Theme From Sparta F.C.

Lyrics

Everybody sing 
(Hey!) 
We are Sparta F.C. 

Come on I will tell you how it will change 
When I give you something to slaughter 
There is a jackknife going up the hill 
Where it is going I don't tell 
But by hook or by crook I will 
I'll get it back 
(Shepherd boy) 
(Hey!) 

Everybody sing 
(Hey!) 
Be my be my toy 

[chanting] 

We live on blood 
We are Sparta F.C. 

[Eleni's Greek vocals] 

Take your fleecy jumper, you won't need it any more 
It is in the car-boot moving away 
Cos where you are going clothes won't help 

Shepherd Boy 
(Hey!) 
Everybody sing 
(Hey!) 
Be my be my toy 

[chanting] 

We live on blood 
We are Sparta F.C. 

(You have to pay for everything, but some things are for free) 
(We live on blood, we are Sparta F.C.) 
(English Chelsea fan, this is your last game) 
(We're not Galatasaray, we're Sparta F.C.) 
(Hey!) 
(Hey!) 

Come on I will tell you how it will change 
You mug old women in the paper-shop 
In your English bobble-hat 
Stay at home 
Shepherd boy 
(Hey!) 

Everybody sing 
(Hey!) 
Be my be my toy 

[chanting] 

We live on blood 
We are Sparta F.C. 

[Eleni's Greek vocals] 

Come on I will tell you how it will change 
When I give you something to slaughter 
Shepherd boy 
(Hey!) 
Everybody sing 
(Hey!) 
Be my be my toy 

[chanting] 

We live on blood 
We are Sparta F.C. 

(You have to pay for everything, but some things are for free) 
(We live on blood, we are Sparta F.C.) 
(English Chelsea fan, this is your last game) 
(We're not Galatasaray, we're Sparta F.C.) 

(You have to pay for everything, but some things are for free) 
(We live on blood, we are Sparta F.C.) 
Come on I will tell you how it will change 
When I give you something to slaughter 
(English Chelsea fan this is your last game) 
(We're not Galatasaray, we're Sparta F.C.) 

We are Sparta F.C. 

Commentary

< Post in progress >

TC: With the album being recorded so quickly, was working on the songs beforehand a much longer process? You’re working with a very new band.

MES: Yeah [long pause] I didn’t have any problems with em. That’s what annoyed me. It’s like if you make it look a bit too easy, people think they can just fiddle around with it. It was hard work, but something like Sparta was knocked up in two days. It sounded really great. Then you get it back and it sounded like Posh Spice, you know. So that got me off, of course. Putting on extra vocals and all that. Nowadays they’ve got too much equipment. You know, it’s out of time. It’s very out of date, trying to put dance music on top of rock. It’s been done. We never needed dance stuff over out stuff. There’s always been that element there. Our kind of stuff is atonal, and they’re trying to put dancy tunes over it, so it skews the whole track. I hate talking like this because you get into studio speak, you know.

---

TC: Can you remember how a song like Sparta come [sic] about? It’s a really great track.

MES: Everybody likes it, yeah. The group made this song that was sort of like Born to Be Wild, I thought, with a great feel to it. And Elena came up with some great words and I added some words I thought were like the Greek football fan’s attitude, you know. I do know quite a few Greek football fans, and their attitude to soccer is completely different to Britain. Sort of cobbled it all together, put a Greek motif on the guitar and that was it.

TC: The lyrics seem to be a springboard form [sic] whatever interpretation you want to put on it.

MES: Right. The thing is, their mental attitude is quite strange. It’s not about winning or anything. It’s just about being within the club. They find British fans very funny. They find them hilarious. You know, when they cry. You see it now, you know. They cry when they don’t win, and all that.

TC: I saw that the other day with the Chelsea game.

MES: Yeah!

TC: A bit shameful.

MES: [much laughter] Spartans, you know, Greeks don’t even want to know the score, they just want to get to the match. [laughter] It’s not really important, it’s not really a matter of life and death. I don’t think anyone else has got the set up we’ve got here. It was easier to get results for Man City in America than it is to get them here. I find it funny that you have to pay to watch England, or go to a pub to watch it.

From Tim Cummings’ interview with MES, Malmaison Hotel bar, Manchester, 14 May 2004. [Link]

At the Carling Academy on 26 September 2004, MES introduced this song with the comment, “This is the theme to a film that hasn’t been made yet.”

“It’s just so catchy and we loved football. Mark also had a fascination with Ragazzi as he called them: the Italian hooligans, those kind of hard hooligans. We read the football magazine When Saturday Comes, and they had also brought out a book about Ragazzi. Mark put in the Greek fan idea of what you might call Greek supremacy. In a way Mark identified as more Greek than me! But it was also an anti-Chelsea song.”

“I wrote the lyrics in Greek,” says Poulou. “And in Greek they are rhyming, but we sang them in English. Mark would add things like ‘fleecy jumper’. That is definitely Mark.”

Eleni Poulou, quoted in Duff (2021, pp.99, 100).

Eleni was born in Germany to Greek parents.

It’s not clear which book Eleni is referring to, and whether “they” means When Saturday Comes specifically or is a generalised “they”. I think the most likely candidate is A Season with Verona by Tim Parks (Secker & Warburg, 2002; paperback published by Vintage, March 2003). It contains several occurrences of the word “ragazzi”.

Grant ‘Showbiz’ Cunliffe: Theme From Sparta F.C. – I’m a Chelsea fan…

---

Eleni Poulou: My lyrics were a bit harsh. We’d gone to Greece and Mark really loved Greece, maybe more than me, and he was a Greek football fan. I wrote a lyric to reflect their behaviour, but its all also a bit surrealistic. It’s a bit like a myth, about going to another world. It’s about human behaviour – it doesn’t necessarily have to be football. It’s really nice to write in Greek, it’s a really beautiful language.

---

Ben Pritchard: I was stood in the desk room at the studio and Mark says, I want something Greek. He did not give you any time to work it out, that riff at the start was the first thing I played.

From the booklet with the 2024 Cherry Red box set of The Real New Fall LP, formerly ‘Country on the Click’:

Versions and Variations

Soundtrack Usage

Final Score

Notable Cover Versions

Footnotes

1. The “shepherd boy” line has I think been consistently misunderstood. Whatever else you might say about Chelsea fans, describing one as a “shepherd boy” seems on the face of it entirely misplaced. ↩︎
2. The old Lyrics Parade [Archived] had the following note for Eleni’s Greek-language vocals:
   
   Phonetic Translation:
   Ella Na Soo Thixo
   Poso tha alaxo
   Otan tha moo thosis
   Kati na sfaxo
   Ella valeh stihima
   Yia na kerthiso
   Afto then ineh pimma
   Yia ta skoopithia
   
   English Translation:
   Come and I will show you
   How I will change
   When you give me
   Something to slaughter
   Come and have a bet
   So I can win
   This is not a poem
   For the bin
   
   Non-Greek speakers like myself obviously cannot personally vouch for the accuracy of either the phonetic transcription or the English translation, and bzfgt at Annotated‘s doomby incarnation could do no more than note that it probably counted in the translation’s favour that it matched some of the vocals heard in English.
   
   However, Greek ears have been applied to the song over the years, and the Lyrics Parade translation has survived remarkably well. Here at Annotating The Fall we continue to use all the modern scientific methods. I ran the English version above through translate.google.com, and it came up with the following Greek translation and transliteration. Which, when I re-translated it back into English, looked like it had worked OK:
   
   Greek translation:
   Έλα να σου δείξω
   Πώς θα αλλάξω
   Όταν μου δώσεις
   Κάτι να σφάξω
   Έλα να στοιχηματίσουμε
   Για να κερδίσω
   Αυτό δεν είναι ποίημα
   Για τα σκουπίδια
   
   Transliteration:
   Éla na sou deíxo
   Pós tha alláxo
   Ótan mou dóseis
   Káti na sfáxo
   Éla na stoichimatísoume
   Gia na kerdíso
   Aftó den eínai poíima
   Gia ta skoupídia ↩︎
3. A jackknife is a pocket knife with a folding blade. ↩︎
4. “By hook or by crook” means by any means necessary. For a discussion of the origins of the phrase see: Phrase Finder. ↩︎
5. Galatasaray S.K. (short for “Spor Kulübü”: sports club) is a Turkish football club. Its Ali Sami Yen stadium (now known as Rams Park) has a reputation as an extremely hostile venue for visiting teams. See the Guardian article by Chaudhary (2000). ↩︎
6. For non-UK readers, a “paper-shop” is a newsagent; a small local shop selling mainly newspapers, stationery, confectionery, cigarettes and a narrow range of other provisions. Not as common as they once were, for obvious reasons. ↩︎
7. A Chelsea F.C. bobble-hat:
   
   ↩︎
8. A “boutique” is a small high-end fashion store, at the opposite end of the scale to a chain-store that sells mass-produced clothing. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “Theme From Sparta F.C.” [Archived]
• Chaudhary, Vivek (2000). “History of intimidation and violence”. The Guardian, 7 April. p.3. [Available online]
• Duff, Graham (2021). The Future’s Here to Stay: the singles of The Fall. London: Strange Attractor Press.
• Smith, Mark E. with Austin Collings (2009). Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith. London: Penguin. (Originally published by Viking, 2008). [Available online in the Internet Archive]
• The Track Record: “Theme From Sparta FC”