Football Fiasco

Note: I've just realised that I wrote about this album six years ago, but as the links on that post (which were for different songs) are now dead, and some of the information was incorrect, you may as well have this anyway! 

The British record buyer has had a soft spot for football-related records for a long time: the earliest football-related record I’m aware of is 1934 8” by the Band of the Arsenal Football Club, and I dare say there were dozens of others between then and the two unofficial England World Cup songs from 1966, Lonnie Donegan’s World Cup Willie, and the Alexander Silver-penned England Football Song.

 

However, in February 1973 a group supposedly made up of Tottenham Hotspur supporters – but actually featuring studio musicians including a pre-Iron Maiden Nicko McBrain on drums - scored a Top 20 hit with the Harold Spiro and Helen Clark song Nice One Cyril. Calling themselves the Cockerel Chorus after the Spurs emblem, history tells us that the title of the song was a reference to Cyril Knowles, a member of the Spurs team, but the phrase had been coined a year or so earlier, and was used in a television advert for Wonderloaf bread before the Tottenham crowd adopted the song.

 

Spiro, a fan of the club, was a jobbing songwriter whose credits include writing for WWR alumni Mike and Bernie Winters, David Hamilton and Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lamarr, as well as the Yardbirds, the Troggs, Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, and even Agnetha Faltskog. He also wrote other football-themed songs, including The Boys in White (for Fulham) released by Cottage Pie in 1975 (Fulham’s home ground was/is Craven Cottage, the oldest football stadium in London), and worked closely with hit songwriter Tony Hiller. Hiller, the man who gave the world the Brotherhood of Man, was another football fan and the pair wrote, amongst others, the official Everton team record from 1985, Here We Go. As well as writing together, the pair had a musical act, Hoagy Poagy, that issued several remarkably bad singles on Pye and Deram in the mid-70s. Hoagy was ‘played’ by Harold Spiro, and marketed as Britain’s answer to Tiny Tim (the ukulele-wielding singer, not the Dickens’ character). He wasn’t, but that’s a back catalogue that I shall examine in a WWR blog post soon!

 

Nice One Cyril, with a lead vocal from Spiro, was released a few months before the 1973 Football League Cup Final, where Tottenham played Norwich City, and not only was it a hit, reaching Number 14 in the UK singles chart, but it spawned a follow-up, Only A Thousand A Day, and an album, Nice One Cyril: Cockerel Chorus Have a Party. Issued through songwriter/producer Miki Dallon’s Young Blood International (distributed at that time through CBS), the album was later reissued by budget specialist Hallmark Records as Party Sing-A-Long.

 

And what an album it is! The single may be a dismissible novelty, but the album is a full-on monstrosity, coming over like a cross between one of those awful, pseudo-ribald rugby songs albums that were so beloved of a certain type of British male, and audio verité of a bunch of football hooligans out on the lash. It is absolutely appalling, hence its inclusion here. Don’t believe me? have a listen to a couple of tracks and tell me I’m wrong. Here is the Cockerel Chorus with their dreadful cover of the Tony Orlando and Dawn hit Tie A Yellow Ribbon and French singer Danyel Gérard’s Butterfly.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Ribbon HERE

Download Butterfly HERE