I have to accept that every time I listen to this song there are going to be some inevitable risks and consequences. For a start I absolutely know that I’m going to have it stuck in my head for the next three days. I just listened to it again in order to write this piece, and yep, I’m going to be singing the chorus under my breath for the foreseeable future, and frankly this isn’t a lyric for all occasions, so when people ask me what I’m singing and I say, “We live on blood / We are Sparta FC,” well, not everybody quite understands the ironies involved.

And I do think there are plenty of ironies. I think the song really is a parody of crass, violent football chants. Nevertheless it does stir up the blood just like an actual football chant, and it does indeed make you want to become a Spartan and, oh I don’t know, go attack the Persians.

What I think Mark E. Smith is saying here is that we have a tendency to think of great warrior tribes as some special and unworldly breed, when in fact they’re more likely to resemble football fans. The Spartans, the Crusaders, Oliver Cromwell’s iconoclastic Puritans, and I dare say the Taliban, may have been zealots, but first they were lads who liked a bit of aggro.

At least that’s what I hope he’s saying.

Only a fool would claim to “understand” many of M.E.S.’s lyrics. Typically when I hear a Fall song for the first time I can pick out a few words, and although I don’t quite get the meaning, I still get the impression that something is actually being said. Then I look at the lyrics and see that he’s banging on about provincial pus or having a metal leg or that Cary Grant (or just possibly Buster Keaton) wasn’t a woman. It’s not all gibberish exactly, but there’s a very fine balancing act going on between coherence and impenetrable private meanings.

The lyrics of Sparta F.C. aren’t exactly free of this stuff – mugging old ladies in your bobble hat, and having your fleecy jumper in the boot of a car, for instance - but by the standards of some Fall songs they’re a model of the well-honed songwriter’s craft. And the fact is, the Spartan’s really did live on blood; they ate a kind of blood soup called melas zomos. The recipe, apparently, has been lost to history.

And of course the other thing that makes Sparta FC such a great song is that it has a killer guitar riff: I won’t be getting that out of my head for the next three days either.

Geoff Nicholson is the author of a bunch of novels including ‘Flesh Guitar’ and ‘Bleeding London’. His most recent book was ‘Sex Collectors’, a non-fiction study of people who collect "erotic materials." He lives in Los Angeles and Suffolk.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.