For the average music-loving punter it also means seeing lots of great artists like Mojo Juju, Ngaiire, Jess Ribeiro, Ruby Boots and The Deans, to name a few, as well as the subject of this little chat, The Audreys, whose co-founder Taasha Coates is looking forward to using the home field advantage to woo overseas movers and shakers.
“It’s a good opportunity for us to get in front of overseas booking agents and buyers without having to actually go overseas,” Coates says. “If an American act comes to Australia we’re like, ‘Wow, you’re from America.’ But an Australian act goes over there, they don’t really care. You’re not special in that way; you’re competing with American acts, so it’s really hard to get noticed. We have a good profile here so we should be able to convince the American bookers that we’re worth going to see.
“I think a lot of networking happens at the bar when you’re just having a yarn,” she continues. “You make a personal connection with someone and that can flow into work.” That’s almost at odds with the Australian propensity for tall poppy syndrome, or rather, the way that the fear of tall poppy syndrome tends to lead our artists to under-promote themselves. “Americans are so good at self promotion because they’re so positive about everything,” says Coates. “I read an article with Keith Urban where he said it took him a few years in America to realise that people were just being super polite. An ARIA was never something I thought I could achieve. It just would have seemed really fanciful.”
The Audreys have been around for a decade now – 2016 will be the tenth anniversary of their debut album Between Last Night And Us – and in that time they’ve seen the musical landscape reshape itself. For a band with a few ARIAs under its belt, but not falling into the ‘multimillion-seller like Taylor Swift’ category, it’s not necessarily all glamour.
“I just got my publishing statement and saw that I had 109 plays on a German streaming service and I made three cents,” Coates says. “Streaming does not create a career. If people were paying really great money to come out and see shows then that’d be fine, but people still grumble about the price of a concert ticket, and a lot of festivals struggle. It’s not like they’re just putting their money somewhere else in the music industry; they’re withdrawing it from the pool that artists have to make a living from. There aren’t more people coming out to gigs. Ticket prices haven’t gone up. Gone are the days when you can make a living from music. It’s pretty tough to do.
You can catch The Audreys with Three Kings and John Bennett and David Hyams on Thursday November 12 at Ding Dong Lounge.“We’ll be bringing our drummer and playing as a trio, and I recently acquired a cherry-red bass ukulele, which is incredibly awesome,” Coates says. “It’s so good. I love it. I wish I could do justice to how awesome it looks with my playing, but we’ll get there. An hour is a shortish show for us. We can easily play for two hours if we’re not careful. So it’ll have to be a greatest hits montage.”
BY PETER HODGSON
