Every team has an unofficial "fight song", and ours is a song called "Shipping up to Boston" by the "DropKick Murphy's". It's a brilliant song that could best be described as a Punk Rock – Sea Shanty and I'm certain that even if you are not immediately familiar with the name of the song, you will have heard it. Martin Scorsese used it in his movie "The Departed" a tale of double crossing cops and bad guys set in the Boston underworld, which happens to be our home port (not the underworld - the city) and also home to the Drop Kick Murphy's.
It's sort of a Whitbread / Volvo tradition that when the boats leave the dock to set off on a leg or arrive having finished a leg, their team song will be played on the loudspeakers to sort of get everyone fired up. The songs are usually picked accordingly, usually with thumping beats and tough lyrics. Another tradition is that the song be picked by the crew, which might sound fairly straightforward but in my experience can be anything but and this time was particularly problematic.
Early on in the program Ken (Ken Read) threw it out there that it was time to start thinking about a song and that we should all make our submissions by e-mail to him, which seems reasonable, he sent the e-mail to everyone, including all the people at PUMA.
Now the people at PUMA know music and we had songs coming from everywhere, most of which none of us had heard of and at this point I think Ken realized that he might have created a monster(no pun intended). Subsequently the fight song decision got put on the back burner while the team took care of some more pressing decisions such as where to put the mast and such. From time to time someone would mention it and Ken merely informed us that when a consensus was arrived at we would have our song.
So fast forward now to August 08, we have had our boat the whole summer and its the final week in Newport before we go Transatlantic to the start of the race in Alicante, Jerry (Jerry Kirby) decided to throw a party at his house as he often does and I'm going to be honest and admit that it turned into a bit of a boozy affair. We had been all business the whole summer and this was the first time that we had really let our hair down as a group. We were having a good laugh telling stories or should I say listening to Jerry tell stories, when the topic of the team song came up. People immediately started shouting out their picks and it quickly became apparent that we were still no nearer to a decision. Then I piped up what about the Drop Kick Murphy's or maybe it was Jerry that first brought it up, either way it soon became apparent that we did in fact have a consensus of two.
At this point the rest of the team needed convincing. Some of the locals were familiar with the song but not so sure and most had never heard of it. The next hour was hilarious as Jerry tried to locate the CD, then he tried downloading it which he achieved but couldn't get it to play, all the while with Ken and the guys heckling us, "how can we pick it if we haven't heard it."
Eventually Jerry got the song fired up and we spent the rest of the evening listening to it, each time louder and louder whilst we argued about whether or not two did in fact constitute a consensus.
Both Jerry and I hadn't realized that we had both picked the same song and we spent the Transatlantic pushing hard to get our way. Eventually Ken agreed so long as our two bosses Antonio Bertone and Jochen Zeitz said it was okay...
Next we were days away from the start of the race in Spain and we finally managed to get all parties together for five minutes to listen to the song, I had prepared some video to show how well the song fit our image and thankfully they agreed...we had our song.
It's always great to hear our song, but the best so far had to be arriving at the yacht basin in Cape Town. We came in second but we knew that we were now contenders and as our song blasted out over the speakers and the fireworks went off, tying our boat up never felt better.
-Rick
