As far as I an tell these days, and according to anyone I have talked to here, there hasn’t been a good music scene here for a long time. There were a couple of good healthy ones back in the day. I moved away at one point, eventually came back years later, and never really got re-involved with local music. Although I did ask around here and there over the years to find out if anything had been happening. It’s been dead here for a long time. Just the same old blues/rock and metal bar bands and their offspring holding up in the bars. There used to be some good creative stuff here. Psychedelic rock, punk rock, metal that didn’t sound like the same old modern radio shit, and so forth. Things that made you go, hmmm. One of the guys that used to live around here who promoted and organized lots of shows eventually moved off and started making B movies. Others just got old and moved on to family life. The couple of studios that were here closed down long ago. A month back, our only guitar shop closed down. It had been there since I can remember, long after the others closed down. This place is a goddamned music zombie wasteland today. I see young guys / gals once in a while posting ads online looking for people to start bands that aren’t cookie cutter bs, but I never hear anything about them.
Sydney in the 70s was apparently a great scene, live music everywhere. When I came over in the late 80s, poker machines (pokies) were just starting to erase that, much cheaper for the venues and much more profitable. A crazy mindset to replace live music with legalised gambling , but there you go.
The 90s and early 2000s were still pretty good for original music, by 2007 or so pay-to-play was taking root, and more recently most bands have had to sell an allocated amount of tickets to their gigs themselves. Must be real hard to start gigging these days (pre-C-19), of course the virus might be the death knell for the live scene or perhaps reinvigorate it, who knows? Going to be impossible to mosh again in the current climate, that’s for sure, not sure bands can be profitable again in the near future for smaller pubs and clubs.
MELBOURNE.
Fk yes. actually so do some of the other cities in Oz.
though COVID may end up wiping out the smaller live venues closed for a while out.
i have a trippy cool but extremely tight band practicing in my garage every friday, including standup bass.