ABBA, sadness and a few too many: The story of the song sweeping Sheffield Wednesday from those that wrote it

“People everywhere,” bursts the opening line of Abba’s disco pop mega-hit Voulez-Vous. “A sense of expectation hangin' in the air.”

People everywhere? Expectation? With those themes emerging straight out of the blocks, we should probably have known it was destined for the Wednesday away day terraces.

“Famewo, a-ha! / Reece James at the back, a-ha! / Windass in attack, a-ha! / Wednesday’s gunna win the league!”

Four days on, has anyone been able to get it out of their heads?

Ignore the fact it’s a slightly re-handled Theo Corbeanu chant – it’s an instant classic and it might just provide the backdrop to something really special as the season drives on.

It all started as the result of a WhatsApp group chat and a beer or two too many, with Conisbrough pals Gaz Robinson and Chris Wosman shooting the Wednesday breeze on a Friday evening.

Less than 24 hours later, a couple of thousand Owls fans were belting it out in the Wycombe Wanderers away end, serenading their team to a hugely impressive and important 1-0 win. They sang it over and over and over – each time a little louder than the last.

Sat at home listening in just a few points short of the required total needed to get his hands on a ticket, Robinson couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

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“It’s amazing how it all took off,” he told The Star. “We were all in the group chat the other night and we hadn’t even seen Famewo play. He could be the answer – McGuinness is a big loss that’s no doubt but everything was just threatening to turn a bit negative about the defenders.

“We’d had a few beers and we were coming up with words and I thought ‘You know what, he’ll play tomorrow, I’ll stick it on Twitter and see what response it gets’.”

A few dozen retweets later and word had got around. As Wednesday fans downed their breakfast and set off for the train station it was already in the heads of many from the night before – that earworm was doing its bit ready to grow and grow.

“It started in the morning, the lads were sending me videos of the lads on the train giving it the biggun and I just thought ‘Good on you lads’ for giving it a go,” Robinson laughed.

“But then the videos started coming through of hundreds of Wednesday fans getting into it in the beer tent outside the ground. It was growing and I couldn’t believe it, it was crackers.

“I was listening to the game and all of a sudden I could hear the song. Well I couldn’t believe it! Our group chat was proper going off and we couldn’t believe it was happening, us idiots coming up with a little ditty and it taking off like that.

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“The whole feel was dead positive, watching the game it felt like everything they were getting from the ground was positive and if we contributed to that just a little bit then great.”

Life in that group chat hasn’t been all that rosy in recent weeks, Robinson admitted.

Far beyond the stress of a Wednesday promotion race came immense sadness at the death of Mick Pollitt, an elderly steward who sat with the group for a number of years before his sad and sudden death earlier this month.

Several of the group would go to visit Mick and will attend his funeral on February 3. This Famewo chant, Robinson reckons, is the exact brand of nonsense he’d have rather enjoyed.

“He was such a stellar bloke, a proper gentleman who had proper stories going back years and years,” he said.

“We got to know him and he didn’t really have anyone else. We were all devastated, he’d been a steward for 30-odd years and he was such a big part of our matchday.

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“It proper rocked us all and we’ve been down in the dumps a bit ever since because he was just such a lovely man. He’d have loved all this.

“Life isn’t exactly amazing at the moment. I’m operations manager for Network Rail and work is horrible [nationwide train strikes have thrown the industry into chaos] – there’s so much going on that’s just so hard to deal with.

“This is my release, Sheffield Wednesday. I just want to have a laugh and enjoy it and football doesn’t always allow you to do that – but it’s brilliant at the minute, isn’t it? I just hope we do it and get promoted, more for my son than me. My son is 15 and I’ve dragged him into this world and he hasn’t had all that much fun.”

It was in the second half of last season that Lee Gregory’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ chant took off and put volume on a Wednesday promotion rally that eventually fell a little short.

Could the Famewo earworm do the same this time – hopefully with a far more satisfactory footballing conclusion?

“It was MK Dons away where that one really took off and it was full goosebumps all afternoon,” Robinson said on the Gregory tune. “It might sound daft but it’s that sense of unity, isn’t it?

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“Look, this thing might be a bit of a one-off but everything seems to be coming together at the right time and it feels like it’s got legs.”

‘Here we go again, we know the start, we know the end’ read the Ulvaeus-Andersson lyrics later in Abba’s far inferior version of Voulez-Vous.

There’s a sense of optimism growing at Wednesday that suggests that ‘end’ could well prove to be a happy one.