Mike Brady AM

About Mike

Mike Brady AM wrote Up There Cazaly in 30 minutes, as a song to promote Channel Seven's coverage of the VFL. It became the biggest-selling Australian single of its time, with sales in excess of 250,000 copies, and held the record for the highest-selling Australian single until February 1981 — a piece of sporting and cultural shorthand so embedded in the national consciousness that most Australians could hum it before they could name its creator. He is also a musician, jingle writer and performer with a career spanning decades, responsible for some of Australia's most durable advertising jingles, among them Lucky, You're With AAMI and Hard Yakka. Across that career he has built and lost three personal fortunes — a biographical detail he delivers with the kind of dry self-awareness that makes audiences immediately warm to him. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in June 2013 for service to the community and to music as a composer and performer.

Brady's story is, at its core, a story about creative work, luck, identity and the strange relationship between a piece of art and the culture that adopts it. He did not set out to write an anthem. He wrote a song for a footy promotion and accidentally captured something that a whole country decided was theirs. What that experience has taught him about creativity, about commercial work and about the unpredictability of what resonates — that is the substance of what he brings to a stage.

For gala dinners, AFL industry events, corporate celebrations, awards nights and any occasion that benefits from a performer who can speak, sing, entertain and leave a room in genuinely good spirits, Mike Brady is a distinctive and memorable choice. He is the rare speaker who is also a genuine performer — someone who can shift registers mid-event and hold the room through both. Audiences leave having been entertained in a way that feels completely Australian and completely authentic.