Cardiff City Chants and Famous Songs: From Men of Harlech to Do the Ayatollah

Cardiff City are one of those clubs whose identity has never really been contained by their league position. The Bluebirds have spent chunks of the last twenty years bouncing between the Premier League, the Championship and, more recently, the third tier, and yet their support has kept doing very much what it always did. A lot of that is down to a songbook that draws almost as much on Welsh cultural memory as it does on the standard English terrace catalogue, which gives the club a distinct sound. You can also add in a mining-country heritage and a bitter rivalry with Swansea.

That, alongside the Welsh passion, helps to shape the mood at the Cardiff City Stadium almost as much as whoever happens to be visiting on the day. It means that you end up with a set of songs that don’t sound like anybody else’s. What follows isn’t intended to be the complete songbook, because there is no such thing at any football club. We have tried to concentrate on the songs Bluebirds fans actually still sing at the Cardiff City Stadium week in and week out, rather than dusting off older curiosities that have slipped out of the rotation.

A couple of the more distinctive Welsh-flavoured entries have been included because you can’t reasonably write about Cardiff’s terrace culture without them.

Top Image: Jon Candy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Men of Harlech

You couldn’t really do a piece on Cardiff songs without this one. Men of Harlech is a Welsh military march that dates from the fifteenth century and is associated with the seven-year siege of Harlech Castle during the Wars of the Roses. It has been used by Welsh regiments in the British Army ever since and got a fresh cultural lift from its role in the 1964 film Zulu, which is how a lot of English supporters first became aware of it. Bluebirds fans use a shortened terrace version rather than the full military lyric and it tends to surface before kick-off and during the big derby fixtures against Swansea.

This is one of the few chants on this list that actively sounds better the drunker the crowd is, which is just as well, all things considered. Here’s what gets sung:

Men of Harlech, stop your dreaming,

Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming,

See their warrior pennants streaming,

To this battlefield!

I’ll Be There with My Little Pick and Shovel

This is genuinely one of the older football chants in the country and it’s one Bluebirds fans have made their own to the point that a lot of supporters would struggle to name any other club singing it. The lyric goes back to the 1926 General Strike, when South Wales pit workers stayed out longer than most of the rest of the country. The ‘little pick and shovel’ reference is a direct nod to the Rhondda coal industry that provided the workforce Cardiff was built on. The city itself grew largely on the back of coal exports through Cardiff Docks and the club’s early support was drawn from families in the valleys.

Those families came down to Ninian Park by train on match days. Whether or not the average teenager in the Canton Stand knows any of that, the song has stayed in the rotation because it is easy to sing and slightly haunting when it is done properly. It is also sung because a chant about turning up to do the hard work fits pretty well with what Cardiff supporters like to think their club is about, even in the years when the team was a long way from doing anything of the sort.

The main verse runs like this:

I’ll be there,

I’ll be there,

With my little pick and shovel,

I’ll be there!

Blue Army

This is one of those chants that has no real ambition to be anything other than a lot of noise and it earns its place in the songbook by being reliable. Blue Army has been a fixture at Cardiff for years and works exactly the way you would expect a two-word football chant to work, with a section of the ground getting it started and the rest of the stadium picking it up until the tune loses whatever shape it had to begin with. It has become one of the songs that tends to break out during passages of play when the team is pinning the opposition back and the crowd wants to lean forward with them.

It also gets a run-out after goals when everyone is still on their feet and doesn’t much feel like sitting back down. There isn’t a lot to write about the lyrics because there aren’t any:

Blue Army!

Blue Army!

Blue Army!

You Are My Cardiff

Set to the tune of You Are My Sunshine, this is the Bluebirds’ version of a song that pretty much every club in Britain has a rendition of. It works because the original tune is uncomplicated enough that even a half-empty away end can carry it and because the sentiment is exactly what a football supporter wants to be able to declare about their team without feeling too embarrassed about it. It generally surfaces during the more affectionate moments of a match rather than during the belligerent ones, with Cardiff fans leaning into the second bit of the chorus about not being able to notice how much they love the team.

Here’s how it goes:

You are my Cardiff,

My only Cardiff,

You make me happy

When skies are grey!

You’ll never notice

How much I love you,

So please don’t

Take my Cardiff away.

And It’s Cardiff City

Cardiff’s version of the chant that gives this site its name, is also one that supporters have adopted with about as much irony as the rest of English football manages, which is to say very little. It boasts the same tune every other club uses, with the team’s name slotted in. Bluebirds fans reach for it during the good bits of a game and occasionally during the bad bits as an act of defiance. There is no point overcomplicating a song whose entire structure is built around the phrase ‘by far the greatest team the world has ever seen’ when that’s rarely the case.

Here’s how the Cardiff City version goes:

And it’s Cardiff City,

Cardiff City FC!

We’re by far the greatest team,

The world has ever seen!

City ‘Til I Die

Practically every football club in the country has a variant of the song and Cardiff’s fits into that lineage without any particular pretensions. It pops up most often at the Cardiff City Stadium after a winning goal or during the closing stages of a match that the team is not going to lose and it works exactly the same way at away ends because the format is universal enough that anyone joining the away end for the first time will pick it up within a couple of verses.

The Bluebirds version is as bare-bones as you’ll find:

I’m City ‘til I die,

I’m City ‘til I die,

I know I am,

I’m sure I am,

I’m City ‘til I die!

Do the Ayatollah

Cardiff’s most distinctive contribution to British terrace culture isn’t really a song at all, though it is accompanied by one. Do the Ayatollah refers to the hand gesture Bluebirds fans have been using since 1990, where supporters tap the tops of their heads with both palms in a steady rhythm.

The gesture was pinched from television footage of mourners at the state funeral of the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989, which was broadcast live on British television that summer, and was first done at a Cardiff match by fans of a Welsh-language punk band called U Thant.

That was back when the club travelled to Lincoln in the September of 1990. It began as a slightly self-lacerating gesture of despair when the team was playing badly, and mutated, in the way that these things tend to, into a celebration when the team scored. Bluebirds players have joined in the gesture from the pitch for the better part of three decades, from Nathan Blake and Jason Bowen through to more recent goalscorers, and the chant that goes with it is designed to summon one of them into doing it on cue. It has been the club’s most immediately recognisable ritual for a long time now.

If there is a chant that accompanies it, this is it:

Do the Ayatollah,

Do the Ayatollah,

Do the Ayatollah,

Nah nah nah nah!