Liquidator: The Jamaican ska instrumental with a rich history in English football
Music and football have always gone hand in hand, whether we’re talking about Gazza’s bizarre number two single with Lindisfarne back in 1990 or the Celtic-loving Rod Stewart’s unforgettable drunken FA Cup draw. One of the most ubiquitous songs in English football, however, is the Jamaican ska instrumental, ‘The Liquidator’.
First released back in 1969 by The Harry J Allstars, on Harry J’s very own label in the heart of Jamaica, the instrumental offering is synonymous with the soundsystem culture and ska scene of the era. An amalgamation of influences from across the Caribbean influenced the song’s distinctive, bass-heavy sound, which seemed destined to be blasted out on soundsystems across the island. Incidentally, though, 1969 was also the year that the UK started to take an increased notice of the rocksteady and ska rhythms emanating from across the Atlantic.
With the influx of people coming into the UK from the Caribbean post-war, as a part of the Windrush generation, the ska and rocksteady music they brought in their suitcases began to infiltrate the British airwaves. Before too long, audiences across the nation – both Black and white – became infatuated with these exciting new sounds, and Trojan Records was set up in London to distribute Jamaican ska music. Inevitably, ‘The Liquidator’ became one of Trojan’s best-selling records.
A core part of Trojan’s audience were members of a newly emerging subculture, formed from the harder end of the mod movement: skinheads. These working-class young people – predominantly men – quickly identified Jamaican ska and boss reggae as their soundtrack, and ‘The Liquidator’ could certainly be described as an early skinhead anthem. If anything was more important to the skinhead subculture than ska or Dr Martens boots, though, it was football.
Exactly how ‘The Liquidator’ made its way from the soundsystems of Jamaica to the terraces of English football is a debatable tale, but it seems more than likely that the prevalence of skinheads on those terraces and their listening habits were factors.
Depending on where your footballing allegiances lie, or even which part of the country you reside in, probably determines which team you relate ‘The Liquidator’ to. There are, after all, five different clubs that claim they were the first to use the instrumental as their walk-out song before kick-off: Chelsea, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Northampton Town, and, most surprisingly, Scottish side St Johnstone – it is no coincidence that each of those teams had strong skinhead contingencies within their fans.
Regardless of which of those teams introduced the song first (the broad likelihood being that each of them adopted the song coincidentally around the same time), ‘The Liquidator’ quickly became a core part of the soundtrack to English football, being belted out from the terraces and played over the speakers at various grounds across the country.
In fact, the song became such a core part of games in the Midlands that the local police forced Wolves and West Brom to ban it in 2004, due to the lyrics that fans had since added to the instrumental – namely “Fuck off Wanderers. West Brom!” and vice versa. West Brom have since reinstated the track, but it remains banned at Wolves.
To this day, over half a century on from when that timeless instrumental, born in the sunshine of Kingston, Jamaica, was adopted by skinhead football fans, its heritage is carried on by the clubs like Chelsea and West Brom that still use it as their walk-out song.
