INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH MUSIC INDUSTRY NEWS & GOSSIP
with Christie Eliezer * Stuff for this column to be emailed to <celiezer@netspace.net.au> by Friday 5pm FESTIVALS DRAW HUGE CROWDS DESPITE HEAT Melbourne’s heatwave on the weekend failed to keep crowds away from festivals. Future Music drew 50,000 where PSY created a greater impact than The Stone Roses, Rita Ora (who said she planned to buy a house in Oz), The Temper Trap (who’re working on their third album), The Prodigy, Dizzee Rascal, Bloc Party, Fun, Rudimental and Azealia Banks. A record 20,000 attended the Port Fairy Folk Festival to see the likes of Glen Hansard, Gurrumul, Tim Finn and Arlo Guthrie. Among them was new premier Denis Napthine. He got chatting to festival chairman Bruce Leishman and ticketing manager Ian Wood who asked if their event could be included in next year’s Tourism Victoria marketing stuff. Over the three days only one guy got locked up for being drunk. A capped 10,000 went to Golden Plains, which ran smoothly except for a small fire in the generator area caused by heat in an exhaust.
BIG DAY OUT LAUNCHES $20K GRANT The Big Day Out is offering a $20,000 grant for someone in the music, film and interactive realm to come up with an innovation to advance the live music experience. Think the Tupac hologram. Think Coldplay’s LED wristband. Big Day Out CEO Adam Zammit pointed out, “We are at an important live production crossroads. Advances in multimedia production are enabling live [performers] to bring all of the power of film making to the stage, from projection, to lighting to even 3D. Advances in audience engagement, encompassing feedback, physical tracking, mobile technology, and social media have the potential to bring the audience into an artist’s stage show in ways that we can only imagine.” See bigdayout.com.
MANAGERS SET UP NEW PUBLISHING COMPANY
Artist mangers Danny Rogers (Gotye, Temper Trap; Laneway Fest) and Adam Tudhope (Mumford & Sons, Keane, Laura Marling) have set up a new publishing company called And Publishing. The two will A&R, Rogers saying, “I’m into songs, I don’t care if they’re from the coolest bands on the planet, or the most mainstream stars.” And Publishing has full-time A&R in the UK (Thomas Child) and Australia (Travis Banko) plus a synchronisation manager, Justin Bumper Reeve of Hidden Track Music in Los Angeles for North America. The venture is funded and administered by Kobalt.
HEMITUDE WIN 8TH AMP
Blue Mountains duo Hermitude’s fourth album HyperParadise have won the 8th Coopers Australian Music Prize. This comes after an ARIA, two SMAC wins and sold out shows on their current tour. The Amp prize is $30,000 cash from the PPCA, which collects broadcasting royalties on behalf of record labels and acts. PPCA’s Dan Rosen hoped the cash would allow the duo to take their music abroad. Over 300 albums were entered into the comp.
COMMUNITY RADIO’S SPECIAL DAY Community radio is lobbying for the Federal Government to provide the $1.4 million funding shortfall in its next budget so it can switch to digital. This is essential as analogue radio will be ceasing in the near future. On Wednesday March 13, 37 stations with digital access have a day of special programming and guests, to get as many listeners as possible to sign up to the campaign online at committocommunityradio.org.au. In Melbourne, SYN Media is taking it to TV with an appeal during Channel 31’s Youth Music Show 1700 at 5pm and PBS will open its studios for folks to sign a physical petition.
THINGS WE HEAR
* The next Wolfmother album is going out under frontman Andrew Stockdale’s name. Aside from the current Wolfie lineup, it also features multiple bassists and drummers. It’s a “different trip now,” he tweeted. * While in Sydney, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood played a
gig in Sydney that Radiohead fans didn’t know. He joined the Australian Chamber Orchestra Underground’s show in a loft space, performing a Steve Reich piece. * After opening for Ed Sheeran, Passenger’s own headlining theatre tour sold out with new dates in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Meantime, the single Let Her Go has been picked up nationally by the Nova network. * Word from the UK dailies is that One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson built a £15,000 “panic room” where he can hide in case a stalker gets into the house. * Will Big Scary’s April tour see them play with a larger band than before? * The Superjesus have reunited for 11 shows from May 30 to June 29. * Six years after their break up, Sodastream are working on an album. * Singer songwriter Russell Morris this week gets his first Top 20 album in 42 years, with his current much acclaimed blues album Sharkmouth up to #17. * Nokia’s most downloaded track in the UK is by Don’t Know Why by Melbourne urban act Alston.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS ROWLAND S. HOWARD LANEWAY
Promoter Nick Haines gathered enough support to formally apply to the City of Port Phillip with a proposal to name a St Kilda lane after Rowland S. Howard. He had a petition with 1,500 signatures including Noah Taylor, Mick Harvey, Pogues’ Shane MacGowan and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Henry Rollins also swung his support, while Nick Cave wrote to council urging them to consider it. The lane being earmarked runs between Eildon Road and Jackson Street. The one time The Birthday Party, These Immortal Souls and Crime & The City Solution guitarist lived on Eildon Road in his last ten years before he died in 2009 of liver cancer, and used the laneway every day. Haines says the position of the laneway is also important: it’s midway between the site of the old Crystal Ballroom where Howard played his first gig, and the Prince of Wales where he played his last in 2009.
THREE MORE SHOCK RECORD EXITS
Incoming Shock Records GM Chris May has his work cut out. Three Shock Records executives announced their intention to move on. These were Senior International Label Manager Stu Harvey (taking a break), marketing manager Annie Tetzlaff (joining promoter Destroy All Lines as event manager) and national PR manager Genna Alexopoulos (holidaying in North America).
PHONE CALL OF THE WEEK The receptionist at an eye clinic in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, rang a 19-year-old student to remind him of an appointment. His voice mail message recited Will Smith’s lyrics to The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air theme, including the lines: ‘Shooting some b-ball outside of the school.’ She misheard it as “shooting people outside of the school’ and screeched for the cops. Schools in the area went into a 20-minute shutdown and the student was briefly arrested.
AUSSIE FAN LAUNCHES KNIGHTHOOD BID FOR OZZY! SHA-RON! An earlier bid in the UK to name Birmingham airport after Ozzy Osbourne fizzled. Now Australian Helen Maidotis launches a campaign to get Da Ozz knighted. She says he’s been an inspiration the past 40 years and launched the careers of the likes of Randy Rhoads and Zakk Wylde. See causes.com/ actions/1735312-ozzy-osbourne-for-a-knighthood.
WANNA GO TO INDIE WEEK? Indie Week is an annual event which draws 600 forward-thinking delegates from indie labels and service providers each June to New York to discuss making more money, copyright protection and other issues. This year they’ve offered ten Australian indie labels the chance to attend. AIR, Sounds Australia and the PPCA are teaming up for this initiative. Labels must send expressions of interest. See air.org.au/news/join-us-at-indie-week-2013.
MOON DUO BY THOMAS BAILEY
San Francisco is such a special place. Throughout its storied history, The City By The Bay has been at the vanguard of pivotal events in cultural shifts. The Beat Generation, the hippie movement, the Summer of Love, Timothy Leary’s Human Be-In, the psychedelic swirlings of the ‘70s, the glory of the Gay Pride Movement – you name it, it probably happened in San Francisco first. It’s only fitting that San Francisco would birth a band like Wooden Shijps. Serving up space rock with a visceral, raw and punishingly repetitious and otherworldly edge, founding member and lead guitarist Ripley Johnson and his shipmates have managed to seize the reins of what we know to be dance rock, and subsequently turn it on its ear into something that’s innately recognisable yet aloof and alien at the same time. And it is this sensibility that Johnson brings to his side project, Moon Duo. Through a clutch of EPs and two solid albums – the most recent of which, the bewitching Circles, was released late last year – Johnson and his longtime partner Sanae Yamada have crafted a sound that fuses lo-fi fuzz and sonic reverbs that, simply put, are heavy. Yamada, speaking by phone from Moon Duo’s world
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headquarters in Portland, Oregon, explains to me that the band was formed in 2009 originally out of a sense of frustration. “Wooden Shijps were starting to get a lot of really interesting offers for tours and shows,” she explains to me, “and it was really hard for them to all tour at the same time – and I think that was particularly frustrating for Ripley, so he had this idea that if we were to start a band it would cut down on all those problems. So when [Moon Duo] originated, the idea was that we would say ‘yes’ to everything!” Circles is a particularly impressive piece of work – a heady, crunchy and delicious maelstrom of organs, percussion and squalling guitars that surrounds the listener in a steely embrace of feedback, noise, and fetching rhythms. It’s like primitive dance music on an epic scale.
MORE ACTS FOR MILLER CITY SESSIONS Miller Genuine Draft announced the final global DJs to join its Miller City Sessions, which has 100 national events until April. From Las Vegas are “Vegas Sound” pioneer Warren Peace of XS and Jason Lema from Marquee. See facebook.com/ MillerBeerANZ for more on tour.
MAJOR NAMES FOR APRA’S PDAs Finalists for APRA’s 2013 APRA Professional Development Awards (PDAs) include Matt Corby, Thomas Busby, Husky Gawenda, Jordie Lane, Andy Bull, Andrew Burford, Dewayne Everettsmith and Leah Flanagan among the 36 finalists. Full list, apra-amcos.com.au/pda. The eight winners from six categories get a $30,000 package, and will be announced March 25.
DILLON NAYLOR COLLATES 30 YEARS OF UNDERGROUND ART
Ballarat-based artist and comic book writer Dillon Naylor has been an integral part of the Melbourne underground/alternative music scene. He’s created comics and CD covers for Area 7 and The Fireballs, and tour posters for Beastie Boys, Powderfinger and the Pushover Festival. Now he’s collated these, along with 30 years of early horror comics, sketches and notes into a book after a two month search to find the originals. A Brush With Darkness is out through Milk Shadow Books (milkshadowbooks.com).
VALE GEOFF MORRIS
Geoff Morris, Bendigo-based president of the Central Victorian Community Broadcasters and bluegrass radio presenter, has died at 72. Trained as a classical pianist, he discovered bluegrass at a folk festival and it changed his life. From the early ‘90s he was on Triple C FM and Phoenix FM, and hosted the WallTo-Wall show on worldwidebluegrass.com for many years. Last December he gave up the show as he needed high-dose radiation therapy to treat an aggressive tumor discovered in his head and neck. Blind from birth, he also proved an inspiration: he went on to get arts and law degrees and, with his seeing-eye dog Milo, repeatedly attended bluegrass events in the U.S. He also held various positions at the Institute for the Blind. Last week he was remembered as a kind and cheerful man, “a true gentleman” a friend commented.
GERNER QUITS PUB GROUP
Co-founder Julian Gerner has quit the Melbourne Pub Group, the Sunday Age reported. The Group owns the Prince of Wales, the Albert Park, Middle Park and Newmarket hotels. Gerner wants to get into new projects including a boxing initiative based on cricket’s 20/20 format. The Sunday Age piece said the Pub Group had been hit by tough trading conditions at some properties including the Prince of Wales on which it spent $5 million in 2011, and the Cellar Bar on which it spent $1.5 million. The article added, “Company sources have also claimed there was a growing disquiet among directors regarding Mr. Gerner’s ‘rock’n’roll lifestyle’ which reached flashpoint over Christmas.”
WANNA VOLUNTEER FOR BOOGIE 7? The seventh Boogie Festival is held on Easter Weekend (Friday March 29 - Sunday March 31) at Bruzzy’s Farm in Tallarook. It is seeking volunteers to work across a variety of areas including bar bussing, catering, environmental management, site runners, ticketing, traffic marshals and more. You put in 12 hours over two shifts, some which start at 7am and finish at 2am. In exchange for their contribution volunteers receive a ticket to the festival, a rad limited edition Boogie t-shirt, return train travel and the satisfaction of helping bring together an amazing festival. More info at boogie.net.au. Deadline for submission is Saturday March 16. A meeting will be held at 7.30pm on Tuesday March 19.
WORKSHOP: GETTING YOUR MUSIC OUT THERE Not for profit record label Sound of Melbourne is holding a fourhour workshop for unsigned songwriters, musicians, bands and would-be entrepreneurs. It’s a DIY guide on how to get your music out there. Topics include what to do once you’ve written a “We’re into music about repetition – I think that certainly the early rock‘n’roll was a great example of early dance music, and modern dance music is so predominantly electronicallyorientated,” Yamada says. “These days, it seems, if you want dance music you go to a techno or a rave, and you expect electronic music to inspire the bodies to move. But people don’t expect that from rock‘n’roll necessarily anymore! It’s a primal thing,” she continues, “it’s the essence of rock‘n’roll, dancing.” For the writing of Circles, Yamada and Johnson decamped to their on-again/off-again isolated cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where their imaginations could run riot. How did that isolation amongst nature influence their sound? “[We were] up in the mountains, and we didn’t know anybody up there and there was really nothing going on,” she reveals, “so we would just sit in this house we were living in and look out at this beautiful natural scenery. Most of the time we spent there was in the winter, and it was really peaceful to take a break from touring and it was gorgeous there, because there was a lot of snow, but there’s also a lot of sun.” Taking its title from the 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson essay of the same name, Circles expounds on what is called “the flying Perfect”. From its buzzing opening track Sleepwalker to the epic (in scale and in length) Rolling Out, this new record is a product not only of time and place, but also of love and trust. Yamada and Johnson, who’ve known and been with one another since 2004, make amazing music that swirls and drifts and encircles the psyche like a shark on the scent of blood. “It’s interesting,” Yamada admits when asked if the musical
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LIFELINES Expecting: Jimmy and Jane Barnes’ 27-year-old drummer and producer son Jackie and wife Stephanie have their first child due in August. Dating: Seal might be back in Australia for The Voice taping, but he’s being linked with actress Erin Cahill soon to appear on ABC’s Red Widow. Split: Brit singer KT Tunstall and her drummer husband Luke Bullen after four years’ marriage. They began dating just before she became successful. In Court: a Czech Republic court acquitted Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe of causing a fan’s death at a 2010 concert after he was pushed off the stage. Arrested: a 44-year-old man has been charged with running over Usher’s 11-year-old stepson in a jetski accident, causing his death. Arrested: an argument between a couple in a motel in Cleveland, Ohio, about who was better – Slash or Van Halen – went out of control. Staff called cops, cops checked their database and discovered the couple had outstanding warrants. Suing: Sony hits a 47-year-old Swedish fan for $233,000 for leaking Beyoncé’s album online. Suing: LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy claims that Tim Goldsworthy, who set up DFA Records with him and Jonathan Galkin, breached contract by not providing the services he was supposed to, and “unjustly enriched” himself by using the company credit card. Three years ago, Goldsworthy abruptly left New York and returned to London without telling DFA. Died: Chris Torpy, singer with Sydney experimental metal band We Lost The Sea took his life, the band confirmed on a Facebook posting. Died: Bobby Rogers, co-founder of Motown group The Miracles, 73, after a long illness. With Smokey Robinson he co-wrote The Temptations’ The Way You Do The Things You Do, The Contours’ First I Look At The Purse and The Miracles’ Going To A Go-Go. Died: British guitarist Alvin Lee, best known as frontman of blues-rockers Ten Years After, 68, after complications following routine surgery. song, setting up a business, associations to join, funding options, mixing and mastering, graphics, packaging, press and media, and advertising options. It is held on Sunday April 7 at Ferntree Gully Arts Centre & Library from 1pm ‘til 4pm. For more info email Joe Grimes, soundofmelbourne@mail.com.
“MUSIC IN MORELAND” FORUM As part of the Brunswick Music Festival, Music Victoria presents a free discussion on the past, present and future of music in the City of Moreland. Musician Sime Nugent, band booker Cat Leahy, City of Moreland Cr Meghan Hopper, Peter Leman (Brunswick Music Festival) and Bek Duke (Music Victoria) will discuss how the local music community has changed, what the future of music in the City is, and the issues facing venues, musicians and music lovers. It’s on Monday March 18 at 6pm at Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, corner Glenlyon Rd and Sydney Rd, Brunswick.
APPLY FOR MELBOURNE JAZZ FRINGE FESTIVAL COMMISSION The Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival is calling for submissions for its Festival Commission. It provides $1,500 to a composer to write an extended work of at least 30 minutes for an ensemble and also provides rehearsal and performance fees for up to 10 ensemble players. The commissioned work is to be presented at the 2013 Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival, on Sunday May 5 at Northcote Town Hall. Previous commissions have resulted in the creation of extraordinary new works by Tilman Robinson, Gian Slater, Fran Swinn, Jex Saarelaht, Colin Hopkins, Erik Griswold, and Ren Walters. More info, melbournejazzfringe.com, deadline is Friday March 15.
BROADWAY UNPLUGGED LAUNCHES IN MELBOURNE Broadway Unplugged, the music theatre and cabaret event which found success in Sydney and Brisbane, launched in Melbourne earlier this month. The show, founded by George Youakim, is broken into two: sets by artists and then an open mic segment which has uncovered some great talent. It is held at the Butterfly Club in Carson Place. See thebutterflyclub.com. The first
language she and her partner share influences the sound they make together. “It’s interesting because there was already enough time and history in that our relationship within the band is only one facet of how we know each other – a history is helpful in terms of not letting the band become … everything.” MOON DUO bring their unique sonic sensibilities to The Espy on Friday March 15 (with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), The Corner Hotel on Saturday March 16 (with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) and the Northcote Social Club on Sunday March 17, supported by Children Of The Wave. Circles is out now through Fuse.