The hit Kanye West song inspired by a Liverpool football anthem
Kanye West, during his creative height, was a man who seemed capable of drawing inspiration out of almost anything. His music was innovative and multi-faceted, but, still, the fact that he constructed a hit song using the bones of a famous footballing anthem is quite something.
The 2007 hit ‘Homecoming,’ which featured Chris Martin and saw Kanye rapping about his hometown of Chicago as if it was lost romantic love, was actually based on an earlier track that Ye made called ‘Home (Windy).’ John Legend had been involved in that earlier track, while, at its core, was a sample of a Patti LaBelle and the BlueBelles track from 1963. It was a cover of an old show tune called ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’
As part of the beat for ‘Home (Windy),’ Ye looped a vocal line that LaBelle sang in her version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ which, originally, was first heard in a musical called Carousel in 1945. The fact that this song traces back that far is interesting in its own right, but, crucially, most people nowadays probably know ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ best as an anthem heard at football stadiums.
‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is sung by the fans of multiple teams all around the world, but it is most closely associated with Liverpool FC and their home ground of Anfield. The team’s fans adopted the song after the local Scouse band Gerry and the Pacemakers released a version of it in 1963.
The song became a true Liverpool anthem, with the club officially adopting the phrase “you’ll never walk alone” as part of its coat of arms. It has been sung at Anfield for decades now, with even players and managers from other teams acknowledging its significance.
The Dutch footballing legend Johan Cruyff, who never played for Liverpool, once said, “There’s not one club in Europe with an anthem like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ There’s not one club in the world so united with the fans. I sat there watching the Liverpool fans and they sent shivers down my spine. A mass of 40,000 people became one force behind their team.”
The Scottish club Celtic are also closely associated with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ while teams in Germany, Belgium, Greece, Japan and several other countries have also been known to belt it out. There are even ice hockey teams who have been known to sing it at games.
‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ also has wider significance beyond sports matches, as when it became something of an anthem for front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The song was sung across the UK as a tribute to medical workers.
All of this is to say that ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ has an extremely storied history, but, arguably, its place in Kanye West’s canon is the most surprising. He used it as the basis of the song that later evolved into ‘Homecoming,’ although, ultimately, he ended up swapping out the initial Patti Labelle sample heard on ‘Home (Windy)’ and replacing it with an anthemic piano riff. But, by then, the football anthem had left its mark on the song.