From about 11.50pm I stood side of stage nervously knowing that the completion of Road To Recovery was my cue. The song ended, the band walked off stage and ‘Cher’ strode to the centre and sang the first two lines of Turn Back Time before beginning the countdown. It all seemed to go pretty well, until afterwards when we were made aware that the set had been running about three minutes ahead of time, so anyone who went to see The Black Keys on the main-stage immediately after got a second countdown.
Episode one of Beat TV was uploaded to YouTube on November 15, 2006 and featured local act Dukes Of Windsor, who were riding high off the runaway success of their TV Rock remixed single The Others, as well as local DJ/Producer T-Rek who had just released his album Freakshow Disco Vol.1. The hosts were Beat editor Nick Snelling and 100% editor (now called Beats) Dave Haberfield. Then there was this skinny effeminate young man who did vox pops – that was me.
Over the next nine years Beat TV established itself as Melbourne’s most talked about online TV show. The show was in a particularly sweet spot in 2008 with producer Joe Nappa, assistant producer Tim Hamilton, hosts Nick Clarke and Courtney Gibbs, and myself as a kind of roving reporter. At the end of that year we gained access to Meredith Music Festival, which led to an interview with MGMT. The band’s Meredith performance came at the end of an 18-month album tour behind Oracular Spectacular, as the brilliant neo-psych record blew up all around the world. To say I was nervous for the interview is a gross understatement– I was petrified. So, like any focused 27-year-old at a music festival, I had a quiet one the night before the interview by taking a massive amount of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Scattered and still a bit sideways, I was desperately nervous ahead of the interview, but what followed was an energetic and interesting conversation between three young men in their mid-20s – at the time Andrew VanWyngarden was 25 and Benjamin Goldwasser 26 – all on exactly the same level. During the interview Goldwasser admitted, “Sometimes we joke about Radiohead being one person,” and VanWyngarden said, “We actually named our band MGMT because it sounds like so many drugs – LSD, DMT, DMX… nah he’s a rapper.” To this I added “Ice Cube?” That should give you a pretty clear insight into the tone of the interview.
In 2011 Beat TV moved away from the episode based format and towards the standalone segment based format that it has today. This includes event coverage as well as many artist interviews conducted by Thom Parry and me. Also, on Wednesday May 16, 2012 we filmed the first Watt’s On: a weekly video that acts as a guide to gigs in Melbourne hosted by myself (Beat director Kris Furst and I were pretty stoked when we came up with the pun in the title). I didn’t have any guests on episode one, yet in episode two singer Kristina Miltiadou came on the show and from there the concept seemed to resonate with Melbourne music fans. Watt’s On is now heading into its fourth year, and only last week the show featured local artists T-Rek, Ella Thompson, Swell, Nick Ling, Going Swimming, Loose Tooth, Passerine, Kids At Midnight, Au Dre, and Dear Plastic.
Thank you to everyone who has ever appeared on or worked on Beat TV. A special shout out must go to current producers Max Jeffcote and Seb Ho. But most of all thank you to the city of Melbourne for being such a bespectacled jewel of music, art and culture, which allows us to create such varied and interesting content.
BY DAN WATT
