And Leeds United are having a party — Square Ball 6/8/24

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Written by: Rob Conlon

Leeds United were breezing through their return to the top flight under Howard Wilkinson, sitting 4th in the First Division after beginning February 1991 with a 0-0 draw with Spurs, when Leeds fan and Sony Music rep Ian De-Whytell opened a letter from Les Reed. De-Whytell had been trying to track down Reed, the writer of Tom Jones’ hits ‘It’s Not Unusual’ and ‘Delilah’, for some time. He used his contacts in the music industry and best detective work to eventually find an address for Reed. Finally, he’d got his man, and now he’d got the reply he was craving.

‘Dear Ian,’ wrote Reed. ‘Thank you for your very nice letter regarding the Leeds United team and, coincidentally, I have been in touch with two major record companies with a view to re-releasing “LEEDS, LEEDS, LEEDS”. As you have been involved in previous recordings, if perchance we cannot secure a release on the tracks, perhaps you might in the meantime feel inclined to offer up a deal wherein you would exploit and promote the record on your own label?’

These days, De-Whytell is more commonly known as the former owner of Leeds establishment Crash Records. Still in its original location on the Headrow, Crash once had a collection of dance records downstairs that used to attract Leeds players like Rio Ferdinand, Jonathan Woodgate, and Michael Duberry. Ferdinand often parked his Ferrari outside the shop, undeterred by the parking tickets. “The loveliest of the lot of them was Olivier Dacourt,” De-Whytell says. “The big spender was Rio, to such a point that when he left Leeds to go ‘Over There’ there was a load of stuff he wanted, but he was worried about coming into Leeds, so we drove out to him. He was going to be staying at a hotel near Wetherby. I’ll always remember because he said, I’m in room 442. And I thought, what a great room number for a footballer.”

De-Whytell grew up in Leeds in the 1970s, obsessed with the majesty of Don Revie’s Leeds United and the glam rock of David Bowie. As a child he owned a copy of Leeds’ 1972 FA Cup final record ‘Leeds United’, with its B-side ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds’, better known as Marching On Together. By 1991, his copy was worn out from being played so much. A year earlier, De-Whytell had released a track called ‘We Are Leeds’ by The Crew on his own label, Q Music. With the twentieth anniversary of Marching On Together looming, he wanted to reissue the record for younger fans who weren’t around to buy it the first time, and older fans like him who needed a new copy.

The music to Marching On Together was written by Reed after he was approached by artist Paul Trevillion, who was working behind the scenes with Don Revie on the Super Leeds revolution of 1972. Not only did United have the sock tags, the named tracksuits and the team to make them the envy of the country, with Revie’s urging and Trevillion’s instigation they even had a top ten hit. Reed provided the music, and his songwriting partner Barry Mason wrote the lyric. It was recorded in Stockport’s Strawberry Studios, with Reed on piano enlisting the help of members of 10CC including Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman as part of the session — ‘by far the best record they were ever responsible for,’ in the words of Melody Maker magazine. The vocal talent came courtesy of Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton, and the rest of the players’ choir. Eight years later, another Leeds United anthem was recorded in Strawberry Studios: Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

“Les Reed was delighted that somebody was interested in bringing this record out again,” De-Whytell says, standing behind the counter at Crash Records. He has handed over the reins of running the shop, but still works one day a week to get his fix. “The long and short of that story is he agreed that I could licence the record. He’d provide the master tape for both the A side and the B side, and I could reissue it. I also told him at the time that I was thinking about doing a remix. I fancied the idea of not only bringing it back out but having an up to date remix.

“I went through these stages of contacting him, then him agreeing to let me reissue it, to then asking around. I can’t remember exactly how I got the details of Shaun Imrei, who used to mix under the name of Bassheads. I’ve got a feeling it was in here, in Crash Records. I’ve got a feeling when I was a rep and I was talking to contacts within the dance music business, I’m pretty sure it was here they said you should try Shaun Imrei. I got some details, he lived in Halifax. He agreed to do a remix. He ended up doing a couple, a short remix and an extended version.”

The process of getting the required permission to reissue the record took so long that by the time Imrei began work, Leeds were halfway through the 1991/92 campaign, and fans were beginning to dream of beating Manchester United to the title. As well as the master tape from Reed, two of Leeds’ most memorable performances from that season also feature on the remix, the 4-1 thumping of Aston Villa and the 6-1 annihilation of Sheffield Wednesday.

“One of the other things that I had going at the time was that I managed to get into most of our away matches as a photographer,” De-Whytell says. “A pal of mine took some photographs. I actually had a front cover of The Square Ball, Mel Sterland throwing his boot into the crowd at the last game of the season. I thought it would be really cool to record the Leeds crowd singing. I’d got this really nice Sony Walkman Professional, which was actually a gift from George Michael, right. When the George Michael album ‘Listen Without Prejudice’ came out, all the sales force got one of these top of the range Song Walkman Professionals with ‘George Michael – Listen Without Prejudice’ branded on it. I thought, I’ll take that with me to the Aston Villa match and record some crowd noise. I’d also then been in touch with Peter Drury, who was commentating at Radio Leeds, and they agreed to let me have some little snippets of commentary. I got the bits of commentary from Radio Leeds, which included the immortal line at Sheffield Wednesday from Peter, ‘And Leeds United are having a party.’”

De-Whytell received his follow up letter from Les Reed on November 20th, 1991. ‘I apologise for the delay in getting back to you,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve been in the studio for the past eight weeks.’ In the letter, Reed encouraged De-Whytell to offer a deal noting how much they could expect to earn from each sale of the record if it was released on De-Whytell’s Q Music label.

Three days after the letter landed on De-Whytell’s doorstep, a club night started on the third floor of a gay club on Lower Briggate in Leeds called The Chocolate Factory, later The Music Factory. The night was started by Dave Beer and Alistair Cooke, and was called Back To Basics. Eighty people turned up for the opening. Within a few weeks, thousands were queuing to get in. The night was a riposte to the commercialisation of acid house and dance music, returning it to its punk ethos, starting with the challenge of getting approval from the Gary ‘Guestlist’ Lethbridge on the door, notorious for turning people away seemingly at random, but only after offering them some friendly advice over a cigarette and telling them to try again next week. Thirty years on, Back To Basics remains one of the country’s most iconic club nights.

De-Whytell’s sole motivation for re-releasing Marching On Together was to celebrate the record’s twentieth anniversary. He could never predict Strachan, McAllister, Batty, and Speed tearing through the First Division, nor could he predict Leeds becoming the place to be in the music industry. When Leeds won the title in 1992, Back To Basics won Mixmag’s Best Club award. The Utah Saints, an electronic duo from Harrogate, were in the middle of three consecutive years releasing top ten singles, peaking at number four in 1992 in the same month Leeds were parading their trophy around the city on an open top bus. Shaun Imrei, meanwhile, released his cult club classic with Terrorize, ‘It’s Just A Feeling’, described by one Discogs user as a ‘stone cold rave classic, the creme de la creme. Then I would say that, the first time I dropped a pill, a brown disco biscuit, I came up to this.’

That’s what Saturdays in Leeds were for: watching the best football team in the country, partying at the best clubs, dancing to the best DJs, then going home and listening to the record that celebrated them all.

Shaun Imrei’s remix reflects the excitement within the city at the time, dropping an E onto Les Reed’s original composition with a bass groove and piano riff that belong on Screamadelica. My sisters bought me the record as a birthday present when I was at uni. I accidentally played it too slow without realising; when Peter Drury’s warped commentary of Tony Dorigo’s free-kick at Hillsborough began, I thought Leeds had released a psychedelic masterpiece.

While the acid house and rave scenes were getting tired in Manchester, Leeds was keeping the party going. In 1991, Happy Mondays headlined a gig at Elland Road also featuring The Farm, The La’s, and one brave raver climbing, then dancing, atop the largest floodlights in Europe.

Imrei was known for his work as Bassheads and also part of the collective Terrorize, a rarity of a rave group that also played gigs as a live band. YouTube has videos of their high energy stage show, performing their biggest tune, ‘It’s Just a Feeling’, sounding ready to follow Utah Saints by crossing over from the raves into the charts. But by the end of the 1990s, Imrei had tragically taken his own life. Aside from sending the occasional royalty cheque, De-Whytell didn’t keep in touch with Imrei, and only has a few memories of him.

“It was sad. I just remember seeing [the news Imrei had died] somewhere, I don’t know how long ago. He was just in his little terrace house in Halifax and was really into his music. He seemed quite an intense guy. Unfortunately the intense sometimes struggle a little bit don’t they, and clearly he did, so it was very sad.”

Searching online for Imrei’s music makes it apparent how highly he was regarded as a DJ and producer, how much his music still means to people to this day, and the warmth people still feel towards him.

“Shaun was an avid record collector,” says John O’Halloran, a tutor at Calderdale College who used to work alongside Imrei as a producer. “Every week we would both buy all the new releases and get countless records from the distributor, to analyse which ones we thought were great and would have some real traction for sales, and then recreate our next release. Shaun had every single number one there had ever been on vinyl apart from ‘How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?’ by Patti Page, released in 1953, and he would have to search through any record shop we visited and visit record fairs to try and find it to complete his collection.

“He had a good ear for which tracks would be commercial, and through monitoring the various club charts and what was flying out of the distributors we knew which tracks were worthy of most of our attention for their production ideas and commerciality. He was essentially obsessed with music, and because I was too we made a good partnership for creating and marketing tracks.”

“Shaun had every single number one on vinyl apart from ‘How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?’”

In 2017, O’Halloran was setting up an internal Andy’s Man Club at Calderdale College to provide a space for people to talk openly and without judgement about their mental health, when a number of male students took their own lives. O’Halloran then worked with students, creating an interactive art installation called Head Space to raise awareness of the triggers of male suicide.

“I became acutely aware of the statistic that in the UK a male under 25 would commit suicide every two hours. This horrified me and given the fact that I myself had been close to numerous people that had chosen to take their own lives, including Shaun, I felt compelled to raise awareness of the fact and do something about it. The NHS got involved and funded us to build what looked like a young lad’s flat within Dean Clough art gallery. Within the flat we put methods and suicide triggers throughout. In the kitchen there were final notices of bills and red letters on a notice board and a pile of money on the table. The bin was full of beer cans. The bedside table was full of pills. We tracked everybody as they moved through the flat with cameras and set up perimeters, so as you got close to the methods and triggers we would send sine waves and specific tones to them, making them vibrate, drawing attention to them, and making people aware of what causes young males to attempt suicide.”

The record was finally released on April 13th, 1992, as a cassette, 7”, and 12”, exactly twenty years to the day after ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds’ was released as a B-side.

“And it started to sell — really, really well,” laughs De-Whytell. “It was released on the backend of the season and I can just remember really clearly dropping a couple of hundred off to Leeds United and within an hour they were on the phone wanting more when it first went on sale. HMV Leeds were on the phone saying they needed more stock. It was flying out.

“Of course, we went on our run, and Manchester United didn’t go on a run. I pulled up outside the ground to replenish them with stock and I had the radio on. Nottingham Forest had beaten Manchester United, and it was all starting to work in our favour.

“With me working for a record company and calling on record shops all over the north on a weekly basis, I put the record into Leeds, York, Bradford, Sheffield. All the way up to the North East were shops taking various amounts of stock. It was absolutely flying out, to such a point I got a panicky call from Radio 1, because it was showing at number 43 on the midweek charts. Radio 1, when they did the chart rundown on a Sunday, had to play all the records. It was a Thursday, and they were saying, you need to get a courier to get some copies to us so we’ve got one and a spare just in case it gets into the chart rundown on Sunday. I got a couple of copies down. Sadly it didn’t go into the top 40 at that time. The release was so heavily geared to sales at the Leeds United shop [which didn’t count towards the chart]. If it was only available in record shops, it would probably have crept into the charts. There was such a large percentage of sales that went through the Leeds United shop that it didn’t.”

Melody Maker made the single one of two records of the week, writing: ‘Has love ever been more eloquently or directly stated? … Forget hackneyed reminisces of how Leeds were “my” team when I was a schoolkid, cos like any self-respective schoolkid I only supported the best, and how I would’ve given my two left feet to be allowed a haircut as half as groovy as Peter Lorimer’s. This is sheer, unadulterated pop. And sheer, unadulterated pop comes no finer.’

Next to a story about the headmaster of a Pateley Bridge school leaving his wife to move in with the chairwoman of governors, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported the record was selling at twice the rate of national number one, Right Said Fred’s ‘Deeply Dippy’. This led to another unexpected boost in publicity. Virgin Records in Leeds provided Japanese station Fuji TV with its weekly chart. Using the local chart rather than the national chart, Marching On Together was played in Japan as the UK number one. The Yorkshire Post ran the story, which was picked up by the national press.

“I ended up on the Friday getting back from work, and there were messages on the answerphone from the Daily Mirror, The Sun, other papers. But because they couldn’t get in touch, they just went ahead with the story. The story, as far as they were concerned, was that Leeds United were number one in Japan, and that this was the number one selling record over in the Land of the Rising Sun.”

The Daily Star published the story with all the sensitivity of an early 1990s red top, printing the names of the Revie team with Ls and Rs swapped around, headlined ‘Japs go potty for Birry Blemner’. The Daily Mirror quoted Norman Hunter: “It’s incredible. I can’t sing very well. But then again, how many pop stars can?”

When the Yorkshire Evening Post followed up with a story about De-Whytell wanting to make a music video that could be played in Japan, it was published above an interview with Howard Wilkinson previewing the trip to Sheffield United that ultimately secured Leeds the three points that made them the last champions of the pre-Premier League era.

“The fact that it was released and within two or three weeks we went on to win the league meant it just sold and sold and sold,” says De-Whytell. “It was my legendary luck really, I happened to do something at exactly the right time. It was nice that the timing was twenty years after, and it was absolutely perfect that we went on to win the league.

“I now sit in the row below where I had a season ticket back in those days and there are still people that sit around me who were there thirty years ago. It was exciting, the quality of football was great. We’d had some lean years and it was all coming through. It was just so nice. We’ve never been able to get in that mindset of ‘everything’s brilliant’. We do have, as the song says, our ups and downs. It’s amazing when it all comes together.”