If you’ve watched any live gig recordings of hardcore bands from Melbourne on YouTube, then chances are you’ve stumbled across KingBean28’s channel.
KingBean28 is the brainchild of a man who goes by the name of Bean, Melbourne’s most prolific live music videographer. Since 2002, he’s dedicated his whole life to documenting and archiving Melbourne’s hardcore scene and “other unpopular music”, all for the love of Melbourne’s thriving music community.
If you’d like to learn more about Melbourne’s thriving music scene, click here.
Where it all started
It all started in 2002, when the then 19-year-old Bean was exposed to the world of bootleg recordings through a stall at the Caribbean market. Purchasing a tape of a live performance of The 5000 Fingers of Marilyn Manson, he recalls being blown away at the recording. “They included songs I’d heard a million times before, recorded live with an energy the album versions didn’t capture.”
It led him to wonder why no one had recorded the smaller, more local bands he’d been listening to. From here, he took it upon himself to document the works of local bands from Melbourne.
“Well, I guess someone has to do it, so I started doing it. It snowballs from there.”
Bean remembers the first show he recorded. Attending a sold-out TISM show at the Prince of Wales in St. Kilda, he borrowed a MiniDisc recorder and microphone from uni, stuffing it down his pants to get past the security.
“I recall standing near a pole, holding the microphone like some weirdo news reporter, hoping nobody would catch me in the act,” says Bean.
“It was high stakes. 80 minutes later, I walked out with recorder and microphone again in my pants, then to the car where I finally relaxed and drove back home. It was the start of a lifelong obsession to record and document live music.”
The Day Everything Became Nothing – Cut (live at Missing Link May 21 2006)
Bean’s commitment to documenting the “unpopular music” of Melbourne is probably most evident here. The video features grindcore band The Day Everything Became Nothing at the old Missing Link record store on Bourke Street. The music itself is violent, visceral and grotesque, only listened to by the most niche groups of metalheads. Bean’s choice to document fringe genres such as grindcore preserves its cultural and historical significance, allowing these groups to thrive further.
Today, he uses his recently purchased Sony FX-30 to record his gigs, and he’s much more comfortable with recording bands now. Aside from his own recordings however, Bean has also acquired a large amount of tape recordings and CDs from other tapers and collectors to digitise and upload, ensuring these pieces of history are preserved. Recordings are either uploaded to his YouTube channel, or his website.
Initially Bean started recording gigs to trade his tapes with others. But as the internet rendered tape trading obsolete, it became an act of capturing the sound of Melbourne. Interestingly, Bean doesn’t seem to lament the death of tape trading. Instead, he’s embraced the accessibility of the internet and the exposure it brings to the videos. “Because I put everything on YouTube, you know, anyone can jump on and watch it and they do,” Bean says.
Refreshingly, money isn’t a motivator for Bean either. He feels guilty charging money for something he does as a hobby – a dilemma most creatives experience at one point or another in their lives.
“The bands I’m seeing, they’re not rolling in cash. So I don’t wanna say: ‘Give me 200 bucks to film the set,’ because it would cost them their whole night’s money.”
The most he asks from bands for a spot on the guest list, saving him roughly $20 per show. That way, his benefit doesn’t come at the band’s expense.
But, Bean recognises his hobby takes up roughly the same amount of space as a full-time job. Just this year, he’s filmed 88 gigs so far. Put into perspective, that’s a gig every second day (at the time of the interview), revealing how labour intensive this work can be.
TISM – The Phillip Ruddock Blues (live on The Panel Sep 25 2002)
Originally airing on Channel 10 on September 25 2002, Bean taped this performance from the band TISM, and digitised, then uploaded it to YouTube in 2010. The wildly eccentric Melbourne band TISM performs The Phillip Ruddock Blues, which offered a scathing commentary of Australia’s politics at the time. It’s perhaps one of the best examples of media that would’ve only existed in people’s memories, and truly highlights the value of Bean’s work.
If you hadn’t realised the enormous scale of his work, then perhaps this will put it into perspective: his entire backlog of footage amounts to 30 hard drives, each filled with four terabytes of footage. Then, another two desktop drives with 12 terabytes of data, and finally 20 gigabytes of footage on his computer, which accounts for the footage he is currently working on mastering. In total, all of his footage amasses to 144 terabytes of data. Oh, and not to mention the thousands of physical tapes yet to be digitised.
Understandably, this is becoming a bit of a problem for Bean, as he’s running low on storage. With his hard drives “bursting at the seams”, he’ll have to purchase some new ones to keep going.
“I’m up for another 320 bucks pretty soon”, Bean says with an air of reluctance. If he’s to make any money from donations, he’d put it towards funding the ever-increasing costs of hard drives. He set up a donation page on his website on the off chance people might want to chip in some cash, but that’s as far as he wants to go in terms of making money.
Because Bean attends so many gigs, it’s virtually impossible for him to get through the mountain of footage he’s accumulated. He keeps telling himself he needs to “take the foot off the pedal”, but then he finds himself leaving the house with his Sony FX-30 in his backpack again. He jokingly mentions how his hobby could feature on the show My Strange Addiction, but ultimately, his inability to withdraw stems from a love for the Melbourne hardcore scene and feeling somewhat responsible for its documentation.
“There’s a lot of shows I go to that, you know, I just feel like if I’m not doing it, it’s gonna just be lost forever,” Bean says.
When he said this to me, I felt an emotion spur inside of me. It was an acknowledgement of the transient nature of memory, the linearity of time, the way how we all keep moving forward.
If Bean hadn’t recorded any of these gigs, they would simply live on as fading memories in the heads of those who witnessed it. At this moment, I start to understand Bean’s obsession with documenting the music of Melbourne, and truly appreciate the cultural and historical significance of his archive.
Without Bean’s efforts, we wouldn’t be able to rewatch the wild scenes at a street-art exhibition in Collingwood, where the band Rort wreaked havoc, smashing the art on the wall. There’d be no footage of the band Tirade’s show in Essendon, where members of the crowd were wielding “flame-thrower deodorant cans”. We wouldn’t be privy to watch TISM perform live on Channel 10 – something that probably wouldn’t even happen today.
But in the end, there’s one thing pulling Bean back to film more, and perhaps it’s a testament to the beautiful music scene Melbourne has built for itself.
“Well, I guess it’s because the shows in Melbourne are just that good, that they’re worth filming.”
If you’d like to help fund the cost of hard drives, or simply show support, you can donate to Bean here.
