Darl Messy
A song written in 1969 by a Brooklyn songwriter should have nothing to do with sport. Instead it has become part of the furniture at stadiums worldwide, sung by tens of thousands of people who could not name the man who wrote it. Here is what happens when it starts.
1. Eighty thousand people recognise it at once
Simultaneous, total recognition across an entire stadium. Almost nothing else in a sporting venue produces that — not the anthems, not the goal music, not the announcements.
2. People stand up who had been sitting all afternoon
It functions as an instruction that nobody issued. Whole tiers get to their feet because they know what comes next and have done this before.
3. The crowd noise exceeds the PA
A stadium sound system is extremely loud. The crowd singing this song is louder, which is a genuinely unusual acoustic event and startling the first time you experience it.
4. Rival supporters sing it together
This is the strangest part. Fans who have spent ninety minutes shouting at each other perform the same song at the same moment, and the antagonism pauses for about three minutes.
5. Nobody knows why it is being played
There is no obvious connection between this record and sport. It arrived through a series of local traditions, spread by repetition, and now nobody questions it because it has always been there.
6. The gap gets filled by everybody
Diamond wrote a deliberate space into the composition for an audience to answer back. In a stadium that structural decision from 1969 becomes the single loudest thing in the building.
7. Scarves and arms go up
Behaviour normally reserved for club anthems gets applied to a pop record about feeling good, which tells you how completely the song has been adopted.
8. Children learn it before they learn any other song
A whole generation of young supporters knows this song from a stadium rather than from a record, and they will carry it for the rest of their lives.
9. Nobody is embarrassed
Grown adults who would not sing in any other context sing this without hesitation, because everyone else is doing it and the social cost of joining in has dropped to zero.
10. It works whether the team is winning or losing
Most stadium music is contingent on the score. This song is played in both circumstances and functions either way, because its subject is company rather than victory.
11. Phones come up across the whole ground
The song generates enormous quantities of footage every single weekend, which is a substantial part of why it keeps reaching people who have never heard the studio version.
12. Somebody starts too early
Every time, everywhere. The crowd corrects itself within a beat and the enthusiasm is treated as part of the tradition rather than a mistake.
13. Away fans join in despite themselves
Even supporters who would prefer not to participate in the home crowd’s ritual usually end up doing it. Resistance to this particular song has a very poor record.
14. Stewards stop working for a moment
It is one of the few points in a match day where the atmosphere is uncomplicatedly good, and it is visible in the body language of everyone present.
15. It gets sung again outside afterwards
In the streets, on the trains, in pubs. The song leaves the stadium with the crowd, which is not something that happens with the rest of the playlist.
16. Nobody cares that it is from 1969
Diamond avoided the production fashions that date records, and the result is that a fifty-plus-year-old song is sung by teenagers with no sense that it is a period piece.
17. It has outgrown its author entirely
A great many of the people singing it could not name Neil Diamond. He has spoken about the song’s independent life without resentment, which is arguably the highest compliment a songwriter can receive.
18. It marks the occasion rather than accompanies it
The song does the job of a hymn or an anthem — it punctuates something that mattered. That is a role almost no pop single ever gets promoted into.
19. Somebody in the crowd is genuinely moved
Underneath the ritual, it is a song about feeling good in company, committed to without irony. On any given weekend that lands properly for someone in that ground.
20. It happens again the following week
And in a hundred other stadiums, in several countries, indefinitely. Diamond retired from touring in 2018, and the song has continued entirely without him ever since.
The bottom line: Diamond wrote a pop single and ended up supplying a global ritual he has no involvement in and receives no credit for from most of the people performing it. That is what happens when a song is built well enough to stop needing its author.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings