How Sky Blues adopted a 2007 song as their anthem

Liverpool has You'll Never Walk Alone, West Ham has I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles and now Coventry City has its own anthem.

The Enemy's We'll Live and Die in These Towns is sung loud and proud at every home game, timed to reach the crescendo of the chorus seconds before kick off.

It helps to generate a powerful pre-match atmosphere - manager Frank Lampard described the tradition as "amazing" after his first game in the home dugout this season.

But how did a song about a flat above a bookmakers in Coventry's Far Gosford Street come to be adopted by the Sky Blue Army?

The song was first introduced to the matchday experience by DJ Stuart Court in 2020 – when the club was playing home matches in Birmingham as a result of a long-running dispute with then stadium owners Wasps.

He said: "It was all about reconnecting, keeping connectivity with the city we weren't playing football games in."

But it was last season the anthem really took hold, the highlight being when it was sung in the run up to kick off during Coventry City's Wembley FA Cup semi-final appearance against Manchester United.

Videos of a sea of thousands of Sky Blue clad fans in England's most famous stadium, preparing to face off against one of the biggest clubs in the world, flooded social media.

It cemented the song as part of the identity of both the football club and the city.

The Enemy vocalist Tom Clarke, who wrote the song, said of its impact: "The fans, really, they've made it what it is and the song's bigger than us now. We just appreciate it."

Such is the resonance of the song, countless Coventry City fans have had the words We'll Live and Die in These Towns tattooed onto themselves.

Asked why he thought the song meant so much to people from the city, Clarke told the BBC: "This is an accurate picture of what I know life is like in Cov".

"It's become bigger than us and bigger than the band and it means something different to everyone.

"Every one of those tattoos means something different to the person who got it.

"It's a really special song and that's not down to us. It's down to those people with those tattoos and the fans who have sung it over the years."

The song, and other football anthems, are being celebrated during a special exhibition at Coventry Music Museum, on Walsgrave Road, which opens at 10:00 GMT on Friday.

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