Black Wire Records: ‘It’s Going To Cost Lots Of Money’

Like so many DIY venues, Sydney’s Black Wire Records is facing threats from all sides. A weekend benefit headlined by Royal Headache will raise funds, but there are larger issues at hand. MAX EASTON sits down with Tom Scott, one of the not-for-profit space’s all-volunteer staff.

Situated along Parramatta Road where Annandale meets Leichhardt and Petersham, Black Wire Records appears to be just another miscellaneous shopfront. Amongst the used car dealerships, dotted restaurants and relics of Sydney’s past, Black Wire’s Tom Scott refers to this stretch as a cultural wasteland, halted from any chance of gentrification by decade-long planning debacles and the persistent hum of passing traffic. Hidden in plain sight is one of Sydney’s most vital DIY venues – also a record store and gallery. For almost three years it has acted as the founding ground for many of the city’s rising acts and helped to prop up the live music scene while the newspapers heralded its death.

In a tumultuous culmination of events, Black Wire is facing a series of challenges that threaten its continued operation. In the week preceding its first-ever benefit weekend, it has faced not only council compliance requests, but an unexpected copyright breach notice from music industry body APRA (Australasian Performance Rights Association). With the aim of raising money to cover these costs, dampen the impact of regular running costs and replace their long-borrowed PA system, an all-Sydney bill of bands has been assembled in celebration. Royal Headache, Pure Evil Trio, Mere Women and Yes I’m Leaving will all play over a weekend dedicated to Black Wire – a growing Sydney institution surrounded by constant threats.

Between the distant whines of My Bloody Valentine and the sirens, horns and engine noises of Sydney in transit sits the soft-spoken voice of Tom Scott, who opens the door at the start of every gig and goes to bed in the same building once the last bottle is put away. “I find the clean-up cathartic,” he smiles. Over a couple of hours we speak about the state of Sydney, the Australian music industry and the inadequacies which led to the necessity for Black Wire’s existence.

(Photos by Shaun Tenzenmen)

Meeting The Need

Blackwire isn’t exactly a traditional music venue. Where did Sydney’s need for spaces like it come from?
I grew up in this local government area, and pretty much all of my formative gig-going years saw me going to more shows at the Manly Youth Centre than anything around here. It was a real wasteland in terms of local culture, but there has always seemed to be a real high importance placed on imported and appropriated culture, this perception of wider culture. But there’s always been really little that is done about supporting or even assisting actual local bands and culture and artists.

Do you think that’s why the Marrickville warehouses and Black Wire started?
It’s an immediate response to that kind of culture, or lack of culture; that’s essentially where we are coming from. All our experience is from either illegal or grey-area things prior to this, so this is an attempt at creating a space that has at the very least an air of legitimacy and is able to withstand attempts to shut it down – so it’s essentially sustainable. The sad thing is that a lot of the warehouses and other spaces are just defeated, often by a lot of the same issues that we’re facing.

It’s a shame. They have so much more cultural and artistic value than they’re given credit for.
And you can’t artificially create that. Those spaces and Black Wire are all products of the people involved. I don’t mean that in terms of us: it’s a product of everyone who comes, and the bands who play; the community essentially creates it itself. It works because it’s a manifestation of that.

Do you think that’s why these places can feel so much more comfortable to attend than traditional venues?
I think it’s the breaking down of barriers. In the larger venues, there’s a performer-attendee gap. Performers and musicians do fantastic things and are worthy of respect and even awe in some cases, but they’re not superhuman, untouchable people. It’s important to recognise that it’s something anyone can do. Particularly in a place like this, you’re standing right next to them; they’re there before and after the sets. They’re just there, and it breaks down this barrier. You’re less removed from the whole experience, which I think makes it more worthwhile.

Is there room for more spaces like Blackwire?
For sure, I would like to think so. I think it should happen, and I think if anything we’re demonstrating that it can be done. Not only based on the amount of people who want to do stuff, but the amount of stuff going on. To put it kind of simply, if there’s more places for people to do things, more people do things! There’s definitely space for it, and I think we should embrace it. Maybe there is potentially a limit to the amount of spaces you can have in any one city, sure, but we’re so far away from even approaching that in Sydney. I think anyone that is going to do anything in an ethical and sound way that supports the artists is going to be fantastic.

Changing Of The Guard

There are a handful of new, conventionally legitimate venues starting to open or become more prominent around Sydney (The Square in Haymarket, the library in Surry Hills, Brighton Up Bar in Darlinghurst). Do you think those take away the need for DIY spaces?
Sydney needs more venues, it’s an undeniable fact. More so, it needs more well-run venues with staff and bookers who understand bands, not people who see bands as people to be taken advantage of or enemies, which is what almost every experience I’ve had with pubs and large venues in Sydney has been like. It’s an antagonistic relationship, which is just wrong, and it doesn’t make sense either! You’d think it would make good business sense to be an ethically run, supportive venue. I’m cautiously optimistic that things like the Newtown Social Club can be beneficial to Sydney, but I don’t want to pre-empt it. All of these other places, including us, exist because of this void that was created, which is not a new thing either; there has always been fits and starts of people doing stuff like this in Sydney. There’s a long, hellish kind of situation where it’s been a dire environment for bands and the gig-going public.

“It was one of the most absurd experiences I’ve ever had. I got free sandwiches, which was good. I was low on money and hadn’t been eating very well. I had to walk down to Broadway because I couldn’t afford public transport!”

It feels like there’s a real shift away from the handful of established venues towards a number of smaller, new venues.
There’s been this horrible tradition of what I kind of envisage as the balding, pony-tailed rock dude who seems to rule everything in this town. They’re this kind of bitter, failed musician who became a music professional, who have taken their resentment at the world out at the community of Sydney. I don’t like those people! They all worked in something for Kylie Minogue, or had some kind of sub-producing credit for INXS…

Just old remnants of the industry model?
Yeah. Look, the industry model is just fundamentally flawed. It always has been, but particularly recently. They’re just refusing to accept any kind of progression of how people engage with music. They have this head-in-the-sand approach that is, again, an antagonistic relationship that the music industry has with the people who engage with and play music, which is just backwards.

Which is why people are naturally drawn to these kind of passion projects.
There are just different cultures. A lot of people see things as having less cultural significance and inherent value if they don’t have a monetary value attached to it, which I think is completely wrong.

‘That’s Just More Fuel For The Nervous Breakdown’

Where do local council and state government fit into the live music scene?
Councils need to be supportive of these things. They don’t need to be reacting to people who are already doing something, they need to become proactive about supporting it in order to actually encourage it. Maybe it’s an overly litigious scenario, but for some unknown reason they’ve got it wrong.

Maybe it’s just fear of the unknown. It’s surprisingly under the radar of a lot of people, let alone your stereotypical councilman.
Well yeah, we’ve been doing stuff for almost two and a half years, hundreds of things with hundreds of artists and internationals before they even knew what was going on! It’s just this kind of detachment from the community they claim to represent. It’s extremely disappointing and counterproductive.

Not just councils, though. You have the press and government lobbies telling you that live music has gone to shit. It’s damaging to the reputation of what is a pretty thriving city of music.
Even federal and state funding bodies have got the complete wrong end of the stick. I went to a really depressing event [a series of workshops under Music NSW’s Indent banner] with Brooke Olsen [Dirty Shirlows], Chris Hearn [Terrace Bar] and lots of other people who were already doing fantastic stuff, people who just needed a little help. Essentially from the workshops we were going to, all they wanted to fund was for someone to reinvent iTunes. They just had this completely detached, corporate approach towards funding, which was entirely depressing. It was one of the most absurd experiences I’ve ever had. I got free sandwiches, which was good. [Laughs] I was low on money and hadn’t been eating very well. I had to walk down to Broadway because I couldn’t afford public transport!

Just to be told that there’s no way you could possibly be funded?
Yeah, and for it to be demonstrated so clearly! They employed some ridiculous consultancy firm to sit there and tell us about it. They were talking about these ridiculous notions, and they were only interested in things that were going to earn millions of dollars. They weren’t worried if it was going to have cultural significance or if it was worthwhile in any kind of broad sense, it was just to do with earning shitloads of money. That was where they placed the value. All the people in the audience were people involved with the production and showcasing of music, whereas they were only worried about sales platforms and ways of essentially reinventing iTunes. They were using all these examples of these ridiculous, redundant platforms, and at some point we mentioned that most of the bands we deal with go through Bandcamp and Soundcloud … they had no idea what either of those were!

Have you looked into or applied for many grants?
Not me personally. Other people have for Black Wire, but it’s a really long and frustrating process. The whole funding structure is set up in a way that encourages people to become good at applying for funding rather than doing something worthwhile that deserves funding. That’s not to say that good projects don’t get funded – I just find that it’s overwhelmingly inappropriate. As much as funding and government acknowledgement would be helpful in a lot of ways, it’s almost good to be separate from that. You’ve got no responsibility to be fulfilling certain criteria. And even just knowing that you’re doing it all yourself and not being assisted, maybe there’s a certain value to being independent. Not just of corporate things like major labels, but being independent of major government as well. Not in an anarchist sense though!

Which ties into some of the things that Nic Warnock was talking about recently in regards to AIR [Australian Independent Record Labels Association] losing their way…
And he’s absolutely right. AIR is just fucked. I think they’re shit-scared that if they deny all these people who are funded and distributed by major labels and only dealt with truly independent labels, they won’t have anything good left. They’ve got so little faith in Australian music, which just shows that they’re not actually listening to Australian music. For them to be celebrating some of these labels is absurd. It may fit a criteria that’s been set by someone, but if you’re funded, manufactured or distributed by major labels, you are no longer independent of them! It’s almost offensive in the way that they’re trying to co-opt a culture of independent labels, because their vested interests are in music and art and the bands themselves and they’re trying to co-opt that. It’s not to say that a lot of them don’t have good intentions, but it’s just not independent.

On industry bodies like AIR, you recently received a copyright infringement notice by APRA. Is that a bit disconcerting to be pretty much fined by someone in place to support music culture?
As much as I think APRA do fantastic things and are really important for musicians, it just seems a bit misguided and punitive. I don’t fully grasp the situation we’re in just yet, because there’s a lot of legalese. Thankfully there’s a lot of people here who are helping us out with it, which is helping me avoid a nervous breakdown. But yeah, I can kind of understand where they’re coming from, but it’s just a bit out of context.

Are these kinds of organisations not fully adapted to DIY spaces yet?
Well yeah, it’s a definite flaw. In the correspondence we’ve had with the people there, they’re supposedly aware of the struggles facing DIY venues, but it hasn’t been taken into account in the criteria of what they’re actually doing. But we’re still in the middle of it, so I don’t know whether to be depressed and horrified by it, or accepting. There are possibilities of waivers and all kinds of things, and there’s every chance they’re just fulfilling an obligation that they have, but we just have to do it formally, which can be a bit scary.

A whole bunch of big words on a whole bunch of paper…
[Laughs] “Breach of copyright” and other scary combinations of words. The bands are in charge of who gets paid and how much they get paid here. It’s the copyright holders who dictate what people pay them here. We don’t dictate how people get paid at all – so to be billed and potentially fined … that’s just more fuel for the nervous breakdown.

Overcoming Threats

You’ve been operating here pretty safely for almost three years now, but there’s always word of some kind of residential complaint. What has been the public’s reception to Black Wire?
For so long it was just overwhelmingly positive. People were excited just to have something happening. They felt safer coming back at night because there were people around. It has only ever been essentially one resident who has caused any problems.

“I have to admit that there are some pretty attractive pissing points around here for people staggering along late at night. A lot of dark alcoves.”

What was the problem there?
A lot of it is based on simple prejudice of how people look, which I can kind of understand, but it’s a difficult thing to deal with; they can’t actually hear anything from the shop. There were incidents of people pissing on a neighbour’s doorstep, which is obviously completely unacceptable, so we had to move the whole shop around to make it more accessible for people to be spending time out the back near the toilet. The nature of Parramatta Road, being on the walking trail between pubs, I’m not exactly surprised. I have to admit that there are some pretty attractive pissing points around here for people staggering along late at night. A lot of dark alcoves. The most recent pissing incident actually happened when we weren’t even open. It just led to us being blamed for it anyway, which led to outlandish claims about bringing property values down in the area, and being responsible for graffiti, and then the general decline of Parramatta Road, which is just absurd!

Is the council compliance stuff you’re going through at the moment a result of that resident complaint?
Yeah, that one residential complaint sent it to compliance officers and they’re obligated to investigate complaints. They essentially said the complaint wasn’t an issue. Apart from us having a neighbourly responsibility, which we absolutely accept, we didn’t have a responsibility for people’s behaviour once they’ve left the premises. What they actually found was that no one who has been in this property had ever gotten planning permission to be a retail shop. We signed a retail lease and took it as a given that it was a retail space, but when council had a look at it, they found that it was actually listed as a restaurant. Supposedly that was what was on the forms for the only person who had ever put in a planning application, but the owners said, “We’ve been here since the Whitlam years, and it has never been a restaurant!” It used to be a computer shop, a newsagent before that and an antique shop, but apparently none of them ever had planning permission.

We opened here after the changes to the Place of Public Entertainment Laws, which made it so that we were able to have bands playing without planning permission for it. It was with that understanding that we started here. But when the council found that we didn’t have planning permission to even have a shop, it meant that was essentially voided. So we have to get permission to go from being a hypothetical restaurant that has never existed and put in a development application for a change of use to being a retail space. Just in a bureaucratic sense, we have to deal with that, and anyone who has dealt with local council bureaucracy would be familiar with the myriad of difficulties and hair loss involved. It’s an ongoing thing. I try to avoid being optimistic about it; you have to prepare yourself for constant disappointment in this thing.

Is that part of the reason for the benefit weekend? It’s a bunch of things. The community has been supportive and amazingly helpful; I can never take it for granted, it never ceases to amaze me. But at the same time, there are things that are unavoidable; it’s going to cost lots of money. Because we’re non-profit and volunteer-run, the most important thing for us – equal in importance to having somewhere for bands to play – is for the bands to be paid enough to be able to be sustainable, particularly for touring bands. We’ve always been acutely aware of the fact that we have to take as little as possible and pay bands as much as possible, but that means we’re constantly just scraping through. Any extra expenses that arise become unmanageable. The benefit will be recovering some inevitable expenses for this application, but also just running costs.

If Jagermeister walked up to your door tonight and offered you $100,000 to get out of the shit, what would you do?
There’d be a couple of levels to that. I couldn’t live with myself, for one, and I would never live down the fact that I’ve given so much shit to people who accept those offers over the years. [Laughs] I resent companies like Red Bull and Jagermeister parasitically attaching themselves to things and throwing money at them just to create an image for themselves. It detracts from anything that anybody is doing. I say this from a position where I have no responsibilities or family to support, so I have a certain privileged position, but I would never get involved in something like that. I would find an offer entertaining ... but it would just be taking the piss. It would completely negate what we’re trying to do.

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Black Wire is a record shop and all-ages performance space that’s not-for-profit and artist- and volunteer-run. For upcoming gigs and other info, check their blog.

Black Wire Benefit Weekend:
Fri, Nov 9 – Listening party & BBQ @ Black Wire Records, Annandale, NSW
Sat, Nov 10 – Pure Evil Trio, Yes I’m Leaving, Hira Hira, Making @ Black Wire Records, Annandale NSW
Sun, Nov 11 – Royal Headache, Mere Women, Thorax, Glory Hole, Hence Therefore @ Red Rattler, Marrickville, NSW