Television show turned stage show extravaganza Rockwiz is considered by many to be an Australian music institution with many music fans trading pre-gig drinks on a Saturday night to stay at home and watch the show.
This adulation has led to the show’s host Julia Zemiro nowadays regarded as a supreme music industry operator.
In 2007, SBS music trivia show Rockwiz won best Best Light Entertainment Television Series at the AFI (Australian Film Industry) Awards. The show was in only its third season but it had captured an untapped audience of Australian music aficionados who had outgrown Video Hits and Channel V, and were starving to be taken seriously.
While the shows’ drawcard was its rotating list of Australian rock royalty and a rocking house band, as the show’s host Zemiro brought a sharp wit and stagecraft honed after years of theatre to the show.
However, back in 2007, on the red carpet of the awards ceremony, a young music journalist for the then freshly launched Beat TV thought he would show-up Zemiro by quizzing her as to who the nominations were for Best Original Music Award? The comedian and actor of over 20 years’ experience saw straight through the ruse and retorted, “You know I host Rockwiz, that covers rock’n’roll.” Despite this factoid, she then listed off the three nominations for that year.
“Did I? That was nice of me,” Zemiro sarcastically responds, after being regaled with the anecdote. She is speaking to Beat from Sydney, where she now lives, which is handy considering that she’s now an Australian television ‘big dog’. Currently Zemiro is filming episodes for new Australian music talent quest All Together Now, which she hosts alongside Ronan Keating.
But back when she was first hosting Rockwiz, like Beat TV’s cheeky presenter, many were openly questioning Zemiro’s credibility. “I’ll be very honest with you, when I went for the Rockwiz audition they were looking for a host. If you knew stuff about music that was a bonus, but if they had hired a music expert who can’t control 200 rowdie music fans in the Gershwin Room, who can’t control four people from the audience with no stage experience but amazing music brains, who can’t control a couple of amazing but sometimes totally random musicians – you just wouldn’t have got the gig.
“There were people who auditioned for that role who might know more about music but they couldn’t control, improvise, flirt, and relax with a group the way my years on stage had given me the confidence to,” Zemiro says.
She offers more insight into the making of her career as a music television host by discussing her call-back audition that was presided over by the show’s creators Brian Nankervis, Peter Bain-Hogg, Michael Ward, and Ken Connor. “When I got the call back they had the band there, Pete and Mike, two panels of contestants made up of professional comedians like Colin Lane, and they cued me up with ‘Show us what you can do, run it,’” Zemiro explains. And run it she did for the next 14 seasons.
With Rockwiz now on permanent hiatus, Zemiro and the rest of Team Rockwiz are focusing on the stage show – consistently selling out venues Australia wide.
Rockwiz Revue Tour 2018 is taking on 11 dates around the country, with three of those in Victoria. There have been quite a few aspects of the music industry in 2018 that have peaked Zemiro’s attention enough to potentially feature in the upcoming revue.
“This year I am particularly interested in how we expect to hold musicians to account, not for their bad behaviour but for their history and what they do,” Zemiro says. I hope we look at the expectations we put on music idols, and how they handle it.”
