How to compose a FOOTBALL CHANT!

So with the World Cup final in football coming up on Sunday, which is also, by the way, the date of my premiere at the BBC proms, I thought I'd try a quick topical video on the subject of what I think you could argue is one of the most difficult genres to compose for, and that is the football chant. On the whole, football chant seems to come in two forms. One is celebrating your own team. And the other, of course, is mocking your opponent. It can also take the form of a chant about a specific player on your team. Or about one of your opponent's players. Occasionally, a chant even manages to swap allegiance. Steven Gerrard had a chant about him which started out life as a celebration of his ability to pass the ball 40 yards. But after a famous slip in an important match, it ended up in the hands of his opponents. So while the ones about your own team are usually quite patriotic, full-hearted and passionate, the ones about the opponents are usually quite funny. Football humour is often gloating, but it can also sometimes be surprisingly self-deprecating. But very often it comes from an unusual combination of words with an incongruous, well-known tune. I'm not sure how widespread humorous chants are outside of England, because I'm basing most of my examples on ones I've heard through being English. I did find some Brazilian humour ones, but I didn't understand them. I'd love to hear from you if you have your own examples of humorous chants from your own countries. There's also occasionally a sign of high culture. When people leave early, fans have been known to sing Is there a fire drill? to the tune of Verdi's La Donna Immobile. Of course, the real compositional skill, just as with a good pop melody, is to find that precise combination of words and music that will really gel, where the shape of the melody is not only pleasing in itself, but also emphasises the point of the words. This is part of the challenge of popular music in general. If you just look at the melodic material in many pop songs, it won't even be that catchy in itself. It's only when you combine it with a particular phrase that fits the melodic shape that the catchiness really takes hold. And of course, football chants, like pop songs, are only more extreme. They need to be not just catchy, but singable. And they need to be something that a group of people, usually males, will feel comfortable and good singing out on the terrace. So it's not really surprising that a majority of football chants are based on existing songs. So if you're going to try and compose your own, the easiest way would be to find a well-known singable phrase or chorus and change the words to fit the melody. There have been a few examples recently of chants that have originated with someone thinking them up on YouTube, and have then been taken up and used in the wild. All of them have used famous pre-existing tunes. So how difficult can this be? Well, here's three attempts that I made at making a chant based on an existing tune. How about changing the Muhammad Ali song to being a chant about the England player Delhi Ali? Or another one, how about changing the Scorpions' Rock You Like a Hurricane to become Rock You Like a Harry Cane? I'd actually love you guys to try this and send me your own chants, and let's see if we can get one of them to catch fire out there in the wild. I'm not sure if any of mine would do this, but I hope it'll give you a flavour of what's involved. So, so far we've used existing melodies and we've added new lyrics to them, which I would argue is still a form of composing, so don't pick me up on that. The much harder task, and one much less likely to succeed, I would say, would be to invent an entirely new melody from scratch. One of the few successful examples I can think of in recent years is one that's been heard a lot in England lately. This was written by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Lightning Seeds. Let's have a look at its qualities as a chant. Well, it has a vocal range of a fifth, which is a pretty good start. A nice small vocal range, easy to sing. The main hook, in fact, is just four syllables on two notes, and the words have a resonant meaning. The idea is that football as a sport was born in England, so when we win, football will be coming home. It's interesting to note that the song's pretty syncopated. You might assume that to be easy to sing, a song wouldn't have syncopation, but you'd be wrong. Rhythm itself as a topic would be a fascinating subject for football chants. I'd love to see a study of performance practice in the rhythms of football chants. What tends to happen is some kind of abbreviation of the gap between one note and the next. You can see in this example that the long note of the original has been vastly shortened. So my tips for writing your own chant are limited note range, catchy, fitting with the words, using rhythmic complexity only at your peril. So for my effort at a fully composed chant, I thought I'd pick the French player N'Golo Kante, just because I like the rhythm of his name. I don't actually know much about him, but I read that he's a defensive midfielder, so I thought of the chant. You can't say no, you can't say no, you can't say no to N'Golo Kante. So again, if any of you fancy videoing yourselves and sending your attempt at a chant in, if I get, say, more than five of those, I'll upload a new video with them on. Send me your videos via Twitter, at David Bruce, or Instagram, at David Bruce Composer, or Gmail, at davidbrucecomposer at gmail.com. And if I manage to get this video out before Wednesday, where it's the semi-final, I believe the expression is GO ON ENGLAND!