I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – Cockney Rejects (1980)

Description

Additional information about this, Cockney Rejects vinyl art.

Cockney Rejects – The Artist/s

Cockney Rejects were formed in 1977 by brothers Jeff and Micky Geggus, with their brother-in-law Chris Murrell on bass and Paul Harvey on drums. Their biggest hit single in the United Kingdom, 1980’s “The Greatest Cockney Rip-Off”, was a parody of Sham 69’s song “Hersham Boys”. Other Cockney Rejects songs were less commercial, partly because they tended to be about hard-edged topics such as street fighting or football hooliganism. Other singles to appear in the UK were “Bad Man,” “We Can Do Anything,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles ” and “We Are the Firm” — all from 1980.

I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – The Song

‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles‘ is a popular American song written in 1918, released in late 1919, becoming a number one hit for Ben Selvin’s Novelty Orchestra. It has been revived and adapted over the years, serving as the anthem of Premier League club, West Ham United. The music was composed by John Kellette in 1918. The lyrics are credited to “Jaan Kenbrovin” — actually a collective pseudonym for the writers James Kendis, James Brockman and Nat Vincent, combining the first three letters of each lyricist’s last name. The number debuted in the Broadway musical, The Passing Show of 1918, and it was introduced by Helen Carrington. The song is well known in England as the club anthem of West Ham United, a London-based football club. It is said to have been adopted by West Ham’s supporters in the 1920s (although there is no record of West Ham fans singing the song until 1940), and it is now one of the most recognisable club anthems in English football, alongside songs similarly adopted by other clubs, such as “Keep Right on to the End of the Road”, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, “Blue Moon”, “Blue Is the Colour”, “On the Ball, City” and “Blaydon Races”. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” was played in various football grounds by marching bands in the 1920s, for example at Swansea and West Ham’s rival Millwall. The song was introduced to West Ham by former manager Charlie Paynter in the late 1920s. A player, Billy J. “Bubbles” Murray, who played for the local Park School had a resemblance to the boy in the “Bubbles” painting by Millais used in a Pears soap commercial of the time. Headmaster Cornelius Beal began singing the tune “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” with amended lyrics when Park players played well. Beal was a friend of Paynter, while Murray was a West Ham trialist and played football at schoolboy level with a number of West Ham players such as Jim Barrett. Through this contrivance of association, the club’s fans took it upon themselves to begin singing the popular music hall tune before home games, sometimes reinforced by the presence of a house band requested to play the refrain by Paynter. In 1980, as a tribute to West Ham United, the punk rock band the Cockney Rejects covered the song. 

The Football / Soccer Shirt – The Shape

In association football, kit (also referred to as a strip or uniform) is the standard equipment and attire worn by players. Footballers generally wear identifying numbers on the backs of their shirts. Originally a team of players wore numbers from 1 to 11, corresponding roughly to their playing positions, but at the professional level this has generally been superseded by squad numbering, whereby each player in a squad is allocated a fixed number for the duration of a season. Professional clubs also usually display players’ surnames or nicknames on their shirts, above their squad numbers. Football kit has evolved significantly since the early days of the sport and advances in clothing manufacture and printing allowed shirts to be made in lighter synthetic fibres with increasingly colourful and complex designs. With the rise of advertising in the 20th century, sponsors’ logos began to appear on shirts, and replica strips were made available for fans to purchase, generating significant amounts of revenue for clubs.

West Ham United Football Club is an English professional football club based in Stratford, East London that compete in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The club plays at the London Stadium, having moved from their former home, the Boleyn Ground, in 2016. The club was founded in 1895 as Thames Ironworks and reformed in 1900 as West Ham United. They moved to the Boleyn Ground in 1904, which remained their home ground for more than a century. The team initially competed in the Southern League and Western League before joining the Football League in 1919. They were promoted to the top flight in 1923, when they were also losing finalists in the first FA Cup Final held at Wembley.  The club has a long-standing rivalry with Millwall, and the fixture between the two teams has gained notoriety for frequent incidents of football hooliganism. West Ham adopted their claret and sky blue colour scheme in the early 1900s, with the most common iteration of a claret shirt and sky blue sleeves first emerging in 1904.

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