by H. G. Nelson
Wholesome rugby league cabaret, packaged in living stereo, spoke to a gentler concept of the code devoid of all the concussion-inducing grunt and poke required to play the greatest game of all for eighty action-packed minutes in the modern era.
Frank – a player, a coach, a commentator and a cabaret star – was the sound of the sport. The game was supported by the leagues clubs of NSW, and after dark in the big showrooms these clubs supported the nation’s great cabaret artists. But music was everywhere in the code. All rugby league clubs had a song known by every true supporter. These simple songs, of heartfelt ‘our team is the greatest’ sentiment, were familiar to all fans.
Club songs were belted out tunelessly with impressive gusto by the team in the rooms after every win. The winners bellow the lyrics across the space filled with happy club members, families, friends and officials. The enthusiastic rendition is accompanied by the bashing of esky lids and hammering on the doors of the change cubicles. The lyrics are drivel. The aim of the post-hooter bellow is to reduce the song to a barrage of annoying noise.
The enthusiastic rendition is accompanied by the bashing of esky lids and hammering on the doors of the change cubicles.
There are some breathtaking club songs. For the St George Illawarra Dragons, well, it is an obvious selection:
Oh when the Saints!
Oh when the Saints go marching in!
No melody, no need. The team shouting accompanied by the rowdy percussion ensemble is perfect.
North Queensland Cowboys have a country-tinged offering to gather the supporters around the campfire. No surprise it’s a big sound for a big-hat town:
The Cowboys are my team
And it’s my dream to see them at the top
Repeat these chorus lines. They say it all.
AS MENTIONED, POST-HOOTER CLUB singsongs are fraught with danger. Players forget, in their enthusiasm to get involved with the celebrations, that there is a vast TV audience tuned in down the local pub or on the couch at home. They forget for a few minutes that they are rugby league players and role models. They imagine they are part of the world of show business where seemingly anything goes. Images of semi-nude players during these rowdy post-hooter renditions often flaunt aspects of the league anatomy that once seen can never be forgotten.
They forget for a few minutes that they are rugby league players and role models. They imagine they are part of the world of show business where seemingly anything goes.
The league’s modern era of musical promotions dates from the late eighties. The G.G.A. was very active in linking existing hit songs to the marketing of the game during the season. But endless repetition in television advertising reduces any song to incomprehensible gibberish.
‘Boys Are Back in Town’, Thin Lizzy’s 1976 rough-and-tumble anthem, got the rugby league promotional ball rolling. Thin Lizzy were a rowdy, hard-drinking, hard-rocking Irish band fronted by a Black Irishman on the bass. They had a run on the top forty charts, but this was their signature tune. It could have been written about the greatest game of all. The lyric is wildly offside in today’s more inclusive times. Not sure what ‘the Thins’ knew about Australian rugby league, but ten years after the gang recorded this number one, the tune was pressed into service to let everyone know the weekend thump, dump, bump action was back. That is the right timeline for a rugby league promotional gambit. The game’s culture is approximately ten years behind mainstream recognition.
The Lizzy posse saddled up and rode the high suburban range, rounding up the herd for rugby league from 1985 through to 1988. The NSWRL were on a winner. In the future, head office promotional efforts focused on songs that summed up the emotion of the game in its totality. They got lucky when someone in the office knew someone who knew the boss of Tina Turner’s management company. Tina had a long history of emotive, pedal-to-the-metal rhythm and blues classic chart-toppers like ‘River Deep Mountain High’, ‘Nutbush City Limits’ and ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’, to name three smouldering top ten bangers.
The first cab off the Tina rugby league rank was ‘What You Get Is What You See’. This tune promoted the game in 1989. In its essence it was pure rugby league: a simple song for a simple game. The lyrics celebrated fit blokes looking great with their shirts off. On the original recording there is a blistering guitar contribution from god-like Eric Clapton. Then the 1989 song ‘Simply the Best’ lurched into view. The league pounced. Thin Lizzy were great but ‘Simply’ was even greater. With ‘Simply the Best’, Tina proved to the world that rugby league was the greatest game of all.
It was the smash the musical maestros at League HQ were after. This song of praise, penned by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, started life as a tune for Bonnie Tyler called ‘The Best’. The musical idea and promotional film clips captured the rawness of league. Players from all clubs packed down in the bash-and-barge videos and looked ‘simply’ stunning.
Tina brought the exotic to the table. She was way more exotic than rugby league, but this song and her appearance demonstrated that rugby league could rock and attract the biggest names of international show business. Therefore, it must be simply the best.
As Tina said in a recent long-form TV documentary on Foxtel when asked by Molly Meldrum about the rugby league involvement:
Honestly, Molly, it was the highlight of a long career to be tapped to be the voice of rugby league. The boys were wonderful. From the Door, the Puller, Stomper, Tiptoes and Barbs I learnt the importance of ball security, knowing when to spread it wide and the importance of putting the ball down under the black dot.
On the first morning of the shoot when they opened Fatty and Chook: Laughing at League as we settled down for a mid-morning cup of tea, I was rubble. I have never laughed so hard. I had heard that league was a funny old game. I had no idea it was an absolute riot.
Tina looked very fit, running with the players along the sand, passing the football like a professional. Tina was there with our stars doing the hard yards in the sand hills. What a great image for the game. Not burlesque, as theatrical types would understand it, but not far from it. The television campaign was a highlight of the season, for once everything came together. It worked. The big moment, the strawberry on top of the whipped cream, on top of the three-layer chocolate cake, came when Tina blew into town for the season-ending big dance at the Sydney Football Stadium in 1993. She mimed ‘Simply’ before kick-off.
What a great image for the game. Not burlesque, as theatrical types would understand it, but not far from it.
‘Hullo Sydney!’ That’s all the capacity crowd wanted! Acknowledgement that one of the world’s entertainment greats knew about rugby league and the 1993 league journey. Everyone could have left the SFS after her performance and wandered away completely happy, in the certain knowledge that they had had the best day of their lives.
No band, no need – just Tina, a backing tape, a wig, footsteps and Sydney! It all came together, when a sax player burst onto the stage with the horn to the lips and a leather codpiece strapped on below to mime the mincemeat out of the sax solo. Everyone was rubble!
It was pure league. This bump-and-grind floorshow up the Randwick end of the SFS would not have been out of place in any one of Sydney’s great after-hours clubs of the era along Oxford Street or in Kings Cross.
The league lost its mojo for a couple of years after Tina was benched in 1995. It was so hard to find someone who could plug the yawning gap Tina left. In 1997 the G.G.A. promotion machine gave the game’s supporters ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. No one was sure of Frankie’s league credentials. But the song summed up the struggle for the very soul of the game in that troubling time of the News Limited Super League breakaway era. That is a story for another book which has already been written, several times.
Eventually a peace deal was plonked on the table. With a peace treaty ready for signatures, ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba was the song of the hour, as peace pens were poised. The Chumbas, a one-hit wonde
r cabaret collective, was tasked to do the heavy promotional lifting, applying the soothing balm to the code’s blackening bruises. The repeated lyrics of getting knocked down and getting up again were rugby league in a nutshell.
In 1999, to usher in the new millennium, the promotions crew in League HQ went right out to the left field fence and then right over it for a promotional campaign. The committee commissioned a poem by league lover and prize-winning novelist Tom Keneally. Tom came down from the hills with a poignant scribble, ‘Blow that Whistle Ref’. It was completely weird. There was no beat, no melody, no chorus. What were the dancers to do with their feet? It made no sense. What was Tom going to do at the Grand Final? Poetry did not talk to footy freaks. It was a oncer!
Poetry did not talk to footy freaks. It was a oncer!
2000 was the year of the Sydney Olympics and so sports fans’ gazes were elsewhere, but the ‘What’s New Pussycat’ man, Tom Jones, knocked up a jingle with the catchy tagline ‘What a Game!’ It had the right elements: a simple lyric with few words that said it all, images of fit players, big hits, incredible tries, fabulous footsteps from the dance troupe and Tom blasting away flat out. The package had a beautiful simplicity, and there was the tantalising carrot that Tom might be available for the Big Frolic on that Sunday in October.
A couple of years flew by now and the league promotion crew were relocated to new digs in the garden shed out back of League HQ, just beyond the toilets. Between 2003 and 2007 ‘That’s My Team’, a rewrite of The Hoodoo Gurus hit ‘What’s My Scene’, did the promotional chore. The Hoodoos were league lovers. They were in town and very keen to strap on the Fenders and run amok at the end-of-year Steeden big day out. The code was cooking with gas.
Moving on, in 2011–12 ‘This Is Our House’ by Bon Jovi was tapped to let Australians know the big show was on the lurk again. Bon Jovi’s connection with rugby league was vague, but it must have made sense when the idea was floated at the marketing meeting in the garden shed lean-to. The ‘Our House’ concept spoke to fans who easily made the jump from ‘this is where we live’ to ‘rugby league is our game’.
It was big hair, big guitars, big blokes and a right-on message. But as in all things slaved to league or the charts, the rise and fall is a continuous wheel of ups and downs. Popular culture is a restless sea, and what was great last season rapidly becomes last year’s model. Suddenly, that tune, that style, that noise is old hat and set to sink without trace. The lid is always flapping on pop culture’s FOGO bin of history.
Over the years, many were called to put their shoulder to the rugby league wheel. They had a crack and moved on. Whenever the league was really stuck for an idea they slid back to the glory days of the 1990s for one more squeeze of the juiciest lemon. As luck would have it, Jimmy Barnes and Tina Turner had recorded a duet version of ‘Simply the Best’. In 2020 the league touched up the duet with a veneer of modernity, tasking Jimmy Barnes to reheat the league’s great anthem.
And in 2019, in one of NSW’s many golden ages of infrastructure expenditure, the jewel in the rugby league real estate crown, the Sydney Football Stadium, was tapped for demolition. When the stadium was built, rugby league was for blokes. Blokes meant there were never enough alcohol outlets, and blokes, unlike women, always need a leak at the footy. When these arguments were considered ridiculous, late suggestions maintained that the stadium was a firetrap and the stairways had never been completed in the original build.
The closing night of the SFS action, before the bulldozers went in, was a night of fabulous league cabaret. There was only one name who could do the event, the game and the venue justice. To bring down the curtain and the stands it was over to Michael Bublé.
Michael loves Australia. He loves cricket. He had heard all about the Sydney Football Stadium. He had a look at the joint and loved it even more when he was told the stories. He was reduced to tears when he stood on the stage and looked out across the field where so many league dreams had come true. He understood immediately why they had to knock it down.
There were no surprises on the night. Toe-tapping, finger-clicking, easy-listening standards. There are never any surprises with Bublé: ‘Cry Me a River’, ‘I Have the World on a String’, ‘Howzat’, ‘Up There Cazaly’, ‘Haven’t Met You Yet’. But where were the celebrated rugby league classics in this farewell set? There was no medley of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, ‘This is Our House’, ‘Simply the Best’ and ‘That’s My Team’. A Bublé medley like that would have brought down the house – and wasn’t that the aim of the night?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE PANDEMIC WAS A golden age for the book. The present and the immediate future seemed so uncertain and yet people who were struggling with health, work, relationships and life in general found time to read books in great numbers. Thanks to all Australians who took an interest in the written word during this troubled time.
A big thanks to the team from Pan Macmillan: Cate Blake, who suggested I have a go at something as the virus took hold, knocked the flight plan into shape after take-off. Belinda Huang was a great editor; she got the idea straightway and made sense of it all, especially the humour in the simple idea of making up history. Of course, I was not the first person to turn that wheeze into a book.
Many ideas and themes for The Fairytale first surfaced in the programmes I made over the last forty years with my companion at the coalface of commentary, Rampaging Roy Slaven aka John Doyle. I thank him for letting me nick the good ones.
As a sounding board on the cultural curve, I picked the brains of two well respected practitioners of The Fairytale, Dare Jennings and James Valentine. They provided the prongs of stability for the flimsy table of knowledge that supports this version of the truth.
A special thanks to Lucille Gosford for the title and IT support, and thanks to the Queen of the Nile, who puts up with the endless practise, Kate Gosford.
Lastly, thanks to all the players who made The Fairytale possible and all the fans who have followed these adventures from near and far.
About H.G. Nelson
Since 1986, Greig Pickhaver has appeared as H.G. Nelson in various radio and television programmes, usually with John Doyle appearing alongside him behind the card table as Rampaging Roy Slaven.
This Sporting Life was a regular weekend fixture on Triple J for 22 years, followed by five years on Triple M with The Life and The Sporting Probe.
John and Greig have presented a number of television shows including This Sporting Life (the TV show), Club Buggery, The Channel Nine Show, Win Roy & H.G.’s Money, The Dream, The Monday Dump, The Cream and The Memphis Trousers Half Hour.
In 2020, he started co-hosting Bludging on the Blindside on ABC Radio.
Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.
First published 2021 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Greig Pickhaver 2021
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Extract in Songs of Praise and Songs of Redemption from ‘Cowboys are My Team’, written by Graeme Connors, © 1998 The Panama Music Company Pty Ltd
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