Up There Cazaly

The disparate worlds of sport and music both loom large on the Australian cultural landscape but often seem miles removed, yet whether it’s individuals with dual passions or instances where the two worlds physically collide in song form, there’s regularly a nexus between the two popular pastimes lurking not too far below the surface.

In AFL-mad Melbourne they’ve recently been running a series of cultural sit-ins titled Presentation Night, where sports-fixated musicians lock horns with music-loving players (or former greats) before a live audience. The resultant conversations have been uniformly fascinating as they delve into each other’s worlds to investigate the differences and – perhaps most importantly – the common ground between the two pursuits.

While AFL doesn’t have the same prominence in Sydney, its popularity is growing exponentially and, to bring Presentation Night to the Harbour City, they’ve roped in former Sydney Swans legend Jude Bolton – who retired last year after 325 games and two Premierships – and Tim Levinson (aka Urthboy), who, as well as having forged a similarly formidable reputation in the hip hop world, is also a mad, one-eyed Swans fan.

“I started pretty young, I had two older brothers and they had pretty decent music tastes, so I got into stuff like The Cruel Sea pretty early on,” Bolton explains of his musical predilections. “My first gig was Regurgitator supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers when I was just a young fella. Then when I moved up to Sydney [from Melbourne] I moved in about 50 metres from The Annandale – that was where I bought my first house. I used to go and see some awesome gigs down there, like The Dandy Warhols, Kings Of Leon and The Mess Hall – it was great fun.

“I used to take all the Swans boys down there for [end of season parties] Mad Mondays – the owners would black out the windows – and the old lady who does the cleaning down at The Annandale said, ‘I’d never seen the place stink more of alcohol than with this group of blokes.’ That was a badge of honour for us!”

Urthboy has similar tales of being immersed in both music and sport from a young age. “I’ve been a Swans fan for a long time, but I think really my tragic love of AFL has only emerged in the last ten years. The first games that I went to were in the ‘80s, when my dad took me to see Swans play his team Essendon, and then I went to a whole heap of games in the early ‘90s when my godmother, who was really involved in women’s cricket, took me along. It was the period when the Swans were bottom of the ladder every year so there was just no one in the ground – they were lean years – but I saw a lot of games in that period and it made it really satisfying even as a non-obsessive fan when a few years later [in 1996] they made it to the Grand Final against North Melbourne.

“Certainly in the last ten years I developed an unhealthy obsession with the Swans and what that means is that you have that strange phenomenon that occurs with really obsessive sports fans in that your whole weekend can be really down when your team loses. When they lose badly your whole morale takes a beating and you’re left feeling a little bit hollow. There’s nothing rational at all about that predicament – it’s just sport – but it moves you and it lifts you and drops you and shakes you up; it’s a strange thing when you invest passion into something like sport, but there are a lot worse things to be really invested in.”

And while there are many common experiences shared by sportsmen and musicians, there are also fundamental differences in their journeys.

“There are some parallels but they’re poles apart as well,” Bolton offers. “The parallels are probably that there’s friction between members of bands and also in teams, but you’ve also got to come together and have a common goal at some stage. It’s also the stress – I imagine putting out an album would be very similar to performing for your footy team on the weekend, in terms that you’re open to public criticism. You put something out there and you can cop the flak but also be lauded for it as well, which can be daunting. You’re also thrust into the limelight at a young age. But the lifestyles are very different in terms of physical fitness and those sort of things. Whenever the guys would get to a gig we were pretty jealous of the rock star lifestyle – we’d all love to be like that – but it’s certainly different paths in that sense.”