NORTH East football club Hartlepool United have paid tribute to Meat Loaf by playing a number of the late singer’s hits before their most recent fixture after the self-confessed ‘Poolie’ adopted the club as ‘his team’ back in 2003.

The rock star, born Marvin Lee Aday, who died aged 74 on Friday (January 21), sold millions of albums worldwide, with Bat Out Of Hell being one of the best-selling albums of all time.

A post on Meat Loaf’s official Facebook page said the US rocker had died with his wife Deborah at his side, and that his daughters, Pearl and Amanda, “and close friends have been with him throughout the last 24 hours”.

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As well as leading a colourful and successful career as a musician, he was also an unlikely ‘Poolie’, who adopted the League Two club after being asked to appear on Sky Sports’ Soccer AM programme in 2003.

In an interview with Setanta Sports News, the singer previously said he had been attracted to Hartlepool by the town’s monkey legend.

At the time, he said: “I was going on Soccer AM and they said ‘do you have a team that you support, Manchester United, Liverpool?’, and I was going, ‘that’s boring!’.

The Northern Echo: The Bat Out of Hell singer died on Friday (September 21) at the age of 74.The Bat Out of Hell singer died on Friday (September 21) at the age of 74.

“It’s just like a celebrity to go on and go ‘oh, I’m a Liverpool fan, I support whoever’, the teams who have always been at the top.

“So, I started looking and I went to the second division, no, no, and I got down to the third division and I said, ‘There’s a cool name, Hartlepool, in the third division’.

“I found out that the city, back a long time ago, the claim was that a monkey washed ashore and the whole city thought it was a Frenchman and they hung him, and I said, ‘that’s perfect’.

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“Then what I did was, I started researching all the players from Hartlepool, so when I got on Soccer AM, I knew all the players, I knew the last game, I knew who were the big scorers, I knew who the coach was.”

After publicly backing Hartlepool and following them in the years that followed, the North East club paid tribute to the man himself by playing a number of Meat Loaf’s hits, including Paradise By The Dashboard Light, before their home game with Stevenage yesterday (January 22).

Before the fixture, the Hartlepool players also ran out of the tunnel to ‘Bat Out of Hell’.

Watch the video of the club paying tribute to Meat Loaf below:

 

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