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Tonight In Sydney: City Conversations 2013
Dave Faulkner from the Hoodoo Gurus and Dig It Up Festival.
Let's start tonight's conversation right now with a few rebuttals to the key points from the presser for this evening's City Of Sydney-hosted event, "You Can't Stop the Music".
Are we really attempting to mimic the music scene of 40 years ago? It goes without saying that the current live scene is a LOT different from when Jimmy and the boys were getting paid in Resches dinner ales for knocking out a 3-hour sweat-soaked set at your local. For one, MySpace was still hosted on a mainframe in Tom's bedroom until 1987.
A slightly skewed statistic considering 39 million of these people were gerned-out attendees of Parklife 2012.
It's OK guys/gals/dawgs, The Oscars Group, the recent purchasers of the Annandale Hotel, have vowed to continue operating the venue in it's current state.
Surely, a better pun would have been: "Is our live music scene in a temper trap?"
Dig It Up is a fantastic, non-traditional approach to the well-worn music festival formula, with an interesting approach to line-up curation (a mix of "classic" bands (read: your Dad's favourite bands) and new up-n-comers) as well as a community focus — hosted across multiple venues of various sizes. It's bloody tops that it, at least judging by the fact it's run more once, appears to be a successful event.
Including John Wardle (Sydney Live Music and Live Performance Taskforce), Meagan Loader (triple j), Mark Gerber (Oxford Art Factory) and Brett Murrihy (Artist Voice). Would have been good to get a speaker from outside of the main channels though, just for a different perspective, eg: Nick from RIP Society, the operators of Red Rattler, The Big Steves, Dr Ianto Ware, that guy from the Sydney Blues Society with the "amazing head of hair".
But probably the most important fact is that the night will also feature live performances from Jep and Dep (Dazza Cross' relatively new alt-alt-country-folk project) and The Laurels, aka the loudest band in Australia.
The event will be taking place at Sydney Town Hall (483 George Street) from 6:30pm with doors opening around 6pm. It's free, but ticket bookings are essential.
