Marching on Together is the song that tells you where you are. Before kick-off at Elland Road the lights drop, the opening bars go up, and 37,000 people who have spent the week arguing about full-backs sing the same words at the same time. It is not a chant that grew on a terrace. It is a B-side, written by two professional songwriters who had never kicked a ball for Leeds United, and it has outlived almost everything that was true about the club when it was recorded.
What Marching on Together actually is
The song was written by Les Reed and Barry Mason, one of the most successful British songwriting partnerships of the era — the pair behind Tom Jones’s Delilah, with Reed also responsible for It’s Not Unusual and Mason for The Last Waltz. In 1972 they were commissioned to write a cup final record for Leeds United, and the squad went into a studio to record it.
The A-side was called Leeds United. The flip side was Marching on Together, and it is the flip side that everybody remembers. The single climbed into the UK top 10 in the spring of 1972 — a chart the Official Charts Company still keeps the records for — and Leeds went to Wembley and won the FA Cup for the first time in their history, beating Arsenal 1-0 through Allan Clarke’s diving header.
Cup final singles were a genre in the 1970s, and almost all of them died with the season that produced them. This one did not. Fifty-odd years later the A-side is a curiosity for collectors and the B-side is the club’s anthem.
Why the B-side survived and the A-side didn’t
Part of it is simply that the tune is built for a crowd: a short, repeating chorus, a melody you can hold onto after two drinks, and a title phrase that works as a shout as easily as a song. But the bigger reason is what the words promise. The chorus is not a boast about being the best. It is a commitment to keep turning up — through the good and the bad, together — and that is a very different thing to sing when your team is losing.
Leeds have needed it. The squad who recorded the record were the outstanding English side of their generation, the group covered in our piece on the Don Revie era, and within a decade the club had been relegated. There followed the long exile of the 1980s, the 1992 title, the crash of the mid-2000s, a drop to the third tier, and sixteen years of trying to climb back. A song about being the best would have become unsingable somewhere in there. A song about sticking around only got truer.
How it is used at Elland Road
There are three fixed moments. It plays over the tannoy as the teams come out, and the crowd sings over the recording rather than along with it. It goes up again after a Leeds goal, usually with the closing line hammered out rather than sung. And it comes at the final whistle after a win, when it can run for several minutes and follow the players down the tunnel.
Away from home it works differently — unaccompanied, from a corner of someone else’s ground, and often loudest when the result has already gone. Anyone who has stood in an away end at 3-0 down will recognise the version of the song that has nothing to do with celebration.
The abbreviated form — the three-word shout of the city’s name that closes the chorus — has become a piece of shorthand in its own right, used on flags, on the front of the pubs around the ground, and as a sign-off in a million messages between Leeds fans who will never meet.
The song and the club’s identity
Leeds have a lot of these markers. The all-white kit Revie introduced to make his players look like Real Madrid, the badge, the nicknames explained in our guide to why Leeds are called the Whites and the Peacocks, the club motto “Side Before Self, Every Time”. The anthem sits alongside them, and arguably does more work than any of them, because it is the only one the supporters perform themselves.
It is also, quietly, a piece of evidence about what the club values. Leeds have a genuinely serious trophy record — three league titles, the FA Cup, the League Cup and more, all set out in our full honours list — and could easily have adopted something triumphal. Instead the song that stuck is one about endurance. That was not a strategic decision by anybody. Two songwriters wrote a B-side, a crowd picked it, and the crowd turned out to know exactly what it was going to need.
The short version
Marching on Together was written by Les Reed and Barry Mason as the B-side to the 1972 FA Cup final single Leeds United, recorded by the squad, and released as Leeds went on to lift the cup at Wembley. It became the club’s anthem because its subject is loyalty rather than success — which turned out to be the more durable of the two. It is played before kick-off, after goals and after wins at Elland Road, and sung by travelling supporters in circumstances that rarely warrant it. Which is more or less the point.
