When Ed Miliband hosted a pub quiz at the Labour conference, says Foster-Ogg, every time he mentioned the leader the audience broke out into song. Such is the drama of the song that Corbyn fans’ responses can appear Pavlovian. And who knows why Tory conference-goers tried to start a chant of “Oh, David Davis” when they could have tried Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It instead? From Friday night club queues to tuxedoed undergraduates at Downing College’s May Ball, it doesn’t take much to get the chant going now. (It didn’t work quite so well when Tom Watson attempted to get “Oh, Rebecca Long-Bailey” off the ground at last month’s Labour conference. It helps that the syllables of Corbyn’s name fall perfectly on the chords of White’s none-more-simple, demonic descending riff. It’s about people coming together and the singing reflects that.” “He’s talking about politics that are more inclusive, more grassroots. “The spread of the chant is definitely confirmation of what we’ve been saying about Jeremy all along,” says Beth Foster-Ogg, training organiser at the Corbynista brains trust Momentum. If you’re on board with the Corbyn project then here is your battle cry. And everyone knows about it, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Listen to the original recording of Seven Nation Army – a far from obscure number 7 in the UK charts in 2003 – and try thinking of anything else. Either way, it is the earworm to beat all earworms. It might have turned you on to Jack White’s now-defunct garage blues duo or it might have ruined them for you forever. Ubiquitous and inescapable, it’s a shared celebration of the moment when a no-hoper led an unprecedented popular movement and knocked established wisdom back on its heels.įor others, it’s symbolic of the empty hero-worship that constitutes the new left, of vapid communal feelgood moments and a cult of personality masking politics that shade from the inept into the disturbing. “O h, Jeremy Corbyn.” For some people this adaptation of the football chant based on the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army is nothing less than an anthem for a political watershed.

Join in the chant