‘Como un rayo’: how ska became the unofficial sound of Spanish football
‘Seven Nation Army’, ‘Mrs Robinson’, ‘Tom Hark’; there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the various pop songs that get adopted by football fans and translated into chants from the terraces. At least in the bastion of footballing excellence that is Spain, though, more than a few of those chants are rooted in the sounds of the Caribbean.
Emerging from the ramshackle studios and sound systems of Kingston in the wake of Jamaica’s newfound independence, ska and rocksteady music soon emigrated outwards, both to the mainland Americas as well as the opposing end of the Atlantic Ocean. It was in the UK, for instance, that ska music was adopted by an anarchic new generation of young football fans during the 1960s, having arrived on this sceptred isle in the suitcases of the Windrush generation.
Quickly becoming the soundtrack of the football-obsessed skinhead subculture, ska music had an immediate effect on English football, as signified by the early adoption of tracks like ‘The Liquidator’ as a walk-out track for multiple teams, Chelsea and West Brom being the main offenders. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed, though, that both of those teams play a considerable distance away from the sun-soaked stadiums of España. So, how did the national sound of Jamaica, and the adopted soundtrack of English football, make it to La Liga?
Much like a rundown of FC Barcelona’s trophy cabinet, it is difficult to get through that in a succinct fashion. It is true, for example, that English football, to a lesser extent these days but certainly in the pre-Premier League era, is placed on a pedestal by many supporters in mainland Europe, if not for the quality of play then certainly for the fan culture.
There is, of course, an ugly side to all of that, with the ska-obsessed skinhead hooligans of the 1960s and 1970s predicting the rise of far-right ultras, from which the Spanish league is certainly not immune. However, English football’s fan culture also contains a lot of musical accompaniments that have taken root abroad, including ska music.
If you look across the soundtrack of Spanish football today, whether it’s chants, walk-out tracks, or even songs written in tribute to various teams, ska is a near-constant presence, and it isn’t all down to the efforts of faraway English teams, either. Given its comparatively close proximity to Jamaica, it is no surprise that ska’s influence found a home in the punk scene of Mexico and surrounding Central America, carving out an expansive and incredible Spanish-language ska-punk scene which, in turn, found an audience in Spain, too.
Crucially, that ska-punk scene – as opposed to certain skinheads on the English terraces of the 1970s – boasts an inherently left-wing, anti-fascist stance that similarly inclined football fans in Spain, particularly those areas with historic ties to the anarcho-communist movement of the Civil War era.
Madrid’s Rayo Vallecano, for instance, is a club rooted in working-class values and left-wing politics, so it is only fitting that ska-punk outfit Ska-P gave them a definitive anthem in the form of ‘Como un rayo’.
Rayo Vallecano aren’t the only Spanish club to be blessed with an inspirational ska-punk anthem, either. Across the footballing pyramid of Spain, ska is a recurring theme and a definitive soundtrack, despite the original incarnation of the sound having precious little to do with football, and hailing from thousands of miles away, across oceans, on the island of Jamaica.
