Q&A: Larry Heath on founding the NLMAs, gender equality & more

Tomorrow night, across eight simultaneous events in all states and territories of Australia, the inaugural National Live Music Awards (NLMAs) will honour the country’s best live music acts and performers.

Larry Heath, NLMA’s Founder, Event Director, and Founder of the AU Review Awards, brought the idea to life after noticing a gap in the industry. The NLMAs now fills that void as the only award in Australia that solely recognises and fosters the local live music sector.

Among the nominees at this year’s awards are Sydney band Gang of Youths, Adelaide rapper Tkay Maidza, Melbourne trio Camp Cope and Northern Territory’s At The Dakota, upholding an all-inclusive approach to the perceived hubs of Australian live music.

TMN chats to Heath about the story behind the NLMAs, picking and choosing award categories, the push for gender and racial equality, and the things he would change if he could.

Why were the NLMAs formed? Did you feel the live sector was underserved?

There were two aspects to it, the first being that there wasn’t a national live music award in Australia. The second, is there wasn’t an award that I felt gave enough support and celebration of the actual country.

So often when we talk about Australian music and touring, it’s Sydney, Melbourne Brisbane, but the stuff that’s happening in Perth, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart are the seams that are creating the music that we listen to. Some of those musicians might move to Sydney or they may stay in Darwin but this is where the music is born, in these regional places.

My thinking with it was ‘Let’s bring the country together in a way that no one has done before. Let’s get together to celebrate live and let’s tell the people in Canberra that they are just as important as the people in Melbourne and the people in Hobart.’

I think that it is important that we have an ecosystem that says you can be in Hobart and make great music and tour from there, you can be in Perth, you can be in Adelaide. There shouldn’t be this elitism of the East Coast states.

To achieve that, we are doing eight simultaneous events. Every state and territory, we have judges in every state and territory.

What that has meant amongst the musicians nominated is, for the national awards, you’ve got a Darwin musician sitting there next to a Perth musician sitting right next to a Sydney musician, and that for me was really important to tackle those two areas.

Your AU Review had two Live Music Awards in 2014 and 2015. Did the staging of those awards inform the NLMAs model in any way?

Completely. It was through doing that for two years that it became clear that there was a hole in the industry celebratory calendar that we were filling and that it, as the AU Awards, could not do by itself. Much of the reason I stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of the AU after the last awards was so that I could focus on projects separate to the AU Review.

It was made clear to me in the industry that for people in the industry, we were filling a gap, but by making it essentially an advertorial opportunity for the AU Review rather than purely an award initiative, prevented it from being as big or as influential as it could be.

As places like Canada, Europe, the UK and the US are all engaging in live music awards in some way, it was clear that we needed to step back and do something. Talking to people at APRA and even ARIA and all these organisations who had been thinking about doing it for a long time, their message to me was to just do it and take what I’ve done and what I’ve learned doing two years of the AU Awards and evolve that into what has become the National Live Music Awards.

The AU Awards is actually going to continue. Sosefina [Fuamoli], who is now the Editor-in-Chief, is going to run it not as a live music focused event but as a live music advertorial event. This [NLMAs] isn’t anything to do with the AU Review, this is a separate initiative that I have year-round plans for. It’s not just going to be an Awards at the end of the year, there will be multiple awards, events and initiatives that will run throughout the year that are all about fostering and celebrating talent all around the country.

It’s been 12 months in the making since I sat down with the Live Music Office and a few people who are now on the board and turned what I was doing into the National Live Music Awards.

I am regretting a little bit that I didn’t take a year off.. We are kind of going into this underfunded, but we had the momentum so I’m in two minds about it. As we were approaching two weeks out from the event, I was at that point going ‘We could have spent two on this rather than one’, but we could have done that and then just lost the momentum, so you never know.

The board features more women than men, which very well may be an Australian music industry first. Was that a conscious decision?

No, I didn’t endeavour to have more women than men, I endeavoured to make it equal. I endeavoured for equality because I wanted the Awards to be representative of the population. I wanted it to be a snapshot of what’s happening around the country of all races, ages, backgrounds, gender etc. The way to do that is to not put quotas on awards, the way you achieve that is by having a diverse judging panel and you way you achieve a diverse judging panel is to have a board that elects those judges who are diverse.

We have board members from all over the country, both male and female, and their duty was to put together an eclectic judging panel. We have ended up with an Awards that is well representative of the current scene. Some categories have no females in it, some categories have only females in it. Some categories are dominated by Indigenous artists, some categories are dominated by women of colour. This is an important aspect, not because of tokenism or not because we are trying to be PC or anything like that, but because an awards like this should be representative of what’s happening, and music in Australia is more diverse and more exciting and more interesting than I think it has ever been, especially live and on-stage.

We are creating more types of music than we had ever created before. We are huge in EDM internationally now, we’ve got such a great rock n roll culture that has always been there and is never going away. The triple j indie scene has been so well fostered by triple j and other outlets in the last decade. That’s extraordinary. What an Awards like this allows us to do is recognise this, celebrate it, and also give focus to artists that wouldn’t normally get the focus because they don’t have a single or they don’t have an album. There’s quite a few artists in there who have never released a song in their lives or certainly not one that has got any traction.

What were the most laboured over decisions you had to make since creating the Awards?

The categories. It’s so important in the first instance that you are creating the right amount of awards without overdoing it. We already have some 50 awards and part of that is due to the fact that we have all the state and territory categories and it becomes quite a lot. You have to pick your battles.

We made some conscious decisions to leave some categories out, at least for this year. We don’t have a Pop Live category simply because we realised that so many of the artists that would be nominated in that category don’t really do enough national touring, they might do corporate gigs and stuff like that. We made the decision with the board, and before we even got to the point where we had the judges, we decided to look at that for next and try to limit this year’s complications.

Was it a unanimous decision?

It wasn’t unanimous. We didn’t go to a vote or anything. It was just me and few board members talking through it and the pros and cons of those sorts of decisions. By the time we had all 11 board members and we were making those sort of decisions, we had already decided on those sorts of things.

Going into 2017, we will have votes from the board to add in a pop category. Every year you’ll see one or two new awards come in. That was another thing we wanted to do. We wanted to leave room for growth, not have everything emerge in the first year. There was some talk about the roots award that we divide it into a country category and a few others. But again, it was getting too much and we focused on the roots category that will cover country, Americana, roots and blues together.

The big thing was what AU Review’s involvement would be. We originally had the AU Award, and up until a week out before the awards, we were still going to have an AU-sponsored award in there. Then we made the decision to not have it involved whatsoever. It was getting confusing already. It ended up being a bit more of a barrier than I expected because people are still seeing this as an AU Review thing.

In the end, I’ve had to kind of do everything myself, from getting things printed, to getting all the programs designed and done up for the night and the advertising. Apart from the logo and a couple of the videos, everything else is pretty much me.

This was my backup plan if we didn’t get the right amount of funding. We had a minimum target for funding and we hit that, enabling us to hire a publicist Nat Files which allowed us to do a couple of extra things. Each $1,000 mark beyond there, it was one less thing I had to do. A little bit more help would have been nice though, especially in these last few weeks.

You’ve made seven of the eight national Awards free to attend. How are the costs being covered for those events?

Sponsorships mainly. The majority of the sponsorship money coming in is paying for the production costs of those events. We’ve got Young Henrys, Jameson and Absolut are running drinks for VIP’s and artists, as well as some drink specials on the night for everyone else.

The venues are all giving up their space for free. All the venues have really got behind the awards. We don’t have to pay hire fees but we are also not taking any money off the bar.

We also have a lot of in-kind deals. A lot of companies are advertising us for each – it’s just the nature of the industry. You do a lot of back scratching deals to make these things happen. When you are not working with government funding, or only a very small amount of it, you have to pull every favour that you can. Theses rewards are the result of eight years of networking and relationships that I’ve built up.

The only reason I knew I could do eight events in a night is because I’ve done that many events over a couple of weeks before. The only difference I that I can only be at one of them.

FOR A FULL LIST OF NOMINEES & TO BUY TICKETS HEAD TO: http://www.nlmas.com.au