Q: In the face of my unquestioning, decades-long love for AFL footy, my new partner asked, “Who on earth writes these team songs?” Belief systems crumble when people ask the simplest questions. Help! L.B., Prahran, VIC
A: If music is the greatest of all cerebral art forms and AFL footy the greatest of all physical pursuits, then surely the combination of music and footy must result in the greatest of all human achievements – namely, the AFL club team song. And now that the footy season has begun, your partner’s musical education can begin, too.
Sit them down and play them Carlton’s beguiling paean to the brokenhearted, We Are the Navy Blues, opening with a jaunty Dixieland trumpet that offers the promise of hope before plunging into a foreboding, anguished soundscape, now defined as “The Moody Carlton Blues Sound”.
Play them Good Old Collingwood Forever, with its electrifying Dixieland trumpet riff, a rousing, civil-rights plea for unity between the black and the white. Play them We Are Geelong, a lusty reworking of “The Toreador March” from Bizet’s operatic masterpiece, Carmen, oozing with virile, Spanish passion and sensual, Dixieland trumpets. Play them Essendon’s See the Bombers Fly Up, a sonically dense, hip-hop saga layered with gritty Dixieland trumpets describing the gangsta street-life of The Bombers (“Our boyz / Who play dis grand ol’ game / Are alwayz strivin’ / For glory”). Play them St Kilda’s nu-folk classic, When the Saints Go Marching In, with its unadorned, Dylanesque sensibilities and obtuse, Dixieland trumpets. Play them every single club song and I guarantee they will be profoundly moved and dazzled.
And if they ask whether Fremantle’s genre-bending experiment in mid-’90s prog-electronica, Freo Way to Go, might have benefited from the addition of Dixieland trumpets, hug them and say, “Yes! You get it now! YES!”
Read more from Modern Guru:
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To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.
Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.