Industrial Strength – Nov 10
Tame Impala, Sia, gallop to UK video wins
Tame Impala and Sia took out wins at eighth UK Music Video Awards in London. These were attended by 750 British and international filmmakers.
Impala’s Let It Happen won Best International Rock / Indie Video while its director David Wilson took out Best Director.
Sia’s Elastic Heart, which she co-directed, won Best Choreography In A Video.
Foxtel to screen ‘Vinyl’ next year
Foxtel’s 2016 programming launch at Strickland House in Sydney’s Vaucluse was heavy on lifestyle and drama but light on music. But Vinyl, the new 1970s based tale of a New York music exec and produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, is confirmed to screen here.
Also returning is American Idol, while US comedian Amy Schumer, set to tour Australia, is back with her runaway hit Inside Amy Schumer. Foxtel Arts is expected continue with the Helpmann Awards and Later With Jools Holland.
Australia tops Global Creativity Index
The 2015 Global Creativity Index sees Australia top the list, replacing Sweden, which drops to #7. The GCI measures the economic growth and sustainable prosperity of 139 countries based on talent, technology and tolerance. The US remains at #2, followed by New Zealand (#3), Canada (up three spots to #4) while Denmark and Finland tied for #5. Iceland is at #8, Singapore #9 and the Netherlands #10. Full report here.
SA celebrates its own, pushes for new ideas
The inaugural Proof of Life Festival, celebrating South Australian music over a week, kicked off on the weekend. It brings together a program of events and panels encouraging collaboration, discussion and appreciation. The thrust of the week is to encourage punters to think outside the box and do things they don’t normally do to discover new music and think about the growth of the sector. Last night (Monday) there was a forum on gender inequality in the scene and how it saps artistic and personal confidence.
The key event is More Than Music on Thursday 12th when, Sundance Film Festival’s Cory McAbee talks about his transformation from self-taught musician to global collaborations incorporating music, film, visual and art. The idea is to encourage the audience to introduce other artforms to their music. To that effect, November 11 sees a discussion on making own T-shirts (everyone asked to wear their fave music T-shirts) and a November 12 dialogue on music theatre and cabaret. More details at proofoflifefestival.com.au.
Four venues face problems
* Sydney music venue Marrickville Bowling Club (aka The Bowlo) had to cancel post-midnight events for the time being. Local council investigating the club’s licence after a noise complaint discovered it was not in compliance with its building code over fire safety. It has until May to become compliant. Meantime, live music is still showcased until midnight, Secretary Manager Kim Townsend emphasises.
* Plans by the Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne’s St. Kilda to reopen by next month for the summer season after extensive internal renovations since May could be delayed One of the additions is a 145 sq m rooftop terrace for 200 which has lead to 26 complaints, which means having to lodge a new external application with Council which could take months.
* Perth 110-year-old His Majesty’s Theatre will close between late December and April for $20 million worth of renovations to the mechanics, dressing rooms, backstage, auditorium stairs and possibly the seats. Plans were mooted two years ago and the Perth International Arts Festival which hosts three to four shows there will in 2016 shift these to the State Theatre Centre and the Perth Concert Hall.
* Melbourne live music venue, the Pinnacle in in Fitzroy North, will return soon “bigger and better”, its operators said, after it caught fire on the weekend causing extensive damage.
More Venue Updates: new arrivals and sales
* Within two weeks, hotels in Cottesloe could expand their Sunday trading (always a boon for live music) from 10 pm to midnight, the WA Government announced.
* Two hospitality venues on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula which have live music, are on the market: The Mex in Ocean Grove, and St Leonards Hotel popularised by TV’s SeaChange. The latter last week went into voluntary administration.
* A new Melbourne EDM-themed venue Glamorama opens on Brunswick Street from Thursday November 12) until 3 am during the week, and 5 am on Fridays and Saturdays. The bar – with a full kitchen and huge drinks list – is set up by the team behind South Yarra bar Less Than Zero. Simon Henderson, Jeremy Koadlow, John Ryan and Anthony Cannan teamed with touring agency Novel to bring international acts Ben Pearce, Dense & Pika and H.O.S.H.
* Applejack Hospitality opens its fifth venue in four years with Della Hyde on November 25. Set on Oxford Street at the Hyde Park end, it is named after US actress Della Pringle. Co-owners Ben Carroll and Hamish Watts also run The Butler, Bondi Hardware, The Botanist and SoCal in Sydney.
* Fat Controller takes over the former basement site of Adelaide’s Cavern Club beneath North Terrace. With a warehouse ambience, it books all genres, with launch act, on November 26, is San Cisco. Its operators are the team behind Royal Croquet Club and Little Miss Dive Shop.
* Lantern Hotels has three of its pubs on the market. These are comedy venue the Brisbane Hotel in Perth, the Dolphin Hotel in Sydney and the Alberts Hotel in New Zealand.
Virgin adds extra flights for Tamworth music festival
Virgin Australia which introduced six flights a week between Sydney and Tamworth from this May, is adding more flights to ease the load of those travelling in January to the Tamworth country music festival. The event draws about 50,000 people. Regional airline Rex does not have a direct flight from the major cities to the country music capital yet.
A survey by the festival found that 56% of the respondents came from NSW, 18% from Queensland and 16% from Victoria. (Of these 78% were fans, 13% artists and 9% from the music industry). As a result Virgin will add an extra six flights between Sydney and Tamworth during peak travel period for festival-goers, and six extra from Brisbane.
Poke In The Eye, Elastico, launched in Adelaide
Long time South Australian music industry execs (and current SA Music Award finalists) Ryan Winter and Tom West are launching two new businesses in Adelaide.
Poke In The Eye Records (www.pokeintheeye.com.au)
is West’s baby. “Our artists make music because they have something to say; not because they have to say something,” he relates. “We embrace their creative pursuits.” The roster will be unveiled at the label at The Metro on December 10.
Elastico (www.elastico.com.au) is a full-service music, arts and cultural promotions agency that will work alongside self-managed creatives and small business operators to grow their brand, maximise market exposure and find new opportunities to explore in Adelaide, Australia and beyond. “Our ultimate goal is to draw attention to the hidden gems and unheralded elements of this city’s culture, and also open new opportunities for creative visitors.” It draws upon Winter’s experience as a publicist for live music venue The Gov and West’s experience as a self-managed musician.
Submission deadline for NT arts/cultural policy extended
After “strong” feedback from the arts and music community and the public, Northern Territory Arts and Museums Minister Gary Higgins extended the period for submissions on the development of an Arts and Cultural Policy for the NT to Friday November 13.
He said, “It means people are serious about putting in their thoughts and ideas which can only be good for the development of the policy. It’s an important project and we’d like to hear from everyone who has an interest in arts and culture in the Northern Territory.
The Shaping the Future: Arts and Culture in the Northern Territory discussion paper and the online survey for the policy can be accessed online at: http://www.artsandmuseums.nt.gov.au/. Written submissions can be sent in via email: artsandculturefuture@nt.gov.au
Studio owner wins Tasmanian bursary
One of 2016’s two $500 bursaries from Arts Tasmania went to Lois Reid, who runs recording and mastering studio Miss Master to upgrade its software. The other went to graphic designer Beverly Waldie to buy materials for her designs.
The Vita Brown Bequest Bursaries are from Brown, one time swimming champion turned visual artist, who left the money in her will in 2012 to Arts Tasmania to support emerging talent.
Recovering
Veteran publisher Gus McNeil, who founded Cellar Music in 1970, is on the mend after being hit by a car in Sydney.
As he recuperates at home after the Thirsty Merc car crash, drummer Mick Skelton has posted a motivational picture of a drum kit next to his bed.
Melbourne duo King Of The North had to blow out five European shows after drummer /singer Danny Leo was rushed to hospital in Berlin with appendicitis. The band posted, “The operation went extremely well and the doctors believe his recovery should be very quick.”
Cream of country music for Slim Dusty Centre opening
Some of Australian country music’s biggest names – including Lee Kernaghan, Troy Cassar-Daley, Graeme Connors and Adam Harvey – have confirmed their attendance at the Thursday November 19 opening ceremony of the Slim Dusty Centre in his hometown of Kempsey, NSW. They join Dusty’s family, singer songwriter wife Joy McKean and daughter Anne Kirkpatrick, and son David Kirkpatrick, an emergency medicine specialist who hops on stage with the family on occasions.
A number of performers, to be confirmed will pay their tributes in song. Graeme Connors will sing We’ve Done Us Proud (which he wrote for Dusty) as a theme for the day, accompanied by the West Kempsey Primary School Choir. The Centre includes a museum, a travelling exhibition gallery, a visitors centre, retail shop The General Store, a function centre and Dusty’s Dinner Camp Café.
Fox8, [V], screening American Music Awards
Australia gets to see the 43rd American Music Awards from Monday November 23 at 12 pm AEST through Fox8. Channel [V] will air encore screenings the following day at 10.00am, 4.00pm and 8.00pm. Performers at LA’s Nokia Theatre include Jennifer Lopez, One Direction, Selena Gomez, 5 Seconds of Summer, Nick Jonas, Demi Lovato and Carrie Underwood.
Echo Entertainment to rebrand as Star Entertainment
Casino owner Echo Entertainment Group’s annual general meeting this month in Sydney saw shareholders overwhelmingly (99.73%) endorse its plans to change its name to The Star Entertainment Group.
As part of this, Jupiters Casino will rebrand to Star Gold Coast in the second half of 2016. The 30 year old building is to go through a $345 million makeover to attract more customers from the rest of Australia and overseas. The Treasury in Brisbane will be known in the interim as Treasury by The Star and becomes The Star, Brisbane when the Queen’s Wharf integrated resort opens in 2022.
Books #1: Australian punk era evoked in Product 45
Product 45 is a coffee table book out on Dec 1 that pictorially captures the 1976-1980 Australian punk and post-punk era through the packaging of the music. The first of three books, it is compiled by Sydney record collector and graphic designer Murray Bennett. A limited collector’s edition of 250 comes with previously unreleased 7’’ records from The Last Words and Cybotron.
Among the 50 luminaries from the era contributing are Stuart Coupe, Bruce Milne, Dave Warner, Ed Kuepper, Keith Glass, Jules Normington, Steve Stravakis, Philip Brophy, Guy Blackman, John Foy, Roger Grierson and Mitchell Jones. Full details at http://taoam.com.au/.
Books #2: 50 years of Seekers recordings analysed
A new coffee book from Melbourne Books is a detailed analysis of The Seekers’ recorded history. The Seekers – The Fifty Year Recorded History of Australia’s First Supergroup offers a forensic analysis of every song, and an ‘Enseeklopedia’ of memorabilia and trivia. It was penned by Chris Patrick, a Brisbane musician and author of ABBA: Let The Music Speak and author and music historian Graham Simpson (The Judith Durham Story – Colours Of My Life).
Number Crunching
£63,000 per gig reportedly earned by Ed Sheeran, which includes £22,000 in profit.
80% of Australians with stress listen to music to chill out, says the Australian Psychological Society’s Stress and Wellbeing Survey.
$3.8 billion value given on Queensland’s night economy between 9pm and 6am by venue operators’ Surfers Paradise Alliance.
1 million people have signed to PledgeMusic, the funding model business revealed at its 6th anniversary celebrations.
Hollywood closes down NZ piracy site
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) shut down a global piracy website run from a house in Auckland. A a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the owner (only known as YTS) was settled out of court. The MPAA claimed the site offered 4500 copyright infringing movie titles online, with 3.4 million unique visitors in August and 43 million views.
Raw FM sets up in Newcastle
NSW dance music radio network Raw FM expanded to Newcastle on the weekend. Raw FM is also available in Canberra and claims an overall footprint to close to 30% of the NSW population in Sydney’s North, the NSW Central Coast, Coffs Harbour, Albury and Wagga.
New home for Arts ACT
Arts ACT has temporarily moved from the Canberra Nara Centre to Eclipse House at 197 London Circuit, Civic.
Melbourne preps for AWME
Melbourne is preparing this week for the Australiasian World Music Expo (AWME) held November 12-14 across the Arts Centre Melbourne. Right from its start, its conference program looked heavily at opportunities for world music performers in overseas, as well as the booking agents and media who would support them. This year is no different. Reps are booked from Glastonbury, Montreal Jazz, Quebec City Summer, Vancouver Folk and Riddu Riddu as well as Australia’s Bluesfest, Boomerang and Port Fairy Folk.
The 50+ speakers also cover booking agencies, record labels, management companies, media, musicians, performers and arts organisations.
Conference topics include being export-ready, the roles of the agent and manager, marketing product, roots music in Australia, conversations with Archie Roach and Emma Donovan, specific problems faced by indigenous musicians, what makes a great festival, a detailed look at Bluesfest and Boomerang, the history of indigenous music making, making better recordings, and touring internationally.
See http://www.awme.com.au for full list as well as the lengthy list of performances and showcases.
Festivals Update: summer school, funding push
* The Adelaide Guitar Festival will next year hold the inaugural Adelaide Guitar Festival Summer School. Returning in 2016 is the Adelaide International Classical Guitar Competition, with a total prize pool of $32,000 and a chance for finalists to perform at the 2018 Adelaide Guitar Festival. Entries are open until January 29. The full festival program is unveiled in April.
* Queensland’s Airlie Beach Music Festival organiser Gavin Butler estimates it drew 2500 people over the weekend, to see 74 acts headlined by a blinding set from Black Sorrows.
* When Soundwave’s AJ Maddah said he was done with taking the festival to Adelaide to low attendances, he meant it. He’s not even considering sideshows in the City of Churches, he stressed to a question asked on Twitter
* However Laneway Festival has no problems with Adelaide. It was announced yesterday that triple j will broadcast the Adelaide show from midday on Friday Feb 5. In addition, CHVRCHES, The Internet and Grimes sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne completely sold out.
* Bolstered by the fact that 13,000 attended Dubbo’s DREAM festival, organisers are again applying to the local council to reinstate its funding. 2831 of the attendees were from outside Dubbo, bringing in tourism dollars to the region.
* The inaugural NZ Psych Fest, highlighting the country’s psychedelia scene, is held in December in Auckland.
* Sydney’s Rocks precinct is transformed into a colourful urban playground for Australia Day 2016 (Tue 26 Jan, 12.30-6pm), featuring a free all-day music program with new acts as well as great eats and markets in a relaxed summer vibe. This year’s event drew 100,000.
Vale
As the son of South Australian Country Music Association founders Danny and Karen O’Brien, Nathaniel O’Brien and his sister Tracy grew up in Burra, in South Australia’s mid-North, surrounded by the music By his early teens, he had started to perform and write songs. He entered any competition to further his career, including The X Factor last year. Despite being hailed for his vocal ability, he didn’t make it to the finals. But he made use of his opportunity, continuing to tour the country. Last month his Without You album saw him nominated in the Most Promising Future Star category of the People’s Choice section of the Australian Country Music Awards. On Sunday November 8, after a morning performance at the Burra Country Music Festival he was driving to a night hotel gig in the regional town of Tea Tree Gully. But he crashed into a tree and died at the scene. He was 19.
Ellis Campbell was a NSW bush poet and songwriter who recorded CDs and published books, winning 700 awards in total. Not bad for someone who left school at 13, he would say. At 17 he became a shearer, and started composing bush songs and verses. In 2012 he received the Judith Hosier Heritage Award at the Tamworth Country Music Festival for nurturing Australia’s heritage of verse. Campbell died in a Dubbo nursing home at 88.
Phil Salter founded full-service marketing and communications company Salmat with Chairman Peter Mattick and father Tom Salter in 1979. What started out as a small catalogue distribution business developed into a global multiplatform entity worth $123 million, allowing him to generously contribute to many charities. He died at 64 after a long illness.
And A Few Other Things ….
For the Brisbane launch of his Splinters album, Darren Middleton booked the Triffid club, celebrating its first anniversary since his old Powderfinger mucker John Collins started it. The show, on November 7, sold out. To make things special for his return to his former hometown, Middleton brought on Ian Haug for The Go-Betweens unofficial Brisbane anthem Streets Of Your Town, then Sahara Beck and Annie Peterson to do Missy Higgins bit on Favours. Bernard Fanning (a month ago onstage at the Brisbane City Hill for the Youngcare Australia benefit) reproduced their Lover’s Shoes duet on Middleton’s first album Translations.
Then came the moment that the music media had been heavily tipping for the 48 hours before, as four Powderfingers stood on the same stage for the first time since 2010 to a welcome roar. “This is not a reunion, folks, we’ve discussed this, we’ve had this conversation,” Middleton set the guidelines at the start. “This is just a bit of fun, something we used to do a long time ago.” They crunched into a badass version of Neil Young’s Like A Hurricane, stretched out with crunchy guitar hits and, we counted, three guitar solos. Judging from the performance, who’d have thought they’d been apart four years.
Sony Music has pop singer Zara Larsson in the country this week for the first time on promotional duties behind her hit Never Forget You with MNEK. She performed on Seven’s Sunrise this morning.
Birds of Tokyo are looking at a project called Broken Wires, reports the West Australian. It is a reprise of the 2009 Broken Strings tour where they did their songs acoustically with a string quartet and grand piano. The band has also taken out a 12 month lease in a run-down building (which they are convinced was a brothel) in which to set up a makeshift studio to cut some demos.
ABC Local Radio honours the career of Archie Roach and the 25th anniversary of his debut Charcoal Lane with a live national broadcast from ABC Southbank Centre in Melbourne next Tuesday at 7 pm. Joining Roach are Courtney Barnett, Briggs, Emma Donovan and Dan Sultan.
Another rally protesting Sydney’s lockout laws is being held by Reclaim The Streets, on Saturday December 12 at Camperdown Memorial Park in Newtown. The first rally, in September, drew 1000.
Channel [V] brings back its new six-part series of B430 from November 18, hosted by Danny Clayton. This year’s theme is Live Like A Local, providing little tips on finding the best from locals in travels to Tokyo, Rio De Janeiro, Paris, Barcelona, New York and Reykjavik.
Sydney nightclub entrepreneur Justin Hemmes and NZ model Kate Fowler had their first child, a daughter, after being a year together.
Australia’s pro-audio and visual tech publication CX has entered the New Zealand market, the first issue a freebie.
Nova 100’s Breakfast Digital Producer Andy Zito won $17,000 on Channel 7’s The Chase quiz show. He’s spending it on doing up his house, apparently.
MusicNT’s Operations Manager Anjea Travers is going on maternity leave. The association is offering a 12-month contract. All details on its website, deadline is November 23.
A 40s-something award winning NZ entertainer (name suppressed) pleaded not guilty in Auckland District Court to four counts of indecent assault and two of sexual violation against four women. The latter charges carry a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in jail. The man returns to court in January.
Universal Music Publishing Australia/NZ has launched a monthly A&R newsletter. “Each month we will carefully curate a selection of social media and news highlights for your viewing and listening pleasure,” it explained. Its Spotify playlist New Jams features new tracks from local signings Peking Duk, Jessica Mauboy, KLP, Elizabeth Rose, I Know Leopard and more.
Love can be a bitch. An audience member at Robbie Williams’ Auckland show fell for a girl who was pulled out of the crowd onto the stage and hit Twitter asking for her identity as he wanted to take her out for a drink. Alas, one of her mates replied she was well and truly “taken”.
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