franklin’s live and deeply soulful version on his Monday show on April 17,
1989. Hillsborough had happened two days earlier and YNWA immediately took on a larger meaning
for Liverpool fans and the families affected. The stoicism the song portrayed was then required for
decades as the families sought, and still seek, justice. Margaret Aspinall of the Hillsborough
Family Support Group said YNWA had become “our prayer. It belongs to the families now”.
All the while, the song spread through football — to Celtic in Glasgow, to Feyenoord in Rotterdam
and, among others, to Germany where it was adopted by two clubs, Mainz and Borussia Dortmund.
This was a most happy coincidence for Jurgen Klopp as they were his
previous clubs before joining Liverpool in 2015.
“In Germany, only two clubs sing You’ll Never Walk Alone before the game and that
is Mainz and Dortmund… now I’ve come to the original place, if you want, and it
never stops feeling really special. It never stops creating goosebumps. That’s how it is.”