As the Scottish rugby team’s day of reckoning arrived, my thoughts turned to our nation’s sporting anthem, Flower of Scotland. I decided I would write a replacement.

As you can hear, things went somewhat awry…

I heard Roy Williamson’s masterpiece – and it is – for the first time in 1974, at the Corries gig in Glasgow City Hall that would become a best-selling album. It was spine-chilling, thrilling and inspiring. On the whole I preferred Ten Years After and Rory Gallagher, but still.

Yet today, in its ubiquity, the song’s limitations are clear. It’s hard to sing accurately, and it’s so specific: It’s about Bannockburn and it’s about Scotland’s relationship with England. We’re bigger, surely (and better) than that narrow rivalry.

And so I began to do some lyrical pondering. How to inspire, unite, assert? I liked the idea of ‘Scottish pride’ but there was that association with the branding of cheese and bread. And somehow my dad’s insistence that “you can always tell a true Scot by his pronunciation of ‘Loch Lochy’ “ became lodged in my mind. The voiceless velar fricative, to give ‘…ch’ its correct appellation.

And so I veered off the narrow rails of anthems and into the sidings of phonic silliness.

Come on Scotland! Och, you can do it!

*Note: in the video, I’ve left the auto-translated subtitles uncorrected for the final chorus. AI has its limitations

Scottish Pride (The ‘Och’ anthem)

We will all sing together 

From Fair Isle to Wemyss Bay 

From the Thurso to the Forth and the Clyde

From Milngavie to Kirkcudbright 

And other places hard to say

We will stand and deliver

Scottish pride

Scottish pride

Scottish pride

A voiceless velar fricative

Calculated to divide

It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht

Doon by Loch Lochyside

Och it’s awfie dreich 

Indeed it’s keech 

Without some Scottish pride

At great sporting occasions

We have collectively sung

With a passion that could never be denied 

It doesn’t matter who we played 

We have burst our collective lungs

Sending the English home

Bemused by Scottish Pride

It’s our bread and butter

It’s a tartan, it’s a cheese

But in our souls it always will reside

Standing shoulder to shoulder 

It’s ‘loch’ not ‘lock’ forever please

I can feel my heartbeat flutter

Scottish pride 

*braw – very nice

  bricht – bright

  moonlicht – moonlit

  nicht – night

  doon – down

  och – aw shucks

  awfie – awfully

  dreich – dull and overcast

   keech – shit