The Fremantle factor
For fans and players of AFL, the team song is a very important part of a post-match celebration. Blared out over the speakers at the ground and sung in the changing rooms to celebrate a win, any serious fan of a team will know the words. In fact AFL fans will be able to identify most team songs even those of hated rivals (hello Collingwood).
West Australian team Fremantle Dockers has been making some changes in the off-season including a new jumper and now they are searching for a new team song. And it’s not the board members who will be choosing. In X Factor style they are leaving the decision to the public. Provided you are a member of the football club.
Members of the club have the choice of four songs with the most popular to be adopted as the team’s song. One of the songs in the running has been written by long suffering Docker fans and WA rockers Eskimo Joe.
Although not usually great works of art a team song should be catchy, celebratory and easy enough for the average five schooners down, tone deaf and off-key fan to be able to sing along to. No simple task for the Eskimo Joe boys.
Traditionalists of the game might be irked the song is being changed after so many years. We just hope the fans get a chance to sing it considering Fremantle’s mediocre performance over the past few years.
(Ed. note — The author is an Essendon Bombers fan so is more than qualified to identify mediocre performances)
Australian flashers getting noticed
Apologies for the misleading title, we’re talking about photographers, not the kind you were thinking of. Better yet, music photographers. You see them at gigs clicking away furiously, all the time wondering ‘how many photos do they need?’ They’re also responsible for those photos where bands and musicians do their best ‘I’m not at all interested to be here, in fact our drummer is so uninterested he’s standing three metres behind us and looking the other way’ impressions.
But we love a good music picture and what a cool job. Unfortunately like most musicians most photographers aren’t making millions out of their passion and it’s nice to see them recognised by their peers.
Three Australian camera hounds have been nominated in the 2011 NME Music Photography Awards with Kane Gilbert, Mikey Hart and Mark Boyle nominated in the Professional and Festival categories.
Our favourite is Gilbert’s cover shot for Inpress magazine of Sydney band Calling All Cars. He got the band to jump in a bath of milk and produced a spectacular picture of them half submerged. The things we do for art hey?
Good luck to the Aussie nominations, we hope you take out the gongs and keep snapping away.
Sydney Opera house gets it’s cool on
It’s not like the Sydney Opera House necessarily needs promotion. The white wave-like exterior is one of Australia’s best known landmarks. Which is awesome as when it comes to tourism promotional campaigns we often miss the mark. Remember the ‘Where the bloody hell are ya’ ads? They were famous for two things. Launching Lara Bingle’s career and reinforcing the stereotype that Aussies like to change their voice pitch and change every sentence into a question… We don’t do that do we?
So there was much delight when we were directed to The Ship Song Project. The crew at Sydney Opera House got together a massive roll call of Australian musicians including Paul Kelly, Sarah Blasko, Daniel Johns, The Temper Trap and Kev Carmody. They then mixed in the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Bangarra Dance group to produce an all singing, all dancing version of Nick Cave’s hit the Ship Song (google it, you won’t be disappointed).
Shot on location at the Opera House it’s an amazing array of Australian talent around an amazing Australian icon. Finally we’ve got something which hopefully will change outdated stereotypes and show the world Australia’s cultural side. Get it into ya!
