As a kid growing up in the West Country in the seventies, the few occasions when my twin loves of Match of the Day and Top of the Pops would ever meet would be around this time of year. Every May, the mandatory FA Cup Final single would be released by one or sometimes both sets of players before the big day. These awkward marriages of convenience would yield classics (or “classics”, depending on how you looked at it) such as “Blue is the Colour” (Chelsea) “Good Old Arsenal” (Erm, Arsenal, but you go that, right?) and “Ossie’s Dream” (“to win the cup for Totting-ham”, since you’re asking). As records (and probably social documents) they have a certain appeal, but great music they weren’t.

A friend of mine, growing up in West London in the seventies, however, bears witness to a different, much cooler, union between football fans and music. It became the tradition at his local team Chelsea for the team to run out to the strains of classic Jamaican instrumental, The Liquidator, by the Harry J Allstars.

It’s a storming rocksteady number, led by Winston Wright’s reedy organ sound, which was released in 1969 and reached number 9 in the UK charts. Harry J was actually producer Harry Johnston who ran a studio in Kingston and his band included Carlton “Family Man” Barrett and his brother Aston both of whom went on to play with Bob Marley in the Wailers.

The song took it’s name from a pulp fiction novel by John Gardner, which became a film in 1965, and as such reflected a tradition in Jamaica of appropriating names from American trash culture as pseudonyms, or for soundsystems or songs themsleves.

It was quickly taken to the heart of the original skinhead and suedehead movement, energetically reacting to the excesses of the hippies of the movement. The original skins were predominantly working class young men, black or white, and therefore were inextricably linked to football in the capital particularly, and bore little relation to the increasingly racist skinhead groups of the eighties. For a time, there were a Chelsea “firm” calling themselves The Liquidators.

Through the seventies, eighties and nineties, the club continued to play the tune before games and it has become something of a club song with particular chants and claps that accompany it.

Other clubs such as Wolves, West Brom and Wycombe also have a tradition with the song, and claim it as theirs. In the Black Country, another area where original skinhead culture flourished, rivals West Brom and Wolves both play the song and have developed unique and obscene ways of directing it at each other, to the extent that the West Midlands police have actually banned the song from matches on the grounds that it incites trouble between the sets of supporters.

It’s still played at Chelsea games today, and the club have, to their credit, resisted the temptation to replace it with newer (lamer) songs. In a time when Chelsea as a club are almost unrecognisable from previous incarnations, it’s heart warming to think that even in these times, there’s still room for a little piece of folk tradition.