The Plight of the Sydney Muso by Kip Williams
Musicians in our city face an ugly choice: give up or go elsewhere. Kip Williams finds out why.
Sydney: it’s a city that likes to think it’s one of the best in the world. It’s got commerce and it’s got culture. It’s got natural beauty and it’s got a bustling nightlife. It’s got sport and it’s got… well… there’s a lot of sport. You might even go so far to say it’s the city of opportunity. But for local musicians trying to catch a break, Sydney can often seem like a pretty lonely place. So how does a band or solo artist actually make it in this town? Is it even possible? What is the plight of the Sydney musician?
Band comps, open mics, backyard shows: these are all readily available options to emerging Sydney artists and great ways to shake those first show nerves. But in a city where the main way to score a live gig is by knowing someone already embedded in the music community, how do the new kids on the block crack the scene?
Vijay Khurana is Triple J’s lunchtime presenter and also co-fronts Sydney indie-pop band The Crustaceans, who took out the 2005 Usyd Band Comp. According to Khurana, breaking into the live circuit is harder than it seems. He argues the Sydney music community is a picky one that is less interested with the sound of a new band and more preoccupied with how trendy they are.
“Communities in Sydney can be quite cliquey,” says Khurana. “It can be a little bit of a fashion thing and somehow if you’re deemed by the patriarchs and matriarchs of that community to be cool enough to be on board, then you’ll be on board.
“I’ve had a little bit of experience with Melbourne, having toured their a few times, and it does seem to be less aesthetic [based], less superficial.”
Dylan Baskind is one Sydney muso who laments the lack of musical depth pervading his local community, wishing that he didn’t feel the need to abandon his home town in order to find an audience.
Playing under the pseudonym of Thom North, Baskind’s quirky folk style has scored him some attention in recent months. Last month, his ballad “Top of the World” was named Song of the Week by Sydney radio station FBi. Most musicians would be thrilled with such exposure. Not Baskind. He’d trade it all in any day for a Sydney music scene that fostered its own breed of music.
“When I think about music history,” says Baskind, “I think about the punks in New York who [could] go hang out at CBGB’s, or [Bob] Dylan and folk musicians at the Gaslight. There, everyone was developing a sound and anyone could get up and play and meet people. Why shouldn’t something like that happen in a place like Sydney?”
It’s an idealistic thought; that some day Sydney might take its place in musical history as the birthplace of a new sound. But maybe it’s not completely out of the question.
In recent years Montreal and Toronto have produced a mountain of bands garnering both critical and popular acclaim. Arcade Fire, Feist, Wolf Parade, Broken Social Scene, Peaches, the list goes on, which all goes to show you don’t have to be American or British to produce globally successful acts. Surely if Canadians can do it, Aussies can too, right?
Tobi Chapman, producer of FBi’s breakfast show Up For It, thinks not. This is not because he feels we lack the talent. Rather, Chapman believes the chance for Sydney to become an international musical focal point is long over, arguing that the idea of musical innovation being situated in geography is a thing of the past.
“To strive for a musician’s commune ideal would almost be anachronistic in today’s Sydney,” says Chapman. “Like it or not, increasingly our communities [are being] formed online.”
He makes a valid point. With the explosion of Myspace over the past few years and even with Facebook now becoming more band-friendly, the trend towards online music communities is beginning to seem less like a passing fad and more like the way of the future.
We’ve all heard about the Myspace success stories; Arctic Monkeys, Lilly Allen and, more recently, Kate Nash. But as more and more people jump on the online bandwagon, these cases of mass success increasingly appear like anomalies amongst a sea of wanna-be’s. So if Myspace isn’t a direct gateway to a warm leather chair, fancy fountain pen and a record contract with your name on it, what is it doing for the average musician?
Chapman, Baskind and Khurana all agree that the great advantage of Myspace is its unrivalled ability to connect bands from all over the world, ever-broadening a musician’s pool of inspiration.
“In this Myspace Facebook era,” muses Khurana, “it’s becoming less important for your influences to be about what’s right around you in your home town and it’s becoming easier and easier to not only find music and get inspired by stuff from anywhere in the world, but to make contacts and friends from different places around the world.”
Local act Zeta Puppis is a perfect example of someone who has capitalised on this new avenue for exposure. In mid-2007, Puppis uploaded songs to Myspace, as well as to the Triple J Unearthed website. She did this before ever having played live. Within a month of her tracks being online, Triple J named her Unearthed Feature Artist of the Week and hits to her Myspace skyrocketed.
“[Unearthed] was an incredible opportunity,” says Puppis. “I had people Myspace me and say ‘I really like your stuff, would you like to gig with me?’ or ‘I’d really like to jam with you’. It provided me with these amazing avenues for exposure as a live artist before I was really prepared to understand what the implications of putting myself out there were.”
The Unearthed program is one of several ways that local and national radio stations are trying to bolster Aussie talent. The FBi equivalent is a monthly ‘music open day’, which invites unsigned musicians to bring their recordings into the studio and have them listened to by the station’s music programmer, Dan Zilber. It was this program that led Baskind’s Thom North music to gain heavy rotation. However, when asked what impact he thought the airplay had made on his career as a live performer, his response was frank: “Not much.”
So is having your tune surf the airways any help at all? Khurana, whose three hour radio show is credited with bringing listeners “the best new music and Unearthed discoveries”, is philosophical about the extent to which radio can bolster a musician’s career.
“There’s a misconception,” he argues, “that if a band has a hit song that’s on the radio all the time it’s going to sell records. In my experience that’s not the case. What radio does do is get people to your shows.”
So it’s simple right? Write a song, post it online, get some airplay and hey presto, your gigs are packed out! Wrong. A history of restrictive liquor licence laws, pokies galore and the current dominance of the DJ makes it incredibly competitive to secure a gig at one of the few live music venues left in Sydney.
It’s a situation all too familiar to Baskind: “All the quality venues I’ve played have been because I’ve known someone, who’s known someone else, who’s let me do a support slot. It’s not like I could go in there and say, ‘here’s my CD, let me play’.”
Baskind’s experience is reflective of the disappointing attitude of those who run live venues in Sydney. Sadly, acts aren’t selected on the quality of their music, but on the quantity of their fans.
“It feels as though all [owners] want you to do is bring people through [the door],” says Baskind. “They couldn’t care if you sit up there banging a tin can, if you bring loads of people, they’d still be happy to have you back next week.”
Luckily, all that may be about to change. In early December 2007, Premier Morris Iemma passed legislation decreasing the minimum cost of a music and liqour licence from $15, 500 to just $500, making the task of setting up a live venue in Sydney a greater reality than ever before.
So far there’s been no sign of a musical renaissance in Sydney, but things are looking better. Music orientated venues such as the Oxford Art Factory and Live at Lilifields are slowly beginning to spring up. With any luck more will follow, hopefully shifting the nature of Sydney’s music scene closer to that of Melbourne.
As it stands, you walk down a back alley in Sydney’s CBD and the only thing you’ll find is a stray cat and an overflowing dumpster. Walk down a back alley in Melbourne, however, and you’ll stumble upon the coolest, the hippest and the most live-music-filled clubs, pubs and bars in the entire country. But best of all, the people who run these places are young music lovers like you and me.
“Sydney is currently in a situation where [venues] are run by older people with solid financial backing, who are more about making money than about providing a creative outlet for people,” says Khurana. “If it’s easier and cheaper to get a liquor licence, you’re going to get more indie, alternative and independent clubs and bars opening [and] you’re going to have younger people who have the financial opportunity to start a bar or venue with their friends.”
But whether people in Sydney actually want to go to a bar and see new live music acts is an entirely different question.
Puppis believes the task of luring music punters into these new music-friendly venues is going to be an up-hill battle.
“The rock and roll that was around in the 70s was far more appropriate for pubs,” she says. “[Today], people in Sydney don’t think of going to pubs simply for the sake of seeing live music. [Pubs] have been taken over by the clubbing scene.”
Baskind, on the other hand, puts Sydney’s disinterest in live performances by new local acts down to deep seated cultural attitudes.
“Australia on the whole, but especially Sydney when compared with Melbourne, is an anti-intellectual society,” he says. “It’s a very blokey country… and that makes [music] more of a commodity here than a cultural expression.”
It’s a sentiment quite commonly expressed by Sydney musicians – that small town attitudes hold back Australian artists with big picture plans. Chapman, although not seeing Sydney as strictly anti-intellectual, agrees that Australia needs to rethink its approach towards music if it is to ever properly develop its local talent.
“Often the Australian sense of humour translates to an inability to take anything too seriously,” argues Chapman. “Perhaps that is why bands like Dappled Cities Fly have chosen to move overseas to pursue their career, because an indefinable act such as them is too difficult to properly address here.”
Dappled Cities Fly are an interesting case in point. Despite enviable support slots for acts such as LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse and Tokyo Police Club, not to mention an impressive 7.8 album review by Pitchfork Media, the Sydney indie band remains relatively unknown. They recently joined a growing number of local acts who are abandoning their hometown in favour of overseas cities that are more receptive to innovative sounds.
“It’s really hard for us in this country because we don’t play the most accessible music,” singer Tim Derricourt told Youtube documenter Chestnut in 2007. “Also, there’s only three cities with enough people to come out and see you play, so once you’ve done this country for a couple of years, you just can’t do it anymore.”
The loss of an adventurous band like Dappled Cities Fly seems inevitable in a nation the size of Australia. Khurana certainly thinks so. “We’re a small country; therefore our music scene is not going to be as big or as vibrant as other countries.” Even so, you would hope that they’d be leaving to expand their audience, not to find one.
It’s clear that Sydney isn’t the easiest place to establish a musical career, but changes in licensing laws and the shift towards the formation of online music communities are slowly improving the situation. Cultural attitudes, however, aren’t so easily solved by technology or legislation. Perhaps the only other way to fight the Sydney muso’s plight is the good old fashioned way – with music you can’t ignore. As Khurana rightly points out, “no matter what the scene is or no matter how cool or uncool your band is, at the end of the day it comes down to how good your songs are. If your songs are killer, you’ll end up making it.”