Australia's largest music industry conference and live showcase, earlier this month Brisbane's BIGSOUND celebrated its 21st birthday.
Staged in various venues in Fortitude Valley, throughout its history BIGSOUND has witnessed the drastic changes to the Brisbane suburb's sonic climate in terms of genre, message, and demand of music. It's also seen venues close, open and evolve. But this particular week also marked the end of an era for some local legends, and the beginning of a succession for other Meanjin bands.
Stoner rock kingpins Violent Soho mounted the stage for the final time at The Fortitude Music Hall on a Saturday night (10 September) and were sent off with their usual, head-banging, blissful riot.
They walked out of The Fortitude Music Hall as Mansfield boys who could draw a crowd of old and young alike, and have solidified themselves as one of Meanjin's most iconic bands in recent times.
The Meanjin music scene 21 years ago was a separate entity to what we know now. To understand the importance of the distinct music scene we have access to in the Valley, we need to know the precinct’s ancestry.
The end of the Bjelke-Petersen era in the late '80s saw corruption plaguing Fortitude Valley. While being alternative is now embraced, back then it made you a target of police brutality.
Following the Fitzgerald Inquiry, which uncovered police corruption, there was an opportunity for the Valley to morph from a seedy underbelly to a haven for alternative misfits. The vision of a select few pollinated the hope the Valley could bloom into a safe place, breaking free from its past.
Co-founder of The Zoo, Joc Curran was a frontrunner in this movement, transforming an industrial sewing factory into a grungy music matriarchy.
"We opened [The Zoo's] doors in 1992. Ann Street was like a ghost town. . . Over the first few years we started to see change, shops started filling, lots of quirky small operators, in part thanks to our landlords – The Apostolos family," Joc explains.
"They gave young small operators a go. Record shops, comic books, fashion labels, collectables, cafes, bars, hairdressers, art galleries. . . Great restaurants and cafes started to pop up, thrive and get legendary status. Youth came to the Valley."
Alongside this gentrification, the Valley's aural landscape expanded as new music venues began to surface, accommodating bands who no longer felt they needed to move interstate to make it.
Bands like Powderfinger and Regurgitator were literally driving their way into the mainstream – a 22-hour drive to Melbourne.
With a fresh breed of bands shredding up the Valley's new stages, an opportunity for BIGSOUND arose in the form of a conference consisting of keynotes and gigs. Organisers drew in industry figures with the intention of showcasing and connecting them with upcoming Meanjin bands.
Former BIGSOUND programmer, Stephen Green has been behind the scenes of the event through most of the Festival's 21 years.
"Watching The Middle East playing at Family Nightclub, watching The Temper Trap playing at The Zoo, or watching Flume play at Brightside the year before they all broke – they're the memories people will end up taking away from BIGSOUND," enthuses Stephen.
"It's not just the bands they saw, it's the aftermath of realising that they saw something incredible that they didn't even realise at the time."
It was also with the help of community radio station 4ZZZ that local bands were supported and loved. Not only was it the bands that made the Meanjin music scene special, but the punters and listeners that had a love for the tight-knit local scene, which is all still applicable today.
Regurgitator's bassist Ben Ely has had a multidisciplinary career across many Meanjin bands. "The thing that is unique is that the [Meanjin] music scene is smaller and everyone plays in each other's bands," he says.
"Different genres put on gigs together. It's different to down south. Not so sceney, I think."
What keeps the sea of Fortitude Valley venues wading in the chaos is each of them honing in on their points of difference and having places that are uniquely theirs. Like how punter's quirks used to make them a target, Fortitude Valley now puts them on a stage.
This draws into the beauty of BIGSOUND, where a venue's preconceived expectations are bent into a shape that has no resemblance to what you would regularly see there on a Friday or Saturday night.
I would never expect to see Teenage Joans in Ric's Backyard or The Riot at The Prince Consort, but it works.
Fortitude Valley is special for its closeness, both the venues and the musicians that inhabit them. To get to the point it's at today took the work of those who saw potential and sought to fill a gap in local venues for the bands they loved.
This gap was filled thanks to these early trailblazers, and is overflowing with the passion and madness of thousands of punters, unknowingly celebrating the evolution of Meanjin's music scene.
This feature has been published as part of The Music Writer's Lab initiative, developed between MusicNT and Australia Council of The Arts. themusicwriterslab.com
