It’s not every day a post-punk band writes a footy song, and rarer still that they do it as a first-person, spoken-word true story rather than a terrace singalong. The Night Packers have done exactly that with ‘Cumberland Oval 1975’, out on Bandcamp, AMRAP and community radio from Friday 14 August, with a Spotify release to follow a week later on 21 August.
Another entry in what I’ve previously called The Marrickville Sound — musicians with long prior form in the Sydney scene converging on a new project later in their playing lives — The Night Packers formed in 2022, playing their first gig at Petersham Bowling Club that July. Their 2024 debut EP ‘Loose Carry’ was a vibrant, urgent set of post-punk jewels, all buzzsaw guitars and shouty melodic swagger, drawing comparisons to The Clash, The Jam and The Saints. ‘Cumberland Oval 1975’ is a different proposition: a narrative single built around spoken word rather than the band’s usual sung, sneering delivery, trading the EP’s jittery pace for something more measured and reflective.
The song recounts a single day in August 1975: an eight-year-old South Sydney Rabbitohs fan and his uncle taking in all three grades at Cumberland Oval, a ground with a fearsome reputation as one of the more forbidding suburban venues of the era — a long way from the sanitised, catered matchday experience of today. The ground itself no longer exists under that name; it was redeveloped and is now known as CommBank Stadium, which gives the song’s title a small elegiac charge before a note is played — this is as much a document of a vanished Sydney as it is of a vanished version of the game.
Poignantly, Dave Wilks says the song is:
…a homage to my uncle Tony Gavin, a working class Irish Catholic Australian guy from Grenfell NSW, who stepped up to become like a Dad to me from when I was 6, and who died on my birthday in 2017.
It’s fertile ground for a band working in the talk-singing, narrative tradition of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground — first-person, plainly told true stories over a driving rhythm section is a lineage that stretches from “Waiting for the Man” through to more recent practitioners like Melbourne’s The Aerial Maps, and it suits transplanting to a suburban football ground better than you might expect.
‘Cumberland Oval 1975’ is out now on Bandcamp, landing on Spotify and other streaming platforms from 21 August.
The Night Packers are:
Michael O’Rourke – Lead Guitar, Vocals, Dave Wilks – Rhythm Guitar, Vocals, David ‘Snajik’ Miller – Bass Guitar, Tom Alexander – Drums
