Up There Cazaly singer Mike Brady almost missed AFL grand final due to fall

He is a name synonymous with the AFL grand final.

While teams change, pre-game acts change and even the rules themselves change, Mike Brady’s performance of unofficial AFL anthem Up There Cazaly has been a fixture of the big day for decades.

Last weekend’s grand final was no different — but that was not always a given.

In January, the 78-year-old suffered a horrific fall during a routine evening walk near his Great Ocean Road home.

“I fell and landed on my ample backside,” he said, laughing.

But the injury was no laughing matter.

Brady described the horror of having to twist his ankle back into place before dragging himself to a nearby fire station, “leaving a trail of blood and mud”.

Brady would later learn he had fractured his leg, ankle and foot in 12 places.

With his doctor telling him not to push himself and that it was unlikely he would be able to walk anytime soon, his grand final call-up nine months later was all but certainly out of the picture.

When the AFL asked if he would still be up to performing, he vowed to be there even if he had to crawl on stage.

“Because I love it. It’s a part of me.”

‘The place was closing in on me’

A self-described “outdoors person” who relishes being active, Brady is the first to admit that even he doubted he would make it during parts of the nine-month journey that followed.

“I wasn’t doing well,” he said.

“I was waking up and felt like the place was closing in on me.

After five months in hospital, he was able to return home with the help of a wheelchair.

He slowly transitioned to crutches, and now mostly gets around using a walking stick.

But Brady defied all expectations and ditched the walking stick to walk out on stage on September 26.

The 100,000-strong crowd gave him the strength not just to walk, he said, but to fly.

“At the beginning of the song, I’m singing it kind of normally, but then I thought, ‘I’ve got this, I’m going to be able to sing it!’

“I sang harder than I’ve ever sung before.

“One hundred thousand people reacted, and the roar — I’ve never heard anything like it.

“It was fantastic. I felt absolutely vindicated for pushing myself so hard.”

Musician vows to perform for years to come

Brady says he is not one to dwell on the past and spent much of his recovery writing new poetry and music.

But many hours alone with his thoughts left him to reminisce on a career he never expected.

As an English immigrant, Brady moved to Melbourne at the age of 11.

The musician and jingle-maker had never even been to a full AFL game when he was asked to create a tune to market the Victorian Football League.

He went on to pen what would become a footy phenomenon.

Recalling the day he first performed Up There Cazaly at the 1979 VFL grand final, introduced by his friend John Farnham, Brady said it was the first time he felt truly at home in the country he had lived in for nearly two decades.

“I really felt like I belonged in Australia,” he said.

“I’d never felt that before. But hearing men and women in the crowd shouting, ‘Good on ya, Mike’, I really felt the warmth.”

Even 48 years later, the feeling remains every time the words “up there cazaly” leave his mouth.

“I often say the smile on my face when I sing it is actually me chuckling at the irony,” he said.

“I love the irony of being a Pommy immigrant that was taken to heart by so many Australian people, and if that’s not a great honour, I don’t know what is.”

While the honour of performing the track has been handed to other performers over the years, he wants to perform for the next two years, taking it to the song’s 50-year anniversary and his own 80th birthday.

In fact, Brady was more determined than ever to take to the stage this year, fearing the AFL might not ask him back if he did not.

If the crowd’s reaction was anything to go by, it was an unlikely fear.