SINGING THE BLUES

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a YouTube clip taken in Japan during a game involving J.League side Montedio Yamagata. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxgGrlsoMHU)
There's no match action, just video of a large group of their fans massed in an open terrace, singing 'Blue is the Colour' but with "Yamagata is our name" inserted into the final line of the chorus.

The most impressive bit about the clip is the la-la-la verse when the fans wrap their arms around each other and indulge in some well-coordinated bouncing from right to left and back again.

It is fan passion at its finest and something you wish you could see at Stamford Bridge every other week (although the stewards would probably take a dim view of it and ask the fans involved to sit down pronto).

Besides making me an instant fan of Montedio, the video also got me to thinking about how well the song has travelled over the years, crossing language boundaries and becoming one of the most memorable and iconic football songs around.

Of course, 'Blue is the Colour' has been and will always be associated, first and foremost, with Chelsea Football Club. After all, it has been our anthem for the past 40 years since the likes of Peter Bonetti, Ron Harris and Peter Osgood were herded into a studio to record it before the 1972 League Cup final against Stoke City. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-C9hr0vnWQ&feature=related)

The match itself has largely been forgotten by Blues fans since we lost 2-1 but the song hit No.5 in the charts and has endured as a club staple through the years, outlasting any of the attempts to supplant it during the Ken Bates era.

And it's not only a favourite of Chelsea and Yamagata fans (or any team in blue, for that matter). It is also been adapted by the Vancouver Whitecaps to 'White is the Colour' while fans of the Singapore national team can also be heard singing 'Red is the Colour'.

And you won't only hear it at association football matches but in other codes of the game as well. I would, in fact, recommend a listen to 'Green is the Colour' by the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League side (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2jkaUiSgQw) if only to discover how they managed to handle the somewhat tricky line "Sasketchewan Roughriders is our name".

So what is it that makes 'Blue is the Colour' so popular and enduring?

Well, it has a catchy tune and it's easy to sing.

It also has a positive lyric devoid of nastiness and obscenity which means that parents can pass it on to their children safe in the knowledge that they are not being a corrupting influence. (The same can't be said of 'Carefree' and 'Celery' but we'll let the kids discover that on their own later in life.)

My five-year-old son is prone to singing it out loud every now and then, whatever the occasion, while my two-year-old girl has also got the tune mastered, if not the actual words ("Football is my name," she sings).

Best of all for Chelsea fans, it makes our club stand out as originals.

While every other team seems to have adapted a popular song for their anthem – Liverpool have 'You'll Never Walk Alone', Man City have 'Blue Moon', and Spurs, Man U et al use versions of the very unoriginal 'Glory, Glory Hallelujah' – we have an original tune that we can truly call our own.

So sing along with me…

Blue is the colour,

Football is the game,

We are all together,

And winning is our aim,

So cheer us on through the sun and rain,

Cos' Chelsea, Chelsea is our name.

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