Cod Almighty | Diary

The day the music died

15 September 2026

Miss Guest Diary writes: Some poets claim that April is the cruellest month, but I'd like to put in a word for September, the month of endings and beginnings; the end of summer and the start of the nights drawing in towards winter. For young people the end of the long summer holidays and the start of a new school term and sometimes, more scarily, moving to a new school or college; and for us football fans the start of a new season with new players and opponents to assess, full of hopes which are frequently unfulfilled. Cruel indeed.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats would have it, is conducive to nostalgia, that wistful affection for a past time or place. With its mention of Rovers literally roving around various grounds in the 1980s and 1990s before settling in their current home at The Memorial Ground, the programme from Saturday's game against Bristol Rovers invoked that feeling in me.

I first saw Town play Rovers at Twerton Park in Bath almost exactly 35 years ago. In those days I was still more interested in the day out than the football, and a lovely day out it was. A couple of hours tootling down the M4 from our home in Watford, a fine lunch and the opportunity to gaze at the beautiful scenery from the terrace when my attention wandered from the football. Town won (3-2) – a rarer occurrence in the Buckley days when it was much more about winning at Blundell Park than on the road – and on the way out of Bath we were shadowed for quite a while by several hot air balloons, presumably still in the area after the previous month's Bristol Balloon Fiesta. The following season produced almost exactly the same experience, with a 3-0 victory for Town and a hot air balloon escort. Happy days.

Music is another thing which can evoke nostalgia, and football fans' fondness for recycling songs from my youth can lift me right out of the moment and into the past. The first time the Town crowd struck up the opening of Herman's Hermits' I'm Into Something Good (Woke up this morning feeling fine), or when Jaze Kabia was "running down the wing and scoring one or two" to the tune of Do Wah Diddy Diddy, I was transported back to dancing at a friend's birthday party as a 10-year old. That "We're on our way" chant, so ubiquitous in the recent promotion seasons, is based on a song from the musical Paint Your Wagon and has me back at a Saturday night screening of the film at a cinema in Watford, long since demolished, with a boyfriend long since gone.

Last Saturday I heard a song in the Pontoon, something along the lines of "In your head, in your head, Turi, Turi" after he scored. That one had no associations, way too modern for me, I thought. I tracked it down on YouTube to find its title – Zombie by The Cranberries – only to discover that it dates back to 1994. This got me wondering about how old some other popular songs-turned-chants I wasn't previously familiar with would turn out to be. Freed From Desire? 1997. Just Can't Get Enough? 1981 Tom Hark? 1980.

Oh dear, I obviously lost touch with popular music somewhere in the 1970s. But it does beg the question why there don't seem to be any songs from this century which have made it onto the terraces. Couldn't fans base a chant on one of Taylor Swift's ditties, or perhaps that cheery song from The Killers which holds the record for most weeks in the UK charts? Maybe Don McClean was just foretelling the future.