'You'll Never Walk Alone' is why I write

BONUS EDITION - had to do a Eurovision special edition celebrating Graham Norton having a wee greet to a song Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made to make you have a wee greet to xxxx

The 1945 musical ‘Carousel’ represents a flop of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s timeless partnership. One of the reasons it is bad is because there are only about four good songs. One of those is the absolute beast, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.  At the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, a rousing rendition, led by the competition 2019 winner Duncan Laurence, was given in tribute to the people of Ukraine amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military invasion. The choice was apt as it is a song of solidarity and has always been one. 

Originally written as a pep talk from Nettie to her cousin Julie Jordan, who is left pregnant and alone after her abusive, dead-beat husband, Billy Bigelow, dies by landing on his own knife. Too grief-stricken to sing along, Julie goes on to close the show with its reprise, the soundtrack to her daughter Louise graduating school as the rest of the town watches the child they helped raise as she feels the presence of her father, whose ghost visits her earlier in the show. 

Now. best known for being the song of Liverpool FC, its meaning has been enriched by the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster that led to 97 deaths. Already a fan unifier, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ morphed into a sort of prayer. Broadcaster Peter Jones recited its lyrics at the memorial. BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel famously played Aretha Franklin’s version when he was too teary recounting the tragedy while on air.  

Building on this varied legacy, a pre-game ritual and a homage to the tireless campaigning paving the road to justice, the song’s spectacle has continued to grow outside of Merseyside. Since Bill Shankly included Gerry and the Pacemakers’ 1963 version in his 1965 Desert Island Disc, it has been offered to and adopted by other teams, political institutions and other bodies, taken on as an anthem all over the world.

Part of its appeal to supporters is both its earnestness and clear message, a constant in much of the Broadway duo’s beloved body of work, and how its lyrics and music capture an optimism in dark times. 

The author and Liverpool FC fan John Green noted this in his 2021 semi-memoir, ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’, writing: “You'll Never Walk Alone' is cheesy, but it's not wrong. The song doesn't claim the world is a just or happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts.”

While just an admirer of their history, how they boo the national anthem and Prince William and not a Liverpool fan myself (COME ON YOU GOONERS), the song has a similar meaning for me too. For as the ‘Fault in Our Stars’ author also notes in the chapter, football, no matter your team, is drama, a wholly agreeable statement.

John writes: “At first blush, it may seem odd that the world’s most popular football song comes from musical theater, since “theater people” are often imagined in opposition to “jocks” or sporty types. But football is theater, and fans make it musical theater. The anthem of West Ham United is called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and at the start of each game, you’ll see thousands of grown adults blowing bubbles from the stands as they sing, “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, then like my dreams they fade and die.”

As a fan, I would go so far to say that the Premier League is just ‘The Real Housewives’ for men. It’s just like drama but manly, innit, the same kind that makes something like, movie musicals so appealing. The genre is designed to get you in the feels, often when it feels impossible. Say for example, you’ve spent the entire of your A-Levels counting down the days you get to leave school, rolling your eyes at suggestions it’s the best days of your life; a thing only said by people who are incredibly lame or misguided.

However, through a stroke of luck, the keenest singer at your school was a huge Liverpool FC and musical theatre fan. As he loved to combine these two interests, he might have opted to perform it at the leavers’ ceremony; just like at Louise’s.

Anyway, maybe this is unsurprising to no one but Tom Middlemass, the nicest boy in my year and hand on heart an actual ray of sunshine, belting this song out in front of the school chapel’s majestic stain-glass wall like a champ made me blub like a baby. For its two minutes and 58 seconds, all my grimaces about the now-disproven suggestion that you’ll miss being 18 almost completely disappeared. 

Now, it’s not very hard to make me, a person not made of stone and that mental health professionals have labelled to have ‘emotional dysregulation’ issues, which is psychiatrist speak for being ‘intense’, get all sentimental, but this song is designed to get a reaction. It is for milestones, for change, for uncertainty. The whole production on the song, by virtue of being from a musical, is just one big manipulation into getting you to have these BIG feelings, the kind that motivate you to write this sort of stuff as you languish in your post-Gay Christmas hangover, the kind you just had to type out into actual sentences and not just more insane tweets.

Those two cunning cads wanted it to be this explosion of emotion used as a placeholder for those words humans are not very good at expressing sometimes. It is meant to leave you feeling that anything is possible, that you can act because you have something resembling a community.  Whether big or small, a silent pat on the back as you go off to university or the strength to demand police admit their culpability in the death of nearly 100 people, it is a musical nod of support. 

 ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is the perfect song to sing at Liverpool’s celebration of Ukraine as it is supposed to make you and Graham Norton on the verge of tears.