In October 1996, Jonathan Barton published the first post on Letsallsingtogether.com – a report on Coventry City’s 1-1 draw with Southampton. The site, known as LAST, ran for eleven years, broke the Gary McAllister appointment two days before any national newspaper had it, and inspired a generation of Coventry fan podcasters who were too nervous to knock on Barton’s door at school and tell him so. It then went dark in 2007 when the club went into administration and was taken over by hedge fund SISU. Last week, 19 years later, it came back.
The catalyst was promotion. Coventry City’s return to the Premier League – ending decades of exile from the top flight – prompted Barton to write a piece about the people who had first taken him to Highfield Road: his late auntie and uncle. He published it on the dormant site, which he had quietly continued to pay for throughout the intervening years. “I got such a nice response from people that I thought, ‘maybe now is the right time to bring it back,'” he told BBC CWR.
The site has been viewed 10,000 times in its first ten days.
Where it came from
LAST launched in an era before social media, before podcasts, before the algorithmic churn of content that defines fan media today. In 1996, if you wanted to read analysis of Coventry City beyond what the Coventry Evening Telegraph was running, your options were limited. Barton changed that.
The site built a reputation for genuine insider knowledge – gossip, rumours and news that the newspapers were not yet running. Its most celebrated moment came in 2002 when LAST reported that Gary McAllister had been appointed Coventry City manager approximately two to three days before any national newspaper had confirmed the story.
“It was a big scoop,” Barton said. The circumstances in which he got it make the story better. Barton had applied for the job himself. “I got a letter back from the club on headed paper saying: ‘Thank you for your interest in the first-team manager’s job. You may well be aware that we have appointed Gary McAllister to the position. Thank you for your interest.'”
A rejection letter had become one of the best exclusives in Coventry City fan media history.
The end – and the gap
In 2007, SISU Capital, a London-based hedge fund, took effective control of Coventry City. It was the beginning of a period that Sky Blues fans regard with a particular kind of weariness – years of uncertainty, a stadium dispute that led to the club playing home games in Birmingham, financial turbulence and the sense that the club’s supporters were perpetually fighting to keep something they loved from being dismantled from the inside. Barton’s final post came that year. The site went quiet.
He kept the domain name. That matters in retrospect: the simple, unremarkable decision to keep paying for letsallsingtogether.com while writing nothing for nearly two decades meant that when the moment came, there was something to come back to.
The generation it inspired
One of the most striking details in Barton’s account is the Nii Lamptey Show. Nii Lamptey was a Ghanaian winger who played eleven games for Coventry in the 1995-96 season and became a cult figure among supporters – partially because of his talent, partially because of the circumstances of his arrival and departure, and partially because “Nii Lamptey” is simply an excellent thing to name a podcast about Coventry City.
The podcasters behind it were students at the school where Barton worked. They knew he ran LAST. They never knocked on his door to say so. When the relaunch was announced, they posted on their X account that if it wasn’t for LAST, the Nii Lamptey Show wouldn’t exist.
“They were students at the school I used to work at and knew I did LAST, but they never had the courage to knock on my door and say hello,” Barton said.
This is how fan media works – how it has always worked. One person starts something that makes another person think something like this is possible, and the second person starts something that does the same for a third, and so on. The Nii Lamptey Show is part of a tradition that runs through Barton’s rejection letter from Coventry City’s manager recruitment in 2002.
The return – and what it means
Coventry City are in the Premier League. As we reported in our Doreen Sky Blues parade piece, 93-year-old Doreen led her own parade through the city to celebrate promotion – a moment that went viral nationally as an expression of what the club means to its supporters. The history Barton started writing in 1996 with a 1-1 draw against Southampton, and the history Doreen was celebrating in the street, are the same history.
Letsallsingtogether.com is back. It has been viewed 10,000 times in ten days. The auntie and uncle who took Barton to the football are gone, but the site they indirectly brought back to life is running again. And somewhere, the podcasters who were too nervous to knock on his door at school are probably slightly relieved he finally had an excuse to return.
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