Friday, January 27, 2012
How, you ask, did one of The White Stripes’ singles first become an Italian football chant — and then be omnipresent in games across the globe?
Sometimes a seemingly innocuous sound or smell can be your ticket back in time.
A turn of phrase might remind you of an old friend you haven’t heard on the other end of a phone in years. Someone, in the distance, clopping football boots together to dislodge the turf from the studs jolts you back to Saturday mornings, togging in. The half-heard bar of a song evokes nights in that pub with that crowd. There’s probably a name for it.
I was watching Cardiff ‘book their place’ — as is the tabloidese — in the Carling Cup final, with a penalty shoot-out victory over Crystal Palace on Tuesday night when the crowd broke into song.
As their players danced around the Cardiff City Stadium pitch celebrating, the fans first offered their own version of Hey Jude. Been there, done that.
They followed that up with Men of Harlech — otherwise known, I was told, as Welshmen Will Not Yield. You might remember it from the battle scene in Zulu as Michael Caine et al face oblivion. Grim.
Then, they reprised something they’d hummed all night: "Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo. Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo. Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo." It’s the White Stripes’ tune Seven Nation Army. And with that, I’m back in Hamburg.
Having picked up a ticket from a tout in the main station early that Friday morning I knocked about the city with a friend, who lived in the city, for the afternoon.
Then after a fried breakfast while standing at the bar of a packed Irish pub at 6pm, we headed out to the stadium and sat in behind the goal for Italy v Ukraine in the quarter-final of the World Cup in 2006 (I would tell you that we bought our tickets separately, hours apart, and said it our goodbyes before kick off before realising we were actually sitting together. But no one ever believes that).
Then we watched the likes of Sheva, Cannavaro, Pirlo.... eh, and Voronin, and the sun shone.
When three goals for the Azzurri ‘booked Italy’s spot’ in the semi-finals of the tournament the blue army, who’d adopted us from pretty early on, started to sing, what was to me, a familiar refrain.
"Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo. Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo. Do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo."
It was Seven Nation Army. The first time, I’d heard it outside the sawdust-covered dancefloor of An Bróg on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork.
The White Stripes, for those whose tastes lie elsewhere; are a two-piece Detroit outfit — made up of brother and sister Jack and Meg White. They’re an idiosyncratic, low-fidelity, Blues-influenced outfit.
So how, you ask, did one of their singles first become an Italian football chant — and then be omnipresent in games across the globe?
Well it all started, like the best stories — in a bar. This one, I learned, thanks to US sports website Deadspin, was in Milan.
I emailed Gaert de Cang this week, a man who leads the Blue Army fans group, who follow Club Brugge around Belgium and Europe.
In 2003, they sat in a bar next to the jukebox, killing the hours before the club’s UEFA Cup game against AC Milan by having a few beers and feeding euros into the machine.
They came across the track, liked it, and sang it on the terraces later. Then, like an inside joke, they brought it home from their trip together and sang it at the next home game.
Three years later, AS Roma came to Brugge for another game and like Man City fans taking the Poznan goal celebration home with them, so too the Italians picked their hosts’ pockets of the chant. A few months later, when Italy won the World Cup, a fortnight after that night in Hamburg, the song became synonymous with the Azzurri.
The Deep South-sounding track has now gone full circle and is a staple of American sports stadiums too. It made the journey across the Atlantic when the Penn State press guy heard a radio documentary about Roma fans singing it at the Olympic Stadium. He played it over the Beaver Stadium PA, the brass band soon learned it too and the college football side’s supporters adopted it as there own.
I emailed that press guy too this week — Guido D’Elia, is his name — but he was otherwise engaged. Their legendary coach Joe Paterno died at the weekend, months after his ‘winningest’ record was tarnished forever by a child sex abuse cover-up scandal. They buried him this week.
On the night he was fired after 45 years in the job, for his role in not bringing what he knew about the abuse to the authorities, fans stood outside his campus home and sang his name, Joe, to the tune of Seven Nation Army.
* adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
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