BIGSOUND 2010: Being There

Self-confessed industry conference junkie IAN ROGERS reports on the final two days of BIGSOUND in Brisbane. Photos by ELLENI TOUMPAS.

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I love music industry conferences. There, I said it. I can never work out why other music writers aren’t so fascinated by them. Obviously going to them is an ordeal but it’s almost always worth the punishment. These things are hotbeds of naivety, clashing ideologies and monstrous rhetoric; all the good stuff, all the best stuff. Luckily, while I’m all the things that people who dread music conferences are, I’m also reinforced by something even more brutal: academia. I’m a guy who stares down with cold, scholarly detachment into the “long plastic hallway” of the Australian commercial music industry and see only narrative struggle and drama. I think, yes, yes, come all ye struggling musicians, bring me your failures; industry stooges, speak now, tell us; delegates drink now, network now, showcase now or forever hold your peace. I told you, I love music industry conferences.

(I do love them. But I love paying my rent on time a little more. So unfortunately – due to work commitments – I miss the entirety of day one of BIGSOUND. A pity, yes, but this shorter stay was enough. Last year after the full three days, I started acting a little out-of-character: yelling at hospitality staff, listening to The Temper Trap, for a whole month I referred to Glen Wheatley as “a pretty good guy”. It got hairy there for a while.)

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] [Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Thursday, September 9

My first glimpse of BIGSOUND 2010 is Violent Femmes bass player (and current Hobart resident) Brian Ritchie onstage with writer/label owner Stuart Coupe. I’m as interested in Coupe as I am Ritchie and his questions manage to untangle some of highs and lows of Ritchie’s career. For example: Brian chose a life in music after retiring from a career working machines in a cardboard box factory, The Femmes have lost approximately $200,000 per annum in catalogue sales since the advent of digital piracy, they actually wanted Nirvana to headline their Australian tour but the band refused. He tells a very familiar story in a plain-spoken way: you have to want it bad enough to have zero options. And sitting behind him is about a million other bass players who should have stayed in the cardboard box factory.

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The 10.30am “Asian Music Master Class” convinced me that going to Asia is probably a bad idea. That continent may be geographically close, but it’s still very distant as a music business concern. For instance: 80 percent of the domestic music sales in Japan are local (hell yes, Japan!) and thus international bands are duking it out for the remaining 20 percent with Kanye and Gaga and the entire history of recorded music. Panelist Paul Curtis sells it to attendees as “an adventure” and he would know. And let me pause to note that Curtis is wearing red pants. He also sports long, almost-shoulder length hair and a graying moustache and somehow this all works together. Remember this, it becomes more important later.

Before lunch, Catherine Bottrill of UK Enviro think-tank Julie’s Bicycle leads the audience through an online gadget designed to calculate the carbon emissions of touring. It’s good work – essential for industry - but also a tall ask for many I’d think. Financially speaking, the average national or international tour by an independent Australian band is a bit like taking the hire car straight from the airport and dumping it in the river. Today, local band Drawn From Bees are used as a case-study. Their last tour took the earth for $3600. Their bass player pleads guilty in front of all of us. No one “tsk-tsks”.

Next up was “Music – It’s A Life Thing” and as cheesy as that sounded, it was either that or “Taking On The World – Part 2” (let me guess, Part 1 was all about great songs) or the “Booking Agents Master Class” which, just for fun, I’d like to imagine was only attended by other booking agents who spoke to each other solely about booking each other’s bands until a meditative om-like trance was induced. Among the music lifers on “It’s A Life Thing” were writer/journalist/reported Everett-True-nemesis Michael Azerrad, John O’Donnell (hopefully the only person on earth who likes Pavement and Cold Chisel) and triple j’s Richard Kingsmill. Everyone talks about how great a life spent listening to music is but also how much they like avoiding it on holidays. All of them are men with receding hairlines and I think to myself “I am probably going to lose my hair too” as they talk. Then right at the point where I don’t feel I can be any more vacuous or snarky I jot down in my notebook that Kingsmill is wearing black cargo pants in 2010 and I underline 2010 and put an exclamation mark next to it. It provokes an unguarded and honest moment.

(What do these pants mean? I don’t know. Here is a man that works in radio and has done for many, many years. Does he need nice pants? Maybe not. Then again, you’d have to be a very, very stubborn person to believe in cargo pants in the present. Maybe stubborn is good. Maybe stubborn is what triple j needs in it’s upper echelons. Maybe those pants are the finger in the dyke, holding backing something much, much worse? Or maybe, a man wearing cargo pants is steering us? Arbitrating taste? That’s worrying. Or maybe, just maybe, it was laundry day. Understanding music is always this difficult and petty.)

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The last and best panel of the day is chaired by sound artist/label owner Lawrence English and concerns “making a difference”. The idea that various business people and musicians with a diverse range of social justice/environmental issues would form any type of consensus was ludicrous but they almost did it here. Catherine Bottrill expanded on her environmental research and how it fit into product aesthetics which was then taken up by Living End manager Rae Harvey as a cost/benefit scenario which led to campaigning by artists and through to the agenda of Mark Grose and his Skinnyfish Music roster. On the ground, in the doing, a lot of complex problems got momentarily and necessarily reduced to simply what needed to happen. Harvey’s comment that she “sleeps well at night” and cannot lie may suggest a type of cultural pathology considering the company she keeps, but it was nice to hear all the panelists speak so pragmatically. Tim Levinson (aka Urthboy) really nailed it down suggesting that, as important as “the issues” are, maybe the artists should first walk their talk by reconsidering how they treat other artists.

(Maybe I should be nicer to the people I write about? But he did say other artists.)

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] [Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

In the evening, Sydney’s Richard In Your Mind showcased across the road from the Judith Wright Centre in what is called the Artisan Gallery Stage but is – in fact – much better described by another punter as “that fucking car park”. Under a tent, in front of a couple of dozen delegates and punters, the band worked through some pleasant enough, reverberated pop. Described quite studiously as “psychedelic” in the program I expected something a little more ragged and weird. But I liked it and in another venue (any other venue) with more time up my sleeve, I feel I might warmed to it a little more.

I dashed off to catch Pikelet at Rics Café. This is the first time I’ve seen her with a full band and it worked. It was splintery and – dare I say it – a little confusing at times but she has great songs, unexpected and layered. There’s still plenty of room in the band to hear Evelyn do interesting things with loops (no mean feat) and she doesn’t disappoint, multitasking percussion and backing vocals as she goes. Michael Azerrad bounced on his heels in the crowd (I think it was dancing, I hope so) – with his fingers pushed firmly into his ears.

The Wilson Pickers are a drummer-less group of alt-country/bluegrass players from Brisbane and Victoria. I expected to be bored by them and was initially but over the course of a half-dozen songs I came round. Their cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ wasn’t an overly surprising choice but how far down into it they dug was; they managed to wring every inch of loathing and desperation out of it. The fact they followed it with an original and didn’t finish flatly was impressive.

I complete my night back in the car park for Parades. They were bombastic and polished and there are parts I liked and parts I could live without. The fact that industry seems so attentive to this stuff surprises me to be honest. It’s not exactly straight-forward pop music but then again, they go where the kids are and tonight all of the paying customers are here, swanning around and dancing.

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Friday, September 10

I started the final day with “Overproduced? The Real Role of a Great Producer”. Bad Seeds producer Victor Van Vugt told a few good stories, as one would expect. Dance producer Simon Lewicki (ie. Groove Terminator) talked about making pop music and while he was pretty jazzed on it, I thought it sounded like the most unromantic creative process imaginable. No real answer was reached but by approximation it seemed that the real role of a great producer was primarily curatorial, it was about the best that can be made by whatever means including, in this day and age, home recordings, new technology and co-producing with increasingly knowledgeable artists.

Dan Condon (of The Grates/Time Off Magazine) started his panel with a fairly direct statement, “We’re all tired and we want to talk shit for a while.” Any panel discussion on the hazards and high-times of touring featuring Peter Jesperson, the manager of The Replacements, was a no-brainer I figured. Collectively the speakers also had touring associations with Iggy Pop, Black Sabbath, The Happy Mondays and Wilco, so the primary topic of conversation was drugs. Drugs and doing more drugs while on lots of drugs. The panelists also discussed (not joking): finding a dead guy in a crowd, shitting, vomiting on planes and glassing the road crew. There was a lot of information flying around – not all of it appealing – but somehow Jake Stone from bluejuice cuts through with his pitch-perfect take on life on the road, “I thought it was going to be interesting and exciting! And it was…interesting.”

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] [Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

BIGSOUND 2010 finished with Robert Forster. There he sat, immaculately suited up, methodically answering Noel Mengel’s questions with all the regal air one would expect. You’d hate him if it weren’t for the fact he’s so damn honest – and not directly honest, he’s not humble or frank, no just incredibly consistent and thorough. At one point he reminds the crowd that his early success was won on the back of four “classic” songs without a hint of doubt or irony. He thanks Mengel at every complement. He pontificates, praises The Saints and refuses to grumble. At the tail end of hours and hours and hours of talk, Forster looks around the room, describes his songs and the songs he’s been a part of and blows his nose, placing each used tissue into the bin someone has placed beside him on the stage.

And so it ends. It was a better year this year. As you may have noticed I spent two days at a music industry conference without enduring a lot of straight-up business talk. To the credit of organisers, there were actual alternatives. In fact, much of what I saw was about the culture of music business as much as it was about its practice. Which is another fascinating part of BIGSOUND: it’s starting to become increasingly self-reflexive. And well it should, nothing is really assured in the contemporary music industry – even the value of business instruction in this setting. It’s not hard to imagine “Industry Conferences: Are They Worth It?” appearing on the program at BIGSOUND 2011.

Whether BIGSOUND was worth it for paying delegates or showcasing bands this year remains to be seen (and isn’t that interesting). What interests me are the people you find at these things. They scare me sometimes. In a sense this is at the heart of why I can love something as unlovable as BIGSOUND: I can tune it out a little and look around. Stories aside, I love music industry conferences because I enjoy the luxury of never really needing to be there.

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MORE PHOTOS: BIGSOUND Live Day 1, BIGSOUND Live Day 2