The quote “music is the space between the notes” is usually attributed to the French composer Claude Debussy. Or maybe it was Richard Strauss. Hell, maybe it was Richard Champion. Whoever it was, they were talking about savouring silence, about embracing emptiness, about avoiding anything that insists itself upon you.
You don’t get a lot of Debussy at football games. They probably sampled his most famous piece in an ad for banks or bookies. But you get a lot of music. You get a lot of noise. You get a lot of flashing lights. And you get a lot of fun facilitation.
The cacophony at Marvel Stadium is the tipping point for many and so it proved for veteran broadcaster Stephen Quartermain on Friday. “This crap music is doing my head in,” he said. “This is a blight on the game.” And he was right. The final quarter of the North Melbourne and Carlton clash should have encapsulated the full fan experience. At least half were experiencing the best 30 minutes they had enjoyed at the footy in years. The other half were on the footballing ledge – some sullen, some resigned, some furious, some halfway home. They all had two things in common. They were all being urged to “MAKE SOME NOISE”. And they were all treated to lashings of KC and the Sunshine Band, Kenny Loggins and assorted bubblegum pop.
It wasn’t much better at Adelaide Oval a few hours later. This was one of the games of the season. It had a heaving home crowd. It had wild momentum swings. It had a rollicking Crows comeback against the Dockers. If anything, it warranted a deep breath. But for the witless sensory assassins, that simply wouldn’t do. And with the home side a few goals up, the public announcer, maybe flown in from the Docklands, was screaming “Make some noise, Crows fans!”.
This isn’t a column saying that music doesn’t have a place at footy games. There are certain venues, and certain supporter bases, where it is embraced and where it works. It works for a showman like Charlie Cameron. It works at quarter-time of a full SCG game. It works in states where the AFL is trying to capture new fans. It works at stadiums where going to the football is less of a ritual, and more of an event.
But it should be used judiciously. Not every moment, and not every game, is worthy of Sweet Caroline. Not every Cameron goal warrants three minutes of John Denver. Every game has its own distinct rhythm, its own patterns, its own heartbeat. Some games take an hour to wake up. Some start like a shot from a cannon and quickly fizzle out. Some catch fire in the final 10 minutes. Some moments make fans want to dance to Tay Tay. Some moments make them want to stick their face in a fan. Some games are putrid. Some stick in the marrow for years.
But the ground announcers and the in-house DJs don’t discriminate. To them, every goal is worthy of a song, and every break is worthy of shouting. Which brings me to another gripe – the over-caffeinated, over-amplified nonsense merchants who perforate our eardrums during the breaks. It’s not just the AFL of course. “A giant, conjoined, strobe lit homogenised assault of incoherent corporate sales fart,” Barney Ronay called some of the offerings at English Premier League stadiums.
And it’s something Matthew Crawford wrote about in his book The World Beyond Your Head. “Our self-appointed disrupters,” he wrote, “have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetise every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention.”
As a result, it’s hard to take pause at a footy game any more. It’s hard to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you. It’s hard, at Marvel Stadium in particular, not to have an epileptic fit. It’s something the AFL Fans Association should be advocating for. They made a lot of noise about the grand final being pushed back a couple of hours. But they were fighting the wrong battle. The continual assault on our senses and intelligence should be their primary focus.
The Easter Monday classic showcased the best of the sport. It’s worth looking at some of the still photographs of that game – the post daylight savings shadows, the tension and panic on the players’ faces, the euphoria of the crowd. Home side Hawthorn, to their eternal credit, did not pipe in music after every goal. The 84,000 people present therefore got to experience football as it should be – the nervous contemplation after a goal, the 10 seconds to collect their thoughts, the communal energies, anxieties and ecstasies of a gripping finish. Our self-appointed disrupters have no business inserting themselves in those moments, footy’s equivalent of the space between the notes.
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