Music City Melbourne

Urban Culture, History and Policy

Shane Homan, Seamus O'Hanlon, Catherine Strong, John Tebbutt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501365713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

How did Melbourne earn its place as one of the world's 'music cities'? Beginning with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, this book explores the development of different sectors of Melbourne's popular music ecosystem in parallel with broader population, urban planning and media industry changes in the city. The authors draw on interviews with Melbourne musicians, venue owners and policy-makers, documenting their ambitions and experiences across different periods, with accompanying spotlights on the gendered, multicultural and indigenous contexts of playing and recording in Melbourne. Focusing on pop and rock, this is the first book to provide an extensive historical lens of popular music within an urban cultural economy that in turn investigates the contemporary nature and challenges of urban music activities and policy.

1

Introduction

In 2005, the city of Melbourne was described by one music/culture writer as central to Australian creativity; ‘its citizens, its suburbs and its climate pervade the lyrics of some of our best-known songs, and have inspired some of the most creative artists to fashion a soundtrack for several generations’ (Kruger 2005a). Indeed, Melbourne was accorded more than a walk-on part in Australian creative life, centrally cast as a principal ‘character’ in which its ‘moods’ account for considerable influence in Australian popular music (ibid.). This might not be too far-fetched, given that Liverpool has sometimes been described as ‘the fifth Beatle’; yet it does align with various narratives that place Melbourne at the centre of recreational and industrial life in relation to popular music. State governments (conservative or centre-left) are ever ready to announce other indexes that confirm Melbourne’s place, especially The Economist Intelligence Unit annual rankings:

… we’re proud to have consistently ranked as one of the world’s top three most liveable cities since the index began in 2002 … Melbourne’s inner-city atmosphere is fuelled by a creative, culturally diverse community and is globally recognised as one of the most concentrated dining and fashion cultures in the world. Our city’s interlocking laneways and the buzzing inner-city precinct reveal one-off boutiques, hidden cafes and world-class restaurants … No matter what time of year you visit, Melbourne city pulses with a dynamic and cutting-edge arts and culture scene (Global Victoria 2020).

It is the particular intersections of space and place, embodied in the city’s live music scenes, that the city is especially proud of, confirmed in various policy reports and annual census data (e.g. Newton and Coyle-Hayward 2018). Based on per capita accounting, government and industry sectors argue that Melbourne is the live music city in the world, ‘beating out the urban super-powers of New York City and London’ (Davino 2018). Adding to the city’s ‘buzzing inner city precincts’ (Global Victoria 2020), it is the diversity of live venues that arguably remains at the centre of industrial activity as other Australian capital cities’ live music sectors have withered.

Popular music (and other visible forms in the city, including music theatre and classical/art musics) has played its part in the historic rivalries between Australian capital cities. As with other cities (e.g. Manchester/Liverpool), Sydney and Melbourne have engaged in occasional battle in regard to industrial, cultural and political dominance. This ‘urban beauty contest’ (Morris and Verhoeven 2004: 30) has included interstate battles over sporting and cultural rights (who will host sports code Grand Finals; or which city is chosen to host lucrative theatre productions), with supposed consequences for cities not sustaining (and even enjoying) the rivalry. Yet it also says something about not just national competition for residents, tourists, capital, labour and city branding that also might induce healthy doses of myth-making; it also reveals such cities as part of the wider ‘world city’ club, thought to be of sufficient size to compete globally on cultural and other terms (e.g. King 1990).

Beginning in the 1950s, this book attempts to chronicle how Melbourne earned its place as one of the world’s ‘music cities’. The arrival of rock and roll in Melbourne in 1956–7 is a useful (and obvious) dividing line to begin mapping the development of popular music life, and the concurrent shifts from ‘variety’, cabaret and other forms before rock and roll; and subsequent changes also afforded by the arrival in television in 1956. Focusing on pop and rock, this is the first book to provide an extensive historical lens of popular music within this specific urban cultural economy. We have sought to assess the increasingly complex relationships between government and music industry sectors, its successes and policy innovations and the problems and limitations of ‘music city’ policy. In relation, we are also interested in the ways that ‘how did we get here?’ histories can in turn provide insight into the contemporary nature and challenges of urban music activities, industries and policy, amidst the role of culture (and cultural policy) in contemporary city life in general. Drawing upon interviews with musicians, venue owners, artist managers, fans and policy-makers, documenting their ambitions and experiences in different periods, the book explores the development of different sectors of Melbourne’s popular music ecosystem in parallel with broader population, urban planning and media industry changes in the city.

Themes

The book derives from an Australian Research Council project, Interrogating the music city: the cultural economy of pop and rock in Melbourne, conducted by Monash and RMIT universities from 2017 to 2019. The project’s five research themes – gender, urban planning/policy, music-media, live music and recording infrastructure – were identified as key areas of activity that combine industrial and government sectors. Firstly, we were interested in how the practices and understandings of gender and ethnicity were apparent in different periods of the city’s popular music development, not the least in how women musicians and related workers (such as artist managers) have become visible in a set of industries that has been historically and trenchantly dominated by men. The book continues earlier work in exhibitions and writing (e.g. Melbourne Arts Centre’s Rock Chicks exhibition in 2010) seeking to capture the often invisible contributions of women and girls as artists and fans within wider narratives of the Australian music industries. Reflecting events and constructions elsewhere, the Australian music industries were founded, shaped and dominated by men (Young 2004) in circumstances that only recently have warranted sustained empirical investigation (e.g. Music Victoria 2015; Victorian Women’s Trust 2016; Strong and Cannizzo 2017) about the consequences for viable careers for women.

Equally, we are interested in the influence of different ethnic sounds, circuits and genres that have influenced Melbourne popular music. In addition to the Indigenous voices that have struggled to be heard but have always been present since before colonization, the city has certainly been shaped by the successive waves of migrant populations, benefiting from cross-border flows of people, ideas and cultures since the Second World War. Here we seek to understand Australian culture from an urban, multicultural and globally focused context; the book’s starting point is that of Melbourne as a post-industrial, internationally oriented music city that looks outwards for both exchange and inspiration. This emphasis is also an important corrective to Anglo-Saxon accounts, given the predominance of US and British influences since the 1950s and 1960s. In relation to our other major themes, we provide snapshots of instances where migrants established opportunities and related thriving music scenes that flirted with mainstream sensibilities.

The second theme of the book is urban planning and policy. The book explores the mixture of governance and regulations that shape popular music activity, and the preoccupations of local and State governments in different periods. As we shall see, State governments held particular sway in providing the blueprints for sometimes radical planning changes configuring streetscapes and related ideas about public/private land use. Yet it was often local council policies driving change, either through specific, gradual commitments to music activity or providing innovation in their ideas about the uses of the CBD and surrounds. Unsurprisingly, given the related emphasis in the book on live music structures, liquor law histories are prominent in understanding the signal moments when State governments were determined to change drinking behaviour and the (often unintended) consequences for the city’s venues.

This is, of course, part of wider shifts in seeing the importance of the night-time economy to cultural activity. According to another music city, the night-time economy ‘describes the social, cultural and economic activities that take place between 6 pm and 6 am’; while this incorporates all the usual economy sectors (such as transport, manufacturing, health and many related services), ‘“nightlife” constitutes a significant part of this mix’ (City of Toronto 2018). Popular music has been at the forefront of Melbourne governments’ efforts to envisage a vibrant city-at-night, with accompanying payoffs in economic and cultural viability, through exciting offerings of drink, food, entertainment; and popular and ‘high’ culture offerings including live music, museums, art galleries, festivals, traditional theatre and music theatre. In turn, the different ideas of the ‘24 hour city’ (Bianchini et al. 1988; Bianchini 1995) and the ‘creative city’, while conceptualized in very different ways and in different periods, are related in marrying unfettered access to leisure/pleasure to ensuring that there is a healthy set of creative industries able to provide it. Creativity should not be simply an outcome within these industries, but also a process for governments in reassessing the regulations and incentives regime and moving towards a more ‘creative bureaucracy’ (Landry 2008: xxi–xxii). The book traces particular moments when the state attempted to open up spaces and places to music through creative policy solutions, and those moments when it battled internal and external calls to reign in (music venue) behaviours thought to be ‘anti-social’.

The third theme of the book, live music, is unsurprising, given the proud claims by industries and governments that Melbourne is the ‘live music capital’ of the world (displacing the claims of Austin, Texas to the title). A 2017 Live Music Census reported over 73,000 gigs in 533 music venues, with an estimated economic contribution to the State of $1.42b (Newton and Coyle-Hayward 2018). This per capita claim in connection to venues is often supported by related indicators of wider senses of community, through strong DIY aesthetics driving various local ‘indie’ scenes and quirky venues (Shaw 2009). While we do not dispute such claims, there is a danger in reverting to myth in explaining live music structures and activities. The book traces the changing venues of live performance from the 1950s, from town hall to concert stadium to local pub. Performance sites are rich terrain for a range of interconnecting themes and events: moral panics and accompanying fears about youth, music and alcohol; the financial and regulatory burdens upon venue owners in different periods; and precisely where particular musicians and audiences were ‘allowed’ to exist (or not) in the city based upon racial discourses. We provide snapshots of key venues and debates to represent wider shifts in behaviour and policy, including performers and venues situated outside the typical licensed rock venue circuits.

Fourthly, we look at the range of media involved in the promotion, dissemination and assessment of Melbourne popular music. We chart the development and influence of commercial radio in the 1960s amidst interstate rivalry. The emergence of an energetic and thoughtful music press, such as Go-Set and Juke, demonstrated a vibrant engagement with youth cultures and the city’s music. The arrival of community radio in the mid-1970s was important in providing Melbourne with considerable firepower to maintain local scenes through broadcasters such as RRR, PBS and 3CR, eventually joined by indigenous broadcaster 3KND. The book provides snapshots of key television and radio programs that identified with Melbourne. Overall, we examine how forms of media innovation – accidental and opportunistic, as well deliberative and provocative – have contributed to sustaining music in Melbourne. In doing so the book contributes to understanding of media with regards to music city discourse more broadly. In putting the relationship between urban music and media into a long historical view, we suggest that media is more than a marketing adjunct to a music city. Media in its various forms at times is antagonistic to music and musicians, while it also provides important forums for reviving traditions as well as expanding knowledge of new music.

The final theme of the book (to a lesser extent) is the recording infrastructure of the city. A particular emphasis is on the city’s dominance in the 1960s and 1970s in recording the nation’s rock and pop stars, assessing the competition between recording studios (and Sydney and Melbourne) for technological innovation. Recording studios are obviously important in providing local artists with sites for presenting their material in the best light; yet they also have roles in wider scenes, connecting with venues, key figures and senses of place. The role of commercial and ‘indie’ recording companies is similarly important in documenting the opportunities afforded to Melbourne artists. While Sydney is regarded as the national headquarters, with its cluster of major international labels and larger studios, smaller labels and studios have been prominent, exemplified in recent historical treatments of the influence of Mushroom Records, and its growth from ‘indie’ label in 1972 to ‘national major’ in the 1980s (in 2013–14, RMIT University produced an exhibition, Music, Melbourne and Me: 40 years of Mushroom and Melbourne’s Popular Music Culture). This book was completed at the time when Mushroom Records’ founding owner, Michael Gudinski, died on 2 March 2021. The subsequent outpouring of grief in Melbourne and across the nation revealed the importance of Mushroom to Australian popular culture.

Across these five themes – gender and ethnicity, urban planning and policy, live music, media and recording – we were also interested in ideas and practices of cultural heritage. Speaking of an entity as large and diverse as a city, there are several means in which heritage comes to be defined through practices of ‘critical acclaim, historical importance and cultural value’ (Bennett 2009: 478). This involves assessing the accumulation of physical and built heritage (historical objects, buildings) and more intangible items such as memories of a concert or infamous dance party, and how together these form impressions/collections of histories that move between formal and informal spaces and uses. For example, heritage is invoked as both practice and status symbol in the City of Melbourne’s argument that ‘it’s time for Melbourne to take its rightful place alongside some of the great music cities of the world including Austin, Berlin, Nashville and Toronto’ (City of Melbourne 2014: 6). At various times, heritage is deployed as part of wider branding strategies, or at the very least, aspirations to be regarded as a music city that is something more than its contemporary scenes. It is also interesting to assess how contemporary moments and events are judged against the glow of past histories and memories (and we recognize that this book is in one sense an exercise in nostalgia, and itself a selective series of reconstructions). Calls to show visible reminders around the city of Melbourne’s popular music history were increasing as we started the project, reinforcing the need for the assessment of an urban heritage as much as a music one, documenting the canonization of genres, venues, performers and scenes and institutions.

The music city

Since the 1980s, there has been steadily increasing interest across cultural geography, urban, cultural and popular music studies in the urban contexts of cultural activity. The ways in which cities find comparative advantages through specific cultural forms means that we can envisage, for example, the ‘literature city’ or the ‘film city’ (Hall 1998). Similarly, we can entertain how cities have been promoted through the specific prominence of music genres: Nashville (country), Liverpool (Merseybeat), Detroit (Motown and Soul) and Manchester (Rave) are useful examples of prior work in this vein (Haslem 2000; Du Noyer 2002).

What else is imagined or defined in the understanding of a ‘music city’? Notions of the ‘Sonic City’ are not helpful, insofar as ‘sonic’ is not defined at the expense of an emphasis upon the urban as a series of settings for clusters of labour and capital, where cities ‘contain the key elements for appropriating and commercializing … musical creativity’ (Florida and Jackson 2010: 312). Those possessing the hyper-advantages of specific clusters of creative industries at the centre of global capitalism can be regarded as ‘global music cities’ (Watson 2008; Bader and Scharenberg 2010). London is cited as an exemplar here in its ability to marshal considerable formal networking of expertise and firms that is boosted by informal networks and scenes (bars, restaurants and of course live music venues) that in turn ‘facilitate learning and the sharing of knowledge across economic and cultural boundaries’ (Watson 2008: 21). In contrast, as one industry executive explained, this has historically made it difficult for artists to emerge outside the larger ‘supercities’: ‘You can’t crack a band in Sunderland. Who gives a s**t if you crack a band in Sunderland?’ (cited in Mean and Tims 2005: 6). In similar ways to Florida and Jackson’s (2010) analysis, the emphasis upon geographical and locational structures does not sufficiently address the various combinations and relationships between the cultural and the economic.

There is, however, one further aspect of ‘locationalism’ to be assessed before moving on to other considerations. ‘Cultural quarter’ policies significantly informed later conceptions of the cultural or creative city,

… fusing it with tourism, “flagship projects” such as festivals and a more general concern with city planning in the name of “quality of life” (Landry & Bianchini 1995; Landry 2000). In some cases, an almost missionary zeal seems to have attached itself to these strategies for the remaking of cities in the name of culture and creativity.

(Hesmondhalgh and Pratt 2005: 4)

The carving out of city and town spaces for creative/cultural uses has become a significant component of urban regeneration, at once linking local identity with cultural and economic development (Roodhouse 2010). The hot fever of ‘cool cities’ driven by cultural industries [specialization] raises important questions about measuring the real effects and economic benefits, the impacts and desires of different stakeholder involvement and the need for attendant inquiries into relevant policy areas such as planning (Markusen and Gadwa 2010: 388). Nonetheless, popular music has been at the forefront of regeneration strategies, from flagship rock/pop museum projects (such as the doomed National Centre for Popular Music Museum in Sheffield from 1999 to 2000) to embedding recording, live music and management businesses in particular zones of related creativity. In successive analyses of Liverpool’s efforts to reconstruct itself after the economic and cultural troubles of the 1980s, Cohen (1991, 2007) has demonstrated how de-industrialization encouraged efforts to reclaim and mobilize popular music, leveraging its Beatles heritage and contemporary networks of venues and education for wider economic benefits.

An allied concern of the uses of popular music and other cultural forms in regeneration strategies are the processes and outcomes that can significantly alter cityscapes for the worse. Gentrification in cultural terms has come to mean ‘suburbanization’ of the inner city, with accompanying homogenization of retail and leisure activities, and the inability for artists and cultural consumers to reside or work in such areas where rents and housing prices require displacement to cheaper city areas (Holt and Wergin 2013: 9–10). The consequent fear is that ‘conditions do not favor low-budget cultural production and lead to the migration of scenes into more peripheral microscenes. The implication is a separation of DIY and commercial cultural production between neighborhoods and therefore a weakening of the ecology that constitutes a scene and ultimately a vibrant neighborhood’ (ibid.: 19). In Melbourne contexts, Shaw (2009, 2013, 2014) has explored the effects of rising rents, land use values and zoning changes upon the ability of cultural practitioners to both live and set up businesses in key parts of the city. Indirect policy settings have no doubt played a role in the broader historical shift Shaw (2013) identifies in the location of cultural enterprises from South Melbourne in the 1970s to its current strongholds in the inner north (see also Now Sound: Melbourne’s Listening 2018). This book locates the story of popular music in Melbourne within broader debates around social and demographic change in the city in the 1960s and 1970s, and the role of culture and leisure as important drivers of the Melbourne economy in the post-industrial era since the 1980s (O’Hanlon 2005, 2010; Dingle and O’Hanlon 2009; O’Hanlon and Sharpe 2009).

Continuing debates about the ‘cultural city’ (including the traditional arts and older forms such as heritage) versus the ‘creative city’ (with its emphasis upon the bases of creativity and how they radiate out into other sectors, including new media) have revealed ongoing tensions between the economic uses, and the stubborn centrality of popular culture to make meaning in everyday life. It is interesting...