Liverbird Upon My Chest: The unlikely origin story of Liverpool’s ‘new’ fan anthem

Liverbird upon my chest (upon my chest),
We are the men, of Shankly’s best (of Shankly’s best)
A team that plays the Liverpool way
And wins the championship in May.

It has become the soundtrack to Liverpool’s potentially triumphant 2024-25 season.

From Merseyside pubs to stadium concourses across the land, and from cramped away ends to the Kop, the Liverbird Upon My Chest refrain has been a consistent companion for Arne Slot’s players as they close in on the Premier League title.

Yet this is not a new chant. Quite the opposite. It’s almost as old as 46-year-old Slot. And nobody is more surprised or delighted to see it making a comeback than Phil Aspinall, the fan who came up with it after watching The Green Berets, a 1968 movie starring John Wayne set during the Vietnam War, on TV the night before a match in 1984.

“As the film finished, they played Ballad of the Green Berets and I thought, ‘That would be a terrific song for Liverpool’,” Aspinall, a regular Anfield matchgoer since 1961 and now aged 74, tells The Athletic. “I wrote the song down so it wouldn’t slip my mind.

“I just wrote a few verses down and the next day, I had another little go at it. The words more or less fitted in place perfectly, with the chorus at the end. That’s how the song got going.”

Liverpool fans often have a chant that ends up being that particular season’s anthem.

During the 2004-05 Champions League-winning campaign it was Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire (the song caught on, so the story goes, after player Jamie Carragher’s father and some of his friends heard it on the coach journey to an away match); in 2013-14, when Brendan Rodgers’ free-flowing team fell just short of the title, it was Poetry in Motion; the run to the 2017-18 Champions League final was played out to the sound of Allez Allez Allez; the reworking of The Beatles’ I Feel Fine, in homage to manager Jurgen Klopp, took centre-stage in 2022.

This year, it has been the turn of Liverbird Upon My Chest.

There was a long rendition from travelling fans away to PSV of the Netherlands in Liverpool’s final game of the Champions League’s initial league phase (where they finished top of the 36-club table) on January 29 — videos subsequently gained traction on social media — and it has gathered steam since.

Liverpool shared footage on their social media channels of their jubilant supporters singing it during the celebrations after beating outgoing champions Manchester City 2-0 away on February 23 and it was being belted out during Saturday’s 3-1 home win against Southampton which took Liverpool 16 points ahead of second-placed Arsenal (who have two games in hand) at the top of the Premier League.

“It makes me feel proud,” Aspinall said. “I was at Brentford (earlier in January), the game when (Darwin) Nunez scored two, and they were all singing it. I was thrilled, because we’d just won with two really important goals and all the crowd were singing the song. I was thinking, ‘That’ll do me’. The song is 41 years old but it’s never really taken off like it has this year.”

There are 21 verses in total, the song having grown in length over the years courtesy of additional lyrics from other Liverpool fans, including Aspinall’s friends Bobby Wilcox, who died in 2009, and Lenny Woods, who passed away in 2020.

Yet, until this season, ‘Liverbird’ was more typically sung by Liverpool fans in pubs or on trains and coaches en route to away matches.

“It was only ever a pub song, it was a hardcore song,” Peter Hooton, lead singer of Liverpool band The Farm, tells The Athletic. “We used to go to the Albert (a pub next to Anfield), where there was Bobby (Wilcox), a very famous fan, and another called Lenny (Woods). Lenny would come up with new verses, and it just grew from there.

“They used to hold court in the Albert after matches in the 1980s and ’90s — it would be fairly busy, but not absolutely rammed like it is now, full of Liverpool’s international fans. They used to sit in the corner and we would listen to them all the time and they would come out with these brilliant songs — and one of them was Liverbird Upon My Chest.

“The original words were, ‘We win the league and a cup in May’ but that’s been morphed in recent years into ‘win the championship in May.’ It never took off like it has this season — it seems to be this year’s song. For a lot of Liverpool fans who haven’t heard it in pubs, it’s new to them.”

Yet there are more layers to this story.

Shortly after Aspinall wrote ‘Liverbird’, Liverpool midfielder Craig Johnston created a version of the song that he mixed together with The Pride of Merseyside, another terrace chant which had been recorded by Joe Fagin (not to be confused with Joe Fagan, the long-time Liverpool assistant who was first-team manager for two seasons in the 1980s) and peaked at number 81 in the UK singles chart in April 1987.

Johnston, an Australian nicknamed ‘Skippy’ after the kangaroo star of a 1960s TV series, became fascinated by the football-fan life when he arrived in the UK from “a culture of surfing” back home. He initially joined Middlesbrough before Liverpool bought him in 1981.

“I used to hang out now and again with (fellow Liverpool player) Sammy Lee and his mates,” says Johnston, who now lives back in his homeland. “They were all passionate Reds who used to travel everywhere following the team. Sometimes they would sleep in our room if we were away on European trips. They were always singing songs about Liverpool, and coming from Australia I found that level of fandom just jaw-dropping.

“With one of the songs, I recognised the tune from it being the Ballad of the Green Berets — my dad used to sing it to me when I was young. It was a country-music/military song with military drum beats and trumpets, a marching tune. The Scousers took that tune and changed the words to Liverbird Upon My Chest. Around that time, they also sang The Pride of Merseyside a lot. So I decided to put the two together, as they were the two chants at Liverpool that I really liked.

“It’s a tribute to the fans and was written at the back end of Arthur Scargill (leading a year-long strike by Britain’s biggest coal mine workers’ union in 1984 and 1985), and (the UK’s then Prime Minister) Maggie Thatcher hammering us all. So it starts off with:

No work, no hope, one chance for fame
It’s our life, not just a game.
For the Reds, grown men have cried,
We’re the pride of Merseyside.
That Liverbird upon their chest,
Liverpool, the world’s best,
This great team, trusted and tried,
They’re the pride of Merseyside.

“The record company wanted us to change the tune in places to avoid having to pay royalties,” he adds. “I wasn’t doing it for the money, I was doing it as a thank you to the fans. I was back at Anfield just before Christmas and it was so special to hear that song again.”

That wasn’t the only song Johnston came up with.

A year later, he wrote the Anfield Rap — with the help of British rapper Derek B — as a celebration of the mix of accents and atmosphere in Liverpool’s dressing room at the time, which peaked at number three in the UK as the team chased a league title and FA Cup double.

“I produced it and directed it and did the video for it as well,” Johnston said. “I really love music, it was my passion. The Anfield Rap was all about the players but The Pride of Merseyside I wanted to make about the fans.”

Following the success of the Anfield Rap, Johnston said he was asked by Liverpool team-mate John Barnes to lend a helping hand on World in Motion, England’s World Cup song with New Order in 1990, as they were struggling for inspiration.

Johnston — who later invented the famous Adidas Predator football boot — said he came up with the idea to have a rap section in the middle of that song, which he helped write. Barnes ended up performing the rap, which has gained iconic status, and the song made it to number one as England got to the semi-finals before a heartbreaking loss on penalties to eventual winners Germany.

Liverbird Upon My Chest may not have the popular appeal of the Anfield Rap but it has permeated other parts of the football ecosystem.

Scottish giants Celtic — who already have renditions of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ballad You’ll Never Walk Alone in common with Liverpool — have adopted the song, albeit with their own lyrical twist.

By a strange quirk of fate, Hooton was instrumental in making this happen.

“In 1997, Liverpool played Celtic (in the UEFA Cup — today’s Europa League),” he recalls. “One of my mates from Glasgow was in a band called the Peat Diggers, who used to play at Celtic matches.

“I got them a gig at a place called Kitty O’Shea’s (an Irish bar) in Liverpool. They came down and did the gig, the pub was absolutely rammed. After the match it wasn’t as busy, it was like 50-50, Celtic and Liverpool fans. Then one of my mates, Paul Murphy, got up and sang Liverbird Upon My Chest. He did probably three or four verses.

“The Peat Diggers — brothers Sandy and Peter Devers — heard it and were like, ‘Oh my God, that’s brilliant.’ So they went back to Glasgow and did a CD called Four Leaf Clover On My Breast. It’s the same tune, but they just changed the words. Basically, they recorded it and sold tens of thousands of copies on CD.”

Hooton said he was amazed when he watched Celtic playing in Europe on TV a couple of years later and the whole crowd were singing Four Leaf Clover On My Breast. It was proof of the power of the terrace anthem, although Liverpool need no reminding of that.

With 10 games remaining in their league season, and a second title in five years (but first since 1990 with fans in the stands, because of the pandemic that affected the end of their 2019-20 triumph) firmly within reach, there is only one aspect of the ‘Liverbird’ song that may not ring true — Slot’s team are so far ahead they could mathematically win the championship before May has even started.

(Top photos: Getty Images)