Summer Gold: Two Man Band, 'Up there Cazaly'

I can't tell you how tempting it was to completely omit this, the last track on Summer Gold, from this overview. Not because I hate the song (at least, I recognise its genius) but just... because.

It's plain that whoever put together the track listing for Summer Gold, the artist formerly known as as muggins, threw zher hands in the air when it came to this track: it just has to go on the end, if for no other reason that a lot of people are likely to want to take the needle off the record at this point (or perhaps to try, with a hot pin, to make a new track right through this one to the label). Whatever it musters in catchiness, 'Up there Cazaly' is also a frustratingly irritating stadium chant that everyone knows and few would seriously want to sit down and listen to like, on a record. Apart from anything else, it's in most (I'm going to guess 70-80%) Victorians' and many (30-40%?) Australians' brains and cannot be purged, even with a strong dose of 'C'Mon Aussie C'Mon'.* 

With the subtitle 'Seven's Footy Theme' (this is omitted on the Summer Gold sleeve) this song was, essentially, a clever bit of doggerel calculated to generate a rush of blood to the head/penis at the mention of aussie rules football, a sport that apparently someone in 1979 thought needed a bit of promotion (not sure why). There are a few things that I do find amusing here, mainly lyrical; the suggestion early in the piece that football spectatorship is something a man does as a, well, turn on or mind-clearing (what's good about that?! Should I try it?) experience. I also recall the slightly askew way Mike Brady sings 'Me, I like football' as I recall a fellow student at my high school at the time this song was popular, singing this particular line many, many times as a kind of absurdist pop culture quote during the school day, and then proving it was true by going to have a forty year (so far) career writing about football in the media. 

To their credit, although Two Man Band (also known as 'Two-Man Band' - don't get confused) released five singles between 1979-1984 each with a song aside, they never tried to cobble together a cheap and nasty album out of their ten extant songs. Respect that. 

* Kudos to Mike Brady and Peter Sullivan for actually going into the studio and recording a fully crafted song here. The Mojo Singers' 'C'mon Aussie C'mon' is a shoddily-edited tape loop, in which someone has just said - 'put this... on a record? This... on a record? Well, ok, I'll just run it a few times till it fills up a side.' 'Up There Cazaly' is actually structured and smart, a bold pop culture (if not outright pop) statement.