No Rock And Roll Fun

SOCCEROBIT: While the world is mourning Brian Clough, it's worth taking a moment to recall what we believe is his single foray into record making, when he teamed up with JJ Barrie to produce a single designed to stop the hooliganism that was ruining English soccer at the time. (Of course, in the end, hooliganism didn't ruin English soccer because Murdoch and the sponsors turned up to ruin it in quite a different direction. Hooliganism itself became a lot less common when people realised Paul Heaton of the Beautiful South was a hoolie, and so it lost its allure.) Clough wasn't asked to sing for the record, so instead he contributed a piece of free-form babbling which is the sort of rap even Vanilla Ice might feel brings his artform into disrepute.

We can't remember much of the song, to be honest, but the chorus was along the lines of:

You can't win them all
You can't win them all
Football's the game
I love my football
But as everyone knows
That's how it goes...

Clough, of course, would later forget the plea for leaving violence out of sport and would take to punching people more or less at random - a couple of pitch invaders at Nottingham Forest, Nigel Jemson for playing poorly, and even slapping Roy Keane - himself currently under investigation for assaulting a teenager, as if to prove that violence is indeed an endless cycle. Lou Reed was right.