How YNWA became the anthem of Anfield
Gerry Marsden walked into Liverpool’s Odeon cinema for a Laurel and Hardy film. It was raining when he started to leave, so he decided to stay for the second part of the double feature and watch the comedy duo one more time. And with that, football history was born. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel was the other movie, and Marsden perked up during the second half.
“I thought ‘what a beautiful song. I’m going to tell my band we’re going to play that song’,” the 75-year-old Marsden recalled last week. “So I told my buddies we’re doing a ballad called You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin — the management team of both the Beatles and of Marsden’s Gerry and the Pacemakers — were skeptical. But when the cover version was released in October 1963, it became the band’s third No 1 hit on the British singles chart. And then it was adopted by the Kop — the stand at one end of Anfield containing Liverpool’s most fervid supporters.
The famous tune will be sung tomorrow by 16,000-plus Liverpool fans at Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine, before and during the Champions League final against Real Madrid, most holding banners with the song’s title. And it will be sung that afternoon and evening at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre by Renee Fleming, nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in this season’s revival of the musical. “It’s just one of those pieces, like
Amazing Grace, like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, that’s universal,” Fleming said. “It’s about resilience, and it’s about hope, ultimately. Despite whatever travails we have, we have to keep going.”
Cover versions have been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Judy Garland, Ray Charles, Alicia Keys, Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong, Olivia Newton-John and Barbra Streisand. Pink Floyd included the crowd singing it in Fearless.
Marsden’s version most likely played at Anfield for the first time on October 19, 1963, before a 1-0 win over West Bromwich Albion. The top 10 hits of the week were played in reverse order before kickoff, and You’ll Never Walk
Alone was No 7.
By the time the Reds returned to play Leicester on November 2, it was top of the charts and was the last tune before kickoff.
“I thought, ‘oh, that’s lovely there’,” said Marsden, who attended every Liverpool home match back then. “The next time I went to the match, two weeks later, they did it again. And by then the Kop, the whole 22,000 of them, is singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.
And I thought ‘wow!’ And that became the song for Liverpool.”
The song remained on top for the home match against Fulham on November 16, but the fans kept singing it even after it was displaced at No 1 by the Beatles’
She Loves You for the Burnley match on November 30. Marsden spoke to Liverpool manager Bill Shankly about the song at The Ed
Sullivan Show in New York the following May 10.
“He said, ‘Gerry, my son, I’ve given you a football team. You’ve given us a song’,” Marsden recalled.
The song title is atop the Shankly Gates, dedicated outside the Anfield Road stand on August 26, 1982, and moved in a 2016 redevelopment to the entrance of the Centenary Stand carpark. It was added to Liverpool’s club crest in 1992-93, and fans supporters of Scotland’s Celtic and Germany’s Borussia Dortmund have also have adopted it.
“From the moment you played for Liverpool, it’s a song you always knew about,” said Steve McManaman, a Liverpool midfielder from 1990-99. “It was a song that everybody could gather around while the families of the 96 that died in Hillsborough, it was always very resonant in them, that thing if you’ll never walk alone, you’ve always got the football team behind you. You can call on anybody at any time and people will help.”