What is the most definitive song about Leeds?
In 1968, Tom Jones scored one of the biggest hits of his illustrious career with a campy up-tempo murder ballad called ‘Delilah’, that year’s surprise winner of the Ivor Novello Award for ‘Best Song’.
Nothing about this sing-along pop classic has anything to do with the city of Leeds in West Yorkshire, mind you, but the two songwriters behind it, Barry Mason and Les Reed, should probably have statues outside the Leeds United football ground at Elland Road.
While Leeds has long had a vibrant, influential, and fairly star-studded music scene, there hasn’t been an overabundance of songs written overtly about the town itself. The Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘I Predict a Riot’, which was inspired by a night out in the city, is probably the most famous attempt to capture the vibe, if not in an entirely complimentary fashion. Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ was born from similar strands, though nobody outside of Leeds seems aware of it.
Some foreigners have paid worthy tributes, as well, including Amanda Palmer’s ‘Leeds United’ (which was actually inspired by her time dating the Kaiser Chiefs’ frontman Ricky Wilson), and the Wonder Years’ ‘Hostels and Brothels’, a Pennsylvania pop-punk tune about a memorable tour stop in the north of England: “Last night in Leeds / Ad and I found ourselves wandering the city / Looking for pizza / All we found was complacency and somewhere to sleep”.
Leeds gets some shout-outs in other classics, from The Smiths’ ‘Panic’ (“And the Leeds side streets that you slip down”) to ‘It’s Grim Up North’ by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, which, to be fair, mentions virtually every other city and town in the North, as well.
The one song written truly for and about Leeds, however, without any subtext about street crime, alcoholism, homesickness for other places, or fleeting relationships with Yorkshiremen, remains the beloved 1972 football anthem ‘Marching On Together’, AKA ‘Leeds Leeds Leeds’, composed by the aforementioned duo of Barry Mason and Les Reed, and sung by fans before every match at Elland Road for half a century.
Under normal circumstances, assigning a novelty football chant as a city’s defining song could be construed as a lazy cop-out. My only defence is that, having moved to Leeds from Chicago nearly a decade ago, I can say from personal experience that ‘Marching On Together’ is uniquely filtered into the water supply here. You needn’t ever attend a football match to hear it regularly, nor is it reserved for the pubs with England flags and Yorkshire roses on the windows.
The song is just kind of always around, whispering down an alleyway in the city centre or out of the back of a canal boat. The first time I heard it wasn’t at Elland Road, but at one of those speed trivia nights where your team gets a selected theme song played when you answer the fastest. Everyone in the bar sang along to the chorus: “Ev-ery-day, we’re all gonna say / We love you, Leeds! Leeds! Leeds!” It’s a good thing almost nobody is aware that a bloke from Lancashire wrote it.
A native of Wigan, Barry Mason was never a Leeds United supporter himself, but he made sense as a songwriter to hire when the club needed a song for its run to the FA Cup final in 1972. Usually working alongside composer and arranger Les Reed, Mason had already shown a knack for writing catchy tunes for mass consumption in the late ‘60s, with three UK number ones to his credit: Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’, Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘The Last Waltz’, and Des O’Connor’s ‘I Pretend’; not to mention various hits for Tom Jones, Petula Clark, and other crooners.
Not every Mason and Reed novelty song commission was a success, like the 1967 single ‘Who’s Doctor Who?’, which attempted a star turn for one of the sci-fi show’s actors, Frazer Hines, was quickly exterminated. ‘Leeds Leeds Leeds’, however, became a legitimate hit, boosted by the fact that Leeds went out and won the 1972 FA Cup, something they haven’t achieved since.
In 2010, when the song was remastered and re-released, it managed to reach the top ten in the UK charts, before falling off a cliff to 112 a week later. Maybe it’d be cooler if Leeds were best known as the city of the Gang of Four, or the Wedding Present, or Sisters of Mercy, as they rightfully should be, but those bands are enjoyed all over the world; ‘Marching On Together’ is a piece of unique, local culture. Barry Mason and Les Reed continued to work and pen hits for many years after writing the song, and both were recognised by LUFC for their contributions when they passed away; Reed in 2019 at 83, and Mason in 2021 at 85.
