What a time it is to be a citizen of Wollongong, the third-largest city in New South Wales.
After years of mismanagement and disruptions leading to venues either cutting out live music or shutting down entirely, the city is back on track and rapidly becoming a hotspot for live music. International acts such as Morrissey and Garbage have visits planned – the former even bypassing Sydney in favour of it – while local and national artists are doing the rounds week in and week out at Rad Bar and the Uni Bar.
The momentum is culminating in perhaps the biggest lineup to hit the city in many years, the second annual Yours & Owls festival taking place across the first weekend of October at Stuart Park in the city’s north. Excitement for the festival is palpable, and it’s set to draw in people from all around, not just natives to the area. How exactly did Wollongong get its groove back?
“I think it’s a testament to the fact that Wollongong is being recognised as a viable stop,” says Ben Tillman, one of the three people behind the Yours & Owls moniker, a brand that has been putting on events in the city since the late 2000s. “At the end of the day, bands touring Australia want to have fun and see as much of it as they can. It’s the agents and industry side that dictates where artists go and how long they’re in the country for. It says a lot about this city that people are realising that they can viably send bands here, and that there’s a way for them to make it work. People are coming out to the shows, everyone’s bills get paid and the bands get to experience a unique part of Australia. It’s kinda cool to see that there’s something going on here: I mean, we’re not as high-profile as Sydney or Melbourne, but it’s a place with a lot of potential and I feel like that’s starting to catch on.”
Similarly, Bec Sandridge, a musician who has recently had a huge boost in profile thanks to her remarkably catchy indie-pop tracks, counts herself ever grateful for the start she got as a musician in Wollongong, where she attended classes at UOW and first made her foray into solo work. “I feel like Wollongong as a scene helped me build up the skills I needed to be a live performer,” she says. “I can remember playing places like the Oxford Tavern, which was this really grungy pub, and the Otis Bar, where there was no stage – we were all packed into this one little space, and all the underage kids would sneak in. Back then, I probably had maybe three original songs. I got a lot from cutting my teeth at those early shows. As silly as it sounds, it was doing shows like that where I learned really simple stuff like doing my own soundcheck and counting my band in. It was me dipping my toes in the water and seeing what might happen.”
Sandridge is one of many performers heading to the festival performing along with Bleached and Chastity Belt, Aussie rappers Tkay Maidza and Sampa The Great and big name drawcards such as The Jezebels and Ladyhawke. Just as excitingly, the festival has been carefully curated to be gender-inclusive: a whopping 52 per cent of the lineup is female, which is far more than can be said about certain other festivals at present. It’s a major step forward, and according to Tillman, it was simply a matter of the cream rising to the top.
“I feel like the very best part about that is that it wasn’t something that we set out to do,” he says of the lineup. “Obviously, a lot of people have come to us and talked to us about it, but we weren’t looking at meeting any sort of minimum or requirements. I feel like that says a lot about the kind of talent that we had on offer, and how many great female artists are prevalent in Australian music right now. Every act on the bill is there on their own merit, and the fact there are so many women on the bill speaks for itself.”
Sandridge agrees with Tillman’s assessment of the lineup’s talent, noting anecdotally that it is an important thing for her to be directly a part of it. “Things have really changed in a big way,” she says. “When my first band Mad Polly would enter band comps around Wollongong, we would be the only females there. The rest would be all dudes. We were more or less made to feel as if we were encroaching on their turf or something. To be playing a festival in Wollongong with so many other great women is such a great thing – I’ve become really good friends with Little May in particular. Most of my favourite artists are female and the fact that it just happened that way without being tokenised is something I can definitely support.”
For those that attended the festival in 2015, Tillman is keen to address the elephant in the room – or park, as it were: there will be no repeats of last year’s sound issues or water shortages. “That was the most stressful weekend of my life,” recalls Tillman with a pained laugh. “We’re quite lucky that we’re in a position where we’re able to properly deal with these things on a financial basis – when you’re broke, you’re just scraping around trying to keep it all together. We learned a big lesson in doing our shit properly last year – the production is going to be amazing this time around.”
There is a lot for music fans to get excited about in the lead-up to Yours & Owls. Not only is the lineup the talk of the town, there are also other projects at work designed to get fans singularly pumped. “We’ve got a geo-dome that’s about 18 metres high and wide,” says Tillman, excitedly detailing one of his key passion projects within the festival grounds.
“You go inside and all of the interior from floor to ceilings is covered in projections. We’ve got a video artist doing a piece for about half an hour, and then we give that video to three different producers. Russell [Webster] from Shining Bird, Daniel [Stricker] from Midnight Juggernauts and Jon Watts, who’s a local guy that I’ve been friends with for a really long time, are all going to do pieces of music to accompany the projections – it’s this all immersive environment where all of your senses are being taken over by the visual. One of the best parts of the festival this year has been the ability to have more ideas building up. If we wanted to just throw some bands on in a park, we could have done exactly that. We wanted there to be more to explore in this festival – the plan is to go a little deeper.”
[Yours And Owls Festival photo by Ian Laidlaw]
Yours And Owls Festival takes place Saturday October 1 and Sunday October 2 at Stuart Park, Wollongong.
