The mark of a truly great football song isn’t in chart position (albeit with that an increasing irrelevance anyway), streaming numbers or by how many times it’s dug up at opportune moments - usually international tournaments - it’s how it manages to permeate a fanbase far beyond excessive volumes on a PA.
As Joey Barton’s side were preparing to celebrate a near-miraculous promotion to League One in May as the clock ticked down to confirm a 7-0 victory over Scunthorpe United, a fervent Thatcher’s End was firmly in song. Now-established couplets about certain men in blue and white quarters on the field were belted out, as was Goodnight Irene, of course, but another tune filled the air of interesting significance.
For the last two decades, Tote End Boys has largely been played at the Mem following a draw or defeat; it’s nostalgia-tinged melancholic verse mixed with the uplift of spirit in the chorus proving as close a soothing audio balm as is possible after a disappointing result.
But the culmination of the 2021/22 season, and all that took place at Port Vale, Rochdale and in north Bristol, cemented its status far, far beyond an accompaniment to the above emotions.
Written and recorded by Ben Gunstone at Nam Studios just outside Bradford-on-Avon, and engineered by friend Steve Evans, the song celebrates its 20th anniversary this September and is now firmly woven into the fabric of Bristol Rovers in the modern age.
In the words of its creator, a Gashead since 1980, it’s a song about the past of the club with stark references in the lyrics to Eastville (home, of course, to the Tote End), Stapleton Road, Geoff Bradford, Micky Barrett, Alfie Biggs and the 4-0 victory over Manchester United in 1956, but also the spirit that underpins the Gas - a nomadic, roaming team whose fortune has never quite landed.
“I’d been going to Rovers for a long time with my dad, my brother, my granddad, my great uncle - we’re all Rovers. And my dad’s friend who had been watching the Gas with him since the 50s challenged me to do a version of Goodnight Irene,” Gunstone tells Bristol Live.
“Everybody’s done Goodnight Irene so if I was going to do anything, I’ll do something original. It was a song very much about the ghosts of Eastville Stadium. It was a pretty impressionable place for a young soul to be in the early 1980s.
“I had the top line - 'can you hear the Tote End Boys sing' - first, and just sang that over a chord sequence that I knew would work with that line. I originally had a stream of lyrics and then tried to edit it down to keep references and images in there which summed it up, by not saying too much - sometimes less is more.
“I guess it’s a dedication to Rovers supporters everywhere - dead or alive - that’s the spirit of the thing, whether they’re on the Tote End, the popular side of Twerton Park or the Blackthorn, now Thatchers, End.
“The first game I saw was against Derby in November 1980 and it was a 1-1 draw. I remember in that season the South Stand had burned down. It was a great big, old falling-apart thing. And so Rovers only played about one game at home and then they came back and in the days before health and safety, you had this great big ghostly iron structure still there. And as a kid, from the Northern Enclosure, just staring at this great big hulk of burnt iron, it was quite an impressionable image.
"There is nostalgia there (in the song) but it’s also about the present spirit of Rovers - we’re a nomadic, roving team.
“Rovers are about unity through adversity. If you’re fatalistic about this, we seem to have a lot of things that didn’t quite work out - 1940, selling Eastville for peanuts; my dad always talks about the 1955/56 season where we were on course for the top-flight and then Geoff Bradford broke his leg and we were never able to replace him; the fact we had to move to Bath and the highs and lows of trying to get a new ground. After all, it’s in the name - Rovers.”
Gunstone remains a working musician, releasing music through Bandcamp and performing around the West Country but his day job is as a schoolteacher based near Warminster, Wiltshire.
The genesis of its ubiquity around the Mem stemmed from Gunstone sending a copy to Keith Brookman who featured it in a matchday programme and from there it caught former matchday announcer and DJ Nick Day’s interest whose love for the song led to it being played regularly, a tradition his successor Lance Cook has continued with gusto.
“When I took over from Nick I tweaked certain things here and there but I could change that, it would be sacrilegious!” he says. “It’s just a great tune. It resonates with a certain generation who have lived through the lyrical content of the song but the newer fans who come along get to learn a bit of the history about the club.”
Lance did commit such an act of heresy prior to the Scunthorpe game on May 7 when, after being besieged by Gasheads on social media requesting it be installed on the all-important pre-match playlist, it was given a prime slot before kick-off for the first time he can remember.
“I remember standing on the pitch about 10 or so minutes before kick off and you could just hear everyone singing it around the Mem,” he adds. “It stopped me in my tracks. It was the first wow moment of the afternoon.”
Gunstone is, of course, proud of the song but its impact, how its woven into the cultural fabric of the club, serving as both an anthem but also an artefact of the recent past and doorway into the Gas’ history, is difficult for him to comprehend. As it would be anyone.
A regular visitor to the Mem, with his daughter Flo part of the next generations of Gasheads - continuing the theme of lineage that inhibits the song, he’s still able to raise a smile whenever it drifts over the air following a game.
“It was a very soulful experience writing it but I didn’t realise it would be quite so well-liked, although I’m sure it’s not liked by everybody,” Gunstone adds. “I’m proud of it. It’s very humbling to hear it played at the ground and that people seem to like it. I’ve even had some Bristol City fans say they regard it as a great Bristol song.
“One of the most moving things was when I took my daughter to the Mem and after the game we were wandering down the Gloucester Road and we could still hear it lingering in the air, she turned to me and said, ‘Dad, is that your song?’ That was... that was a special moment.”
Gunstone still performs Tote End Boys live and even has tentative plans to re-record a 20th anniversary version with Flo on vocals, “she has a better voice than me”, he remarks.
A paean to Eastville and the past it may be, although some of his fondest memories of the club are eternally linked with those early games and the charred remains of that hulking South Stand, influencing the song that has now transcended generations, like any Gashead, all he wants is a place Rovers can finally call home.
"That line, ‘the flowers are dead and gone behind the Eastville goals’, when I performed it not so long ago, I changed the lyrics,” he adds, with a chuckle. “Instead I sang, ‘I hope they’ll plant some flowers behind those new goals”, in case we get a new ground!
“There's no way any song is going to replace Goodnight Irene as a club anthem, because it is the anthem, but whatever small part I can play in the story, I'm happy and humbled to do so.”
Tote End Boys
Verse
The flowers are dead and gone behind the Eastville goals,
The traffic’s a little quieter on the Stapleton road.
Ghosts of Bamford and Barrett steel,
Shadows on a drizzle field.
Chorus
And can you hear the Tote End Boys sing,
I can hear everything.
And when the north Bristol chorus rings,
I can hear everything.
Verse
The flowers are shopping malls on the Eastville goals,
I was blue and white quarters from the age of three years old.
The Francis golden age,
We paid that player’s wage.
Chorus
And can you hear the Tote End Boys sing,
I can hear everything.
And when the north Bristol chorus rings,
I can hear everything.
Bridge
Bradford, Meyer, Biggs,
The 7th of January 1956.
Chorus
And can you hear the Tote End boys sing,
I can hear everything.
And when the north Bristol chorus rings,
I can hear everything.
And can you hear the Tote End Boys sing,
Irene I’ll see you in my dreams.
And when the north Bristol chorus rings,
I can hear everything.
I can hear everything.
The flowers are dead and gone behind the Eastville goals
You can listen to, and purchase, more of Ben's music via his Bandcamp page
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