An ode to the sport of Australian football, “Footy Footy” is a fast garage rock song with blaring harmonica, crowd vocals, and references to twenty-one different players and teams.
A demo was released on Demos Vol. 1: Music To Kill Bad People To. The recording is short, at one minute and thirty-eight seconds and features distorted guitar, vocals and drum machine— typical of Gizzard demos from the time. It doesn’t stray far from the final version, but doesn’t contain the tempo change at the end and has a longer intro. Interestingly, the bass slide at the beginning of the song is from the demo of “Stoned Mullet,” showing that both were written around the same time.
During an interview with Zan Rowe from Triple J, Eric explains the origins of the song, even saying there was some hesitancy to put the song out. “Stu kind of wrote it as, once again, just an absolute gag song. Like it was just an absolute joke and we thought ‘oh we can never play this’ like we didn’t know how people would take it or if they would like, hate us, or if all of the sudden we’d just become this band that has the ‘footy’ song or something like that… and um, yeah, we’re just in the studio and this song was kinda done and then Joe, like, our guitarist, just starting like doing these really funny voiceovers of all these favorite players and we’re like ‘you gotta record that, you gotta add that in’ so now it’s just like the whole song is just a roll call of all these mid-90s like underappreciated AFL players.” In an interview for Beat, he elaborated on those Joey mentioned: “The players Joe was naming are from our era when we all grew up—’96, ’97. It’s when we were like ten and loving footy. It’s probably an album that will polarise people. So many people will be like ‘this is dumb, what is this shit’. Then there will be people that will get it straight away and it’ll just click with them. I guess we’ll see how it goes.” During a track-by-track rundown for Mess+Noise, Stu said “‘Footy Footy’ is about footy. It’s kind of serious but kind of not. I kind of love footy, but it’s kind of funny to joke about it sometimes too. Joe [Walker] ad-libbed through all his favorite footballers and the spoken-word part at the end in his best footy-boy voice. This song is the shittest song on the album, so we put it at the end.” It was released on 12 Bar Bruise on September 7th, 2012.
Despite writing an entire song about the sport, Stu has made his distaste for the sport clear in the band’s Reddit AMAs and before various performances of the song. On 2014-10-24 for example, he said “this song’s about footy. I fuckin’ hate footy!” It seems to be a bit tongue in cheek however, as Stu was once a team captain for Geelong Junior Football League, though ABC reports that he stopped playing due to an ACL injury. Beyond Stu, Lucas is a fan of Geelong and has shown his support during various Reddit AMAs. The band also sponsored Anglesea FNC in 2021. Joey discussed the AFL and played both “Footy Footy” and the themes of various teams during his appearance on The Footy with Borden Kelly. The AFL has also crossed paths with Gizzard a handful of times, most notably with this song’s inclusion in the video game AFL Live 2, released September 12th, 2013. The band posted about its inclusion, writing “we like what this game has become,” a rewrite of Joey’s final adlib. AFL player Patrick Dangerfield called King Gizzard his favorite band.
The players and teams Joey references are:
The first reported performance of “Footy Footy” was on 2013-08-21 at Bar Open in Naarm (Melbourne), with a handful of other reported performances following it in 2013. The first confirmed performance as of writing was on 2014-09-26 at The Bakery in Perth. The song wouldn’t be seen after late 2014. A 2014 performance of the song would be featured in the documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL. Live versions of the song feature ad-libbed roll calls from Joey with different phrases and names.