Before We Call Them Fans
‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ was written in 1945 for the Broadway musical ‘Carousel’. The Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers sang it again, and their version entered the British charts in October 1963. Before matches at Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground, the current ten most popular songs were played, and the crowd sang along to the new ones. This song quickly became the terraces’ favourite. When it dropped out of the ten and stopped being played, the fans asked where their song had gone.
From then on, it was Anfield’s song. Even now, before every match at Anfield, Gerry Marsden’s voice comes first and the whole crowd follows. On the days they win big they sing it like a toast, and on the hard days they sing it to hold one another up. It is not one person’s song but a culture built by every hand it has passed through.
Why did Liverpool fans protest to get the song back? No one would have told them to sing it, and singing it would have won them nothing. But it was sung by a Liverpool band, in the voice of their own city. While they sang it, the strangers in the stand would all have been on the same side. Above all, singing it together was a joy. We believe culture begins like that, in a pure joy that comes before any use.
The morning after a festival, the field holds only the traces of songs sung together the night before. That is how culture connects people, and keeps a time as memory, so that long after, we meet who we were then.
When a work comes into the world, half of it is still unwritten. The other half is filled in by the person who receives it.
Marcel Duchamp said that creation is not the artist’s work alone. He made a set of round discs printed with patterns on both sides. They were made so that only when someone placed them on a phonograph turntable and spun them would the patterns gain depth and rise. The work was complete only when someone put a disc on and set it turning. After all, wasn’t it the Anfield crowd that truly completed ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’?
What we love becomes, before we know it, the way we describe ourselves. We sometimes introduce ourselves by the title of a song, and when we nearly lose it, we ask for it back. We believe that is when the word fan begins.
That is how what people kept together comes to bind them, and those who lived through the same years know each other by a single line of a song. They sing along, sing again and pass the song on, building that culture together. When a work that carries its own story meets people and is completed with them, those gathered around it become a fandom. A fandom is a community made by culture, the trace of a work and its people resonating together for a long time.
Before we look to fans, we aim to return first to what culture essentially means. We keep exploring, without losing a sense of purity, what real joy is rather than forced trends, and we pursue work that strangers will sing together, keep, and one day call their own song.
We believe fan is not a name we give, but one that people who built a culture together earn for themselves. So our eyes will always rest on the person before that name, and on the culture we will build with them.