A scientific breakdown of the best AFL team songs

I was a music teacher for thirty years in both California and Idaho here in the US, mostly at the secondary level.

I’ve composed and arranged professionally from the age of sixteen, and have written marching band field shows, stage musicals, rock, pop, jazz, and a wide range of other forms and genres.

Including fight songs.

So I feel qualified to do something both useless and with the potential to offend – analyse the AFL’s 18 fight songs on musical terms. Having written a few for different schools, having taught dozens over the years, and having listened to literally hundreds over the decades, I have a very good idea as to what makes for a top-shelf fight song.

First, it needs energy and tempo. Anything below about 100 beats per minute isn’t going to get the blood pumping in anyone – players or fans.

Then there’s singability. A fight song is something that the fans are going to be singing, especially after winning a game, and the team’s going to have to be able to sing (or shout) without background music in the locker room.

It must be made up of words that fit the team, the culture of the team, and present the team in a positive light. (And the words need to be easy to learn. Erudite rhymes are best saved for the concert hall.)

The song must be and unique. I once taught band in a sports conference where four of the seven schools (mine included) had the same fight song, coincidentally the same one Sydney uses: the Notre Dame Fight Song.

There’s nothing worse than being on the road, playing your fight song, and hearing the other team’s fans sing their words louder than yours. It should ideally be something that says your team the moment you hear it start.

And finally, is it a well-constructed, musically-sound song?

For a more well-rounded perspective, I also asked for the opinions of two people close to me who were unfamiliar with the songs in advance. I asked my sixteen-year old son, who lives the life of fight-song cheering as a student, and my girlfriend Dana, who has more experience than she ever wanted hearing fight songs in use while she was married for thirty years to a secondary school coach.

There are seven songs that come from famous sources. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For me that takes away from the uniqueness of your fight song; on the other hand, Dana thought it made the songs quicker to pick up for the fan.

Adelaide’s comes from the United States Marine’s Hymn, itself originally from Jacques Offenbach. Brisbane uses the French anthem, Le Marseilles. Geelong rewrote Bizet’s Toreador Song from Carmen. Hawthorn uses I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy; Melbourne, curiously, uses the American national march, The Stars And Stripes Forever. Sydney uses the fight song one of my schools used, the Notre Dame Fight Song, and the award for the most appropriate choice of borrowed music goes to St Kilda’s use of When The Saints Go Marching In.

Six more are copped from less familiar sources. Carlton’s is from something called Lily Of Laguna, written in 1898 by Leslie Stuart. Good Old Collingwood Forever was once Goodbye Dolly Gray, also an 1898 song from the Spanish-American War. Essendon claimed their song from a Ray Henderson 1929 musical and song called Sunny Side Up, which the Herald Sun says was the theme song for a local TV show in Melbourne in the 1950s. North Melbourne uses the 1920s song Wee Doech ‘n Dorus.

Richmond took a piece from the Ziegfield Follies of 1912, called Row Row Row, and the Footscray Sons Of The ‘Scray, passed on to the Bulldogs as the more palatable Sons Of The West, was from a sea shanty called Sons Of The Sea.

The only five songs that are truly original to the club, as far as I know, are Fremantle’s Freo Way To Go (which replaced their horrid Volga Boatman adaptation a few years ago); Suns Of The Gold Coast Sky, written by Rosco Elliott in 2010; The Mighty Giants, Greater Western Sydney’s theme song, written by Harry Angus; Power To Win, an original written in 1997 by Quentin Eyers and Les Kaczmarek, and West Coast’s We’re The Eagles was originally written by Kevin Peek in 1987.

Let’s look at these within those categories, just for convenience. In the ‘steal from the best’ category, the two that feel like the teams didn’t spend any time or effort on changing the words would be Melbourne and St Kilda.

In the Saints’ case in particular, they literally changed two words, added nothing else to the song, and popped a cool one. And when ‘red and the blue’ replacing ‘red, white, and blue’ is the biggest change to a well-known song, you haven’t done enough yet.

Brisbane had to rework Fitzroy’s fight song to make it work, but the words never really fit. Maybe that’s because the original was in French, and the languages flow differently; I don’t know. But it’s a noble attempt to make a piece of good classical music work as something it was never intended to do.

Dana’s comment on this song was that “it doesn’t feel natural. There’s so much going on.”

Geelong’s has a similar hurdle: originally meant to be sung in Italian, making the words fit was a challenge not always met “Our banners fly-iy high”, but the branding is on point, especially “down at Kardinia Park”!

This was Dana’s favourite of the seven in this category: “the name is right up front – easy rhymes, great melody.”

I personally struggle with Sydney’s because it was my fight song for almost a decade, but it’s the only one here that came from an actual fight song.

I don’t know how familiar Notre Dame football is in Australia – here, it’s so iconic it’s outright theft to use it. If that’s not the case there, then more credit to the Swans (and South Melbourne before them) for using it.

They didn’t change a ton of words either, but then it was designed for the right purpose to begin with.

The two best in this category, for my money, are Adelaide’s complete transformation of the US Marine’s Hymn, which was literally designed to march to, and Hawthorn’s work with Irving Berlin’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Both use very singable tunes, both are upbeat, happy songs; both sets of lyrics are distinctively team-branded. My son’s preference in this category was Hawthorn’s; Dana’s second and third choices were these two. If I had to rank them, I’d put Adelaide, Hawthorn, and Geelong at the top in some order, and St Kilda at the bottom with Melbourne right above them.

Then the ‘steal from where they won’t notice’ category. These six are the easiest and best to sing a cappella. These seem to be the songs that the teams really kick in to in the locker room, even if they’re not the best overall.

Collingwood and Essendon’s songs are disturbingly close to each other musically, although the lyrics distinguish them clearly. Dana thought Good Old Collingwood Forever was “a great pom-pom song – a great song to tap or clap to”.

She correctly notes that Essendon’s theme song doesn’t work as well to sing: “I really like that song, but it’s more of a performance piece than it is a crowd participation song,” compared to Collingwood’s.

North Melbourne’s song needs more song, which the team solves in the locker by adding that intro room before they “join in the chorus”, a chorus that really rocks. Like St Kilda, the four-line chorus isn’t enough for a fight song; unlike the Saints, the Kangaroos do something about it.

Besides Collingwood, the two songs that check all the boxes are Western Bulldogs’ Sons Of The West and my favourite, Richmond’s Tiger Land, which stands out from the others on the basis of three words: ‘Yellow And Black!’

That gets the crowd going like nothing else in this category. So, a slight lead for the Tigers over the Magpies and Dogs.

I’ve avoided mentioning the worst fight song ever devised. It doesn’t matter how eloquent the lyrics are: if the song puts everyone to sleep, it’s a failure as a fight song. Dana’s comment was “It sounds like they were the loser, not the winner!”

I’m sorry, Carlton – love your team, hate your song. When I arrived at this school I currently teach at, the “fight song” for the girls’ basketball team was My Girl by the Temptations. Equally useless. We switched to the theme song from The Magnificent Seven, and suddenly the team actually ran onto the court.

And, in the ‘those sound old, we will write our own’ category, all five songs work beautifully for the modern audience. When you write specifically for a purpose, you’re more likely to get what you want as a result.

The only black mark I’m going to put on any of these is that the two songs from WA both work better as performance pieces (with the guitars wailing) than they do as locker room sing-a-longs.

Dana thought “West Coast’s is a good branding of their team – easy to follow but it had variety in it.” As for Fremantle, “I like that one; I can repeat that one already! It’s harder to understand the words in the middle, (but it) gets the crowd up on their feet and moving!”

(AAP Image/Tony McDonough)

Our three favourites of ours all come from this category. My son adored Greater Western Sydney’s tuba-driven fight song – he simply cannot remain still when it comes on! Dana’s favourite was Sons Of The Gold Coast Sky (“That makes you want to shake a pom-pom; it’s like crowd aerobics! That’s the one you want to play so you can get up and move!”), and I agree that both of those are outstanding on all fronts.

My vote for the most effective of the eighteen fight songs, however, is Port Adelaide’s. The fanfare tells you what’s coming, the lyrics are strong, recognisable, and very Port.

There are several spots to shout “Stop! Stop! Stop! Until we’re Top! Top! Top!”. The break isn’t just a meaningless rehash of the melody in cheesy brass – it’s new music that you can sing with or wait through until we hit the climax.

It’s easily condensed into a locker room chant, and most dramatically, it has the best closing of any fight song in the league – “POWER!” I’m no more a fan of Port than any other team, but that’s my particular preference as a fight song analyst.

I refuse to rank the songs one-to-eighteen, because there’s no objective basis for doing so and my opinion is only that. But it’s hard not to recognise some songs as more effective (Port Adelaide, Geelong, Gold Coast, Richmond) and others as less effective (Carlton, Melbourne, St Kilda, Carlton).

I’m hoping you disagree and make a valid argument for your preference, but I challenge you to argue for a song besides your own team – go beyond your personal prejudice!