arc04: 'I FIND THE CLEAN UP CATHARTIC' - an interview with Black Wire Records (Mess+Noise, 2012)
This 2012 interview with Tom Scott of Black Wire Records came at a time when the Sydney DIY space was in a battle with a number of external influences, ranging from a copyright notice to a bureaucratic issue with council. While those issues were circumvented, Black Wire ran until 2017 when an entirely unrelated complaint of equal pettiness led to its end; the shop front has sat empty and unused on Parramatta Road ever since. Black Wire reinvented itself as a part of the DIY venue 96 Tears for a time, and now exists as a record store in Forest Lodge called 19th Nervous Breakdown, which you should visit if you get a chance (I haven’t been yet!)
Black Wire was the first DIY space I ever went to and there would be countless people and bands who could cite the space as one of the most important locations for their music of that era. I miss it all the time. On re-reading this, I thought Tom somehow covered nearly everything about the intent, meaning and culture of the whole thing, as well as the place of underground/outsider/DIY music in a particularly absurd time for Sydney councils and state government. Thanks to Tom for permission to re-print this, and please enjoy this snapshot of 2012 Sydney.
Where do you think Sydney’s need for spaces like Black Wire comes from?
I grew up in this local government area [Annandale and surrounds], and pretty much all of my formative gig-going years saw me going to more shows at the Manly Youth Centre than anything around here. It was a real wasteland in terms of local culture, but there has always seemed to be a real high importance placed on imported and appropriated culture, this perception of wider culture. But there’s always been really little that is done about supporting or even assisting actual local bands, culture and artists.
Do you think that motivated the opening of Black Wire? And the Marrickville warehouse spaces more generally?
It’s an immediate response to that kind of culture, or lack of culture; that’s essentially where we are coming from. All our experience is from either illegal or grey-area things prior to this, so this is an attempt at creating a space that has at the very least an air of legitimacy and is able to withstand attempts to shut it down, something that's essentially sustainable. The sad thing is that a lot of the warehouses and other spaces are just defeated, often by a lot of the same issues that we’re facing.
It's a shame that there seems to be very little broader credit given to the cultural and artistic value of spaces like these...
And you can’t artificially create that. Those spaces and Black Wire are all products of the people involved. I don’t mean that in terms of us: it’s a product of everyone who comes, and the bands who play. The community essentially creates it itself and it works because it’s a manifestation of that.
Do you think that’s why these places feel so much more comfortable to attend than conventional venues?
I think that’s the breaking down of barriers. In the larger venues, there’s a performer-attendee gap. Performers and musicians do fantastic things and are worthy of respect and even awe in some cases, but they’re not superhuman, untouchable people. It’s important to recognise that it’s something anyone can do. Particularly in a place like this, you’re standing right next to them; they’re there before and after the sets. They’re just there, and it breaks down this barrier. You’re less removed from the whole experience, which I think makes it more worthwhile.
Do you think there's room for more DIY spaces like Black Wire?
For sure, I would like to think so. I think it should happen, and I think if anything we’re demonstrating that it can be done. Not only based on the amount of people who want to do stuff, but the amount of stuff going on. To put it kind of simply: if there’s more places for people to do things, more people do things! There’s definitely space for it, and I think we should embrace it. Maybe there is potentially a limit to the amount of spaces you can have in any one city, sure, but we’re so far away from even approaching that in Sydney. I think anyone that is going to do anything in an ethical and sound way that supports the artists is going to be fantastic.
There are a handful of new, conventionally 'legitimate' venues starting to open or become more prominent around Sydney [The Square in Haymarket, the Library in Surry Hills, Brighton Up Bar in Darlinghurst]. Do you think that ever takes away the need for DIY spaces?
Sydney just needs more venues, it’s an undeniable fact. More so, it needs more well-run venues with staff and bookers who understand bands, not people who see bands as people to be taken advantage of or enemies, which is what almost every experience I’ve had with pubs and large venues in Sydney has been like. It’s an antagonistic relationship, which is just wrong, and it doesn’t make sense either! You’d think it would make good business sense to be an ethically run, supportive venue. I’m cautiously optimistic that things like the Newtown Social Club [Note: previously the Sando, a mini-golf bar in 2022] can be beneficial to Sydney, but I don’t want to pre-empt it. All of these other places, including us, exist because of this void that was created, which is not a new thing either - there has always been fits and starts of people doing stuff like this in Sydney. There’s a long, hellish kind of situation where it’s been a dire environment for bands and the gig-going public.
It feels like there’s a real shift away from the handful of established venues towards a number of smaller, new venues.
There’s been this horrible tradition of what I kind of envisage as the balding, pony-tailed rock dude who seems to rule everything in this town. They’re this kind of bitter, failed musician who became a music professional, who have taken their resentment at the world out at the community of Sydney. I don’t like those people! They all worked in something for Kylie Minogue, or had some kind of sub-producing credit for INXS…
Just old remnants of the industry model?
Yeah. Look, the industry model is just fundamentally flawed. It always has been, but particularly recently. They’re just refusing to accept any kind of progression of how people engage with music. They have this head-in-the-sand approach that is, again, an antagonistic relationship that the music industry has with the people who engage with and play music, which is just backwards.
Which is why people are naturally drawn to these kinds of passion projects?
There are just different cultures. A lot of people see things as having less cultural significance and inherent value if they don’t have a monetary value attached to it, which I think is completely wrong.
Where does local council and state government fit into the world of live music then?
Councils need to be supportive of these things. They don’t need to be reacting to people who are already doing something, they need to become proactive about supporting it in order to actually encourage it. Maybe it’s an overly litigious scenario, but for some unknown reason they’ve got it wrong.
I wonder sometimes if it’s just fear of the unknown, that this world can be surprisingly under the radar of a lot of people, let alone the stereotypical councillor.
Well yeah, we’ve been doing stuff for almost two-and-a-half years: hundreds of things with hundreds of artists and internationals before they even knew what was going on! It’s just this kind of detachment from the community they claim to represent. It’s extremely disappointing and counterproductive.
Not just councils, though. I feel like we're at multiple shows a week, yet you have the press and government lobbies telling you that live music is dead. It seems damaging to the reputation of what is a pretty thriving city of music.
Well, federal and state funding bodies have got the complete wrong end of the stick. I went to a really depressing event [a series of workshops under Music NSW’s Indent banner] with Brooke Olsen [Dirty Shirlows], Chris Hearn [Terrace Bar] and lots of other people who were already doing fantastic stuff, people who just needed a little help. Essentially from the workshops we were going to, all they wanted to fund was for someone to reinvent iTunes. They just had this completely detached, corporate approach towards funding, which was entirely depressing. It was one of the most absurd experiences I’ve ever had. I got free sandwiches, which was good. [Laughs] I was low on money and hadn’t been eating very well. I had to walk down to Broadway because I couldn’t afford public transport!
Just to be told that there’s no way you could be funded...
Yeah, and for it to be demonstrated so clearly! They employed some ridiculous consultancy firm to sit there and tell us about it. They were talking about these ridiculous notions, and they were only interested in things that were going to earn millions of dollars. They weren’t worried if it was going to have cultural significance or if it was worthwhile in any kind of broad sense, it was just to do with earning shitloads of money. That was where they placed the value. All the people in the audience were people involved with the production and showcasing of music, whereas they were only worried about sales platforms and ways of essentially reinventing iTunes. They were using all these examples of these ridiculous, redundant platforms, and at some point we mentioned that most of the bands we deal with go through Bandcamp and Soundcloud- and they had no idea what either of those were!
Have you ended up spending much time applying for arts grants?
Not me personally. Other people have for Black Wire, but it’s a really long and frustrating process. The whole funding structure is set up in a way that encourages people to become good at applying for funding rather than doing something worthwhile that deserves funding. That’s not to say that good projects don’t get funded – I just find that it’s overwhelmingly inappropriate. As much as funding and government acknowledgement would be helpful in a lot of ways, it’s almost good to be separate from that. You’ve got no responsibility to be fulfilling certain criteria. And even just knowing that you’re doing it all yourself and not being assisted...maybe there’s a certain value to being independent. Not just of corporate things like major labels, but being independent of major government as well.
Which ties into some of the things that Nic Warnock was talking about recently in regards to AIR [Australian Independent Record Labels Association] losing their way…
And he’s absolutely right. AIR is just fucked. I think they’re shit-scared that if they deny all these people who are funded and distributed by major labels and only dealt with truly independent labels, they wouldn’t have anything good left. They’ve got so little faith in Australian music, which just shows that they’re not actually listening to Australian music. For them to be celebrating some of these labels is absurd. It may fit a criteria that’s been set by someone, but if you’re funded, manufactured or distributed by major labels, you are no longer independent of them! It’s almost offensive in the way that they’re trying to co-opt a culture of independent labels, because their vested interests are in music and art and the bands themselves and they’re trying to co-opt that. It’s not to say that a lot of them don’t have good intentions, but it’s just not independent.
On industry bodies like AIR, you recently received a copyright infringement notice from APRA. Is it disconcerting to be fined by someone who is supposed to be in place to support music culture?
As much as I think APRA do fantastic things and are really important for musicians, it just seems a bit misguided and punitive. I don’t fully grasp the situation we’re in just yet, because there’s a lot of legalese. Thankfully there’s a lot of people here who are helping us out with it, which is helping me avoid a nervous breakdown. But yeah, I can kind of understand where they’re coming from, but it’s just a bit out of context.
Are these kinds of organisations just not adapted to DIY spaces?
Well yeah, it’s a definite flaw. In the correspondence we’ve had with the people there, they’re supposedly aware of the struggles facing DIY venues, but it hasn’t been taken into account in the criteria of what they’re actually doing. But we’re still in the middle of it, so I don’t know whether to be depressed and horrified by it, or accepting. There are possibilities of waivers and all kinds of things, and there’s every chance they’re just fulfilling an obligation that they have, but we just have to do it formally, which can be a bit scary.
A whole bunch of big words on a whole bunch of paper…
“Breach of copyright” and other scary combinations of words. The bands are in charge of who gets paid and how much they get paid here. It’s the copyright holders who dictate what people pay them here. We don’t dictate how people get paid at all, so to be billed and potentially fined, that’s just more fuel for the nervous breakdown.
You’ve been operating here pretty safely for almost three years now, but there’s always word of some kind of residential complaint. What has been the public’s reception to Black Wire?
For so long it was just overwhelmingly positive. People were excited just to have something happening. They felt safer coming back at night because there were people around. It has only ever been essentially one resident who has caused any problems.
What was the problem there?
A lot of it is based on simple prejudice of how people look, which I can kind of understand, but it’s a difficult thing to deal with; they can’t actually hear anything from the shop. There were incidents of people pissing on a neighbour’s doorstep, which is obviously completely unacceptable, so we had to move the whole shop around to make it more accessible for people to be spending time out the back near the toilet. The nature of Parramatta Road though, being on the walking trail between pubs, I’m not exactly surprised. I have to admit that there are some pretty attractive pissing points around here for people staggering along late at night. A lot of dark alcoves. The most recent pissing incident actually happened when we weren’t even open. It just led to us being blamed for it anyway, which led to outlandish claims about bringing property values down in the area, and being responsible for graffiti, and then the general decline of Parramatta Road, which is just absurd!
Is the council compliance stuff you’re going through at the moment a result of that resident complaint?
Yes. That one residential complaint sent it to compliance officers and they’re obligated to investigate complaints. They essentially said the complaint wasn’t an issue. Apart from us having a neighbourly responsibility, which we absolutely accept, we didn’t have a responsibility for people’s behaviour once they’ve left the premises. What they actually found was that no one who has been in this property had ever gotten planning permission to be a retail shop. We signed a retail lease and took it as a given that it was a retail space, but when council had a look at it, they found that it was actually listed as a restaurant. Supposedly that was what was on the forms for the only person who had ever put in a planning application, but the owners said, “we’ve been here since the Whitlam years, and it has never been a restaurant!” It used to be a computer shop, a newsagent before that and an antique shop, but apparently none of them ever had planning permission.
We opened here after the changes to the Place of Public Entertainment Laws, which made it so that we were able to have bands playing without planning permission for it. It was with that understanding that we started here. But when the council found that we didn’t have planning permission to even have a shop, it meant that was essentially voided. So we have to get permission to go from being a hypothetical restaurant that has never existed and put in a development application for a change of use to being a retail space. Just in a bureaucratic sense, we have to deal with that, and anyone who has dealt with local council bureaucracy would be familiar with the myriad of difficulties and hair loss involved. It’s an ongoing thing. I try to avoid being optimistic about it; you have to prepare yourself for constant disappointment in this thing.
Is that part of the reason for the benefit weekend?
It’s a bunch of things. The community has been supportive and amazingly helpful; I can never take it for granted, it never ceases to amaze me. But at the same time, there are things that are unavoidable; it’s going to cost lots of money. Because we’re non-profit and volunteer-run, the most important thing for us – equal in importance to having somewhere for bands to play – is for the bands to be paid enough to be able to be sustainable, particularly for touring bands. We’ve always been acutely aware of the fact that we have to take as little as possible and pay bands as much as possible, but that means we’re constantly just scraping through. Any extra expenses that arise become unmanageable. The benefit will be recovering some inevitable expenses for this application, but also just running costs.
So if it came to someone like Jagermeister coming along to sponsor the venue, saying like, "here's $100,000 to get out of the shit," what do you do?
There’d be a couple of levels to that. I couldn’t live with myself for one. And I would never live down the fact that I’ve given so much shit to people who accept those offers over the years. I resent companies like Red Bull and Jagermeister parasitically attaching themselves to things and throwing money at them just to create an image for themselves. It detracts from anything that anybody is doing. I say this from a position where I have no responsibilities or family to support, so I have a certain privileged position, but I would never get involved in something like that. I would find an offer very entertaining, but it would just be taking the piss. It would completely negate what we’re trying to do.
+++other updates___
—visited giacomo stefanini (friend of barely human and member of the band Kobra and label/collective Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzio) in milano on friday and cannot get over what is being done in that city on the diy front. the above interview is nice to reflect on with what milano has going with occupied venues/squats (Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito), collectives, broader community initiatives and really, really good people and music: went to see milano band spirito di lupo practice who are really fucking good and are playing a brand of music that giacomo is trying to coin as ‘inner-peace punk’—it rules. the plan was to record an interview for this substack but i had such a good time talking to everyone that i never got around to recording anything, but i’ll try and arrange an interview when back in sydney.
—probably a new barely human zine/tape soon too? trying to decide on a few things i had planned, but let me know if you need a cheaper deal on anything that’s on the mail order list and i’ll try put some things together in october