(A piece of prose/poetry by John Coopey and Lenny Roberts, with some skipping on the audio)

Have you ever wondered how a chant starts at a football match?  Who decides what to sing?  Is it a single person or a group?  How do they persuade 10,000 others to join in?  and what about a new chant?  how does the crowd learn it? are there song-sheets?  Essentially it is a question of natural history.  One could equally ask of the murmuration of starlings, wheeling in their orchestrated, aerial ballet, “Who’s in charge?”

The answer, on the terraces, was Lenny.

Many, like myself, write – short stories, poems, songs.  Pretentiously most of us adopt a faux working class persona, “Fuck the Tories.  Fuck the multinationals.  Fuck the United States etc”, often written over a skinny latte and recited to fellow travellers enjoying organic real ale or a presumptious little Pinot Grigio.  Without exception, by the very act of writing the poetry we betray ourselves as no longer working class, if, indeed, we ever were.  (The only person you’ll ever find trying to argue that a poet is working class will be another poet.)

But not so Lenny.  Lenny is the last of the proletarian poets.  His work is not credited anywhere.  It is not available in print.  (Lenny laughs at the idea of vanity publishing).  He will not appear on The South Bank Show.  For Lenny belongs to an altogether different and lost aural tradition of feasting halls and Celtic and Saxon gods. 

His work is both transient and enduring, audible for seconds and then gone, only to be heard in another place at another time, at once as fresh and as repetitive as a thrush’s song.  For Lenny is, indeed, the last of the proletarian poets.

Venomous or affectionate, witty or cruel; but above all, universal.  He is an unpaid mercenary.  He works for City and United, for the Rovers and the Wanderers, for Rangers and for Celtic. 

And crucially, unlike the rest of us, he knows his audience and plays it like a virtuoso.  How many of us have bombed through not pitching the right material at the right audience?  (Who could forget  Arthur Mytholmroyd’s first try-out of “Sniff Ma Dick Yo Mutherfucker” at the Penistone and District Mothers Union?)

Not Lenny.  He melds original work to familiar rhythms enabling what the more sophisticated of us call “inclusiveness and accessibility”.  Lenny just calls it “joining in”.

A simple and reuseable device of his is to take a familiar rhythm and melody, and adapt it.  The song, “The Quartermaster’s Store”, for instance, served as a coathanger for his 1970’s piece,

“He saw, he missed, he must be fucking pissed -

Charlie George. Charlie George”,

reworked years later as an homage to a 6’ 7” Liverpool striker,

“He’s big, he’s red, his feet hang out of bed -

Peter Crouch, Peter Crouch”

The tune “Guantanamera” he has extensively hijacked.  When Alan Shearer left punditry on Match of the Day to take up the manager’s role at Newcastle, only to guide them to relegation, Lenny offered with cutting simplicity,

“Stayed on the telly, you should have stayed on the telly”

When Scotland ritualistically turned up for their World Cup qualifier against Estonia to find the Estonian team had boycotted the match as a protest against its revised kick-off time, Lenny gave us,

“One team in Tallin, there’s only one team in Tallin”

And even more shamelessly derivative of his own work when news broke of a Glasgow Rangers goalkeeper having treatment for schizophrenia, he thrilled the Celtic fans with

“Two Andy Gorams, there’s only two Andy Gorams”

His work can be, on the one hand, disparaging,

“When you’re sat in Row Z and the ball hits your head – that’s Zamora”

or, on the other, a warm tribute,

“Ravanelli shows his belly when he scores a goal”

Of course, truly proletarian poetry respects no “ISMS”.  The Viking skald Egill Skallagrimsson, for example, never wrote, “I Cooked My Love A Vegetarian Supper”.  And Lenny too suspended political correctness between 3pm and 4.45pm.  When Brighton play away the strains of his,

“Does your boyfriend, does your boyfriend, does your boyfriend know you’re here?”

can be heard to the tune of Bread of Heaven, along with,

“Fat Eddie Murphy, you’re just a fat Eddie Murphy” targeted at the unfortunate Floyd Hasselbaink.

On one famous occasion Lenny himself apologised to the player who suffered a crisis of confidence after fans taunted his tied-up hairstyle with,

“He’s got a pineapple on his head, he’s got a pineapple on his head”.

Lenny was ever aware of the powerful ju-ju he commanded.

Sadly Lenny passed way earlier this week.  His work will be recited by millions who will never read Hemingway or Whitman and will endure as long as theirs.  His ashes will be scattered on the pitch of his beloved Nuthall Nomads prior to the kick-off of their first match next season.  Lenny’s wish was that there would be no chanting, for he knew he was The Last Poet Prauletariate.