FIGHT CONTINUES FOR ALL-AGES GIG OPERATORS

Last month in a flurry of midsummer afternoon daylight at Season Three, a DIY music venue on Wickham Street, I asked Nick Smethurst what he thought about where Everything stood. That much being: The state of commercial and local music; The history of Meanjin music culture, ‘pig city’, and its enduring effects; Failing, rejoicing and failing again; The Ins and Outs of ‘DIY’. And least of all, the impending shutdown of his venue.

Season Three was a brainchild, ephemeral in its application, set to leave what will be a perpetual legacy. It’s one of a grand few he’s had since commencing a career in the music industry at age seventeen (at which time he ran ‘610’, formerly a music space on 610 Ann Street with no traceable record of existence). I asked Nick about his view on the state of it all because as it happens, he seems almost to have seen it all. He has experienced the triumphs and the afflictions of DIY culture for live music spaces. Resultantly, then too, those of the people who have performed inside them, visited them, and reminisced upon them.   

“I have watched people who I was ostracised by as a teenager in the music scene go through personal arcs of international recognition, heroin addiction, and whatever their life became afterwards.” - Nick Smethurst

We swiftly got to talking about that pressing notion of ‘failure’ and its hard-hitting relationship with conceptualising success. It’s worth noting that Nick doesn’t think Season Three failed and neither do I, and neither does sound engineer extraordinaire James Walker (who Nick says is “the best engineer in the country”). Quite rather the inverse. It resounds not only as a pillar of young and fresh-faced DIY music, but as the sort of personal remuneration that Nick would go on to regard as ‘spiritual dividends.’

Sound engineer James Walker is ‘extraordinary’, says Smethurst.

James Walker - Sound Engineer of Season Three

I found myself most enamoured with the concept of frustration in Nick’s world of DIY. So, we explored it from two perspectives. Frustration with the self; and frustration with the external world. Here’s a fundamental truth:

Nick: “The right wing is concerned with systems of power blaming the individual. The left wing is concerned with the collective blaming systems of power. That characterises the difference between the two. We need to start blaming systems of power.”

Nick could, if he chose to, blame an infinite number of individuals, not barring himself, for any cockup with the PA, or making impossible promises, or ticket miscalculation, or you name it, that’s occurred in his career. But would that be a sound evaluation? No. Right. So, then it must be equally impossible to blame a premier; CEO; landlord; board of directors; for anything we don’t like about the way the music industry is run. Yes.

So, what is it that’s going wrong with the current systems of power?

Let’s take an analogy.

David Crisafulli’s crackdown on youth crime focuses on the incarceration of youths. A solution, then, that acts as a direct consequence to the action of the individual (the young criminal in this case). That is an example of a system of power blaming an individual. In a parallel scenario, the system of power would first work on understanding the discrepancies within itself that lead to early youth crime. What it might identify is a few things. Boredom being one. Lack of interest or engagement, aloneness or ostracization another. Why might a young person feel that way? A good place to start would be the ‘opportunity gap’.

“Growing up going to a stable private school, coming up with the same group of friends whose families share the same socio-economic background, in a predominantly white context, all going on to work similar jobs and live a stable life, is a valid experience. But it’s an incredibly narrow one.”

It’s also one that makes it very easy to ‘fit a mold’.

Season Three will be forced to shut its doors this month. 

People who don’t have that opportunity, often those of a First Nations background, are still called to live up to the same narrative. To educate oneself and serve a capital dominated society. So, when the inevitable inequalities prevail, and an Indigenous student drops out of school due to an economic or trauma-based disadvantage, the immediate sense must become ‘there is no other way I can fit the mold.’  The system of power has failed them by promoting solely that narrow idea of success. And still, the same system of power has yet kept under wraps the whirling undercurrent that is Brisbane’s music and arts fuelled sub-scene. A scene that sustains itself solely on the char of creative passion.

Smethurst and Walker are searching for spaces to continue Season Three’s legacy.

“This place is not financially remunerative for me. It loses me money every single week. James and I do this because we have good equipment, we are happy to share it, and we can just afford to run it, and it happens to be our only calling in this world.”

I’ll leave you with this:

The capacity of Season Three is 110 people. In a scheme, tiny.

If a room with no bar: no alcohol license; no bathroom; $20 ticket prices; can break its capacity with a racially and gender diverse crowd of creatives multiple times every single week: what does that say about its audience?

It says, ‘something here feels just right.’