The Teacher Who Said He'd Fail

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a school bell, a pub door, a cheer)
He named the whole chain after the man who told him he'd amount to nothing.

[Verse 1]
Tim Martin was a boy in New Zealand in a classroom,
and there was a teacher there — a Mr. Wetherspoon —
who told him, in the way that teachers sometimes tell a boy,
that he would never manage anything, that he'd never get control.
And he remembered it. He remembered it exactly.
And in nineteen seventy-nine he opened up a pub.

[Chorus]
And he called it WETHERSPOON! After the man who said he'd fail!
Not out of spite exactly — or not ONLY out of spite —
but because a name like that has got a story stapled to it
and every time you say it you are saying: he was wrong.
Wetherspoon! Nine hundred pubs!
Named for a teacher who did not believe in him!

[Verse 2]
And the J.D. on the front is not his name either —
it's from a character on television, a marshal in a western,
so the whole thing is a boy's grudge glued to a boy's cartoon,
which is the most honest origin story on this entire record.
Everyone else got worn down into letters by accident.
This one built the letters on purpose, out of a grievance.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I don't know if the teacher ever knew. I hope he did.
I hope he walked past one in a high street somewhere, once,
and stopped, and read the sign, and worked it out,
and had to stand there on the pavement with the whole of it.
That's the best possible outcome for everyone involved.
That's a man getting the last word forty years later, in brass.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the pub door, the cheer again)
He said he'd never manage anything.
Nine hundred pubs. Nine hundred.