All posts tagged chris

  • Rolling Stone story: ‘The Discovery Channel: triple j’s power over Australian music’, December 2011

    A feature story published in the January 2012 issue of Rolling Stone Australia, under the ‘National Affairs’ banner.

    Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    National Affairs: The Discovery Channel
    Is triple j’s power over Australian music being used for good, or evil?

    by Andrew McMillen. Illustration by Andrea Innocent

    In many ways, triple j studios – located on the third level of the cavernous ABC building on Harris Street, in inner Sydney – also functions as the central nervous system of the Australian music industry. On any given day, hundreds of thousands of listeners across the country are tuned in. Label owners, promoters, publicists and musicians follow the station with relentless fascination, as its playlist and musical preferences can literally make, delay, or break careers in the notoriously fickle music business.

    For decades, since the national broadcaster’s inception in August 1980, triple j has continued to grow: in terms of staff numbers, audience popularity and, as a direct result, cultural influence. With great power comes great responsibility. As triple j continues to slowly evolve into a gangly octopus whose arms now extend far beyond its initial radio habitat into print media, significant online networking, year-round event promotion, and – with the October launch of a standalone Unearthed station – digital radio, it’s worth taking a magnifying glass to the station’s many activities to examine whether their great power is being used for good or evil.

    Two senses are immediately pricked entering triple j studios: the eyes are met with bloody red walls contrasting against innocuous whites, and the ears latch onto the sounds of triple j being piped through the station’s corridors, while Zan Rowe broadcasts her morning show live to air just a few metres away. Station manager Chris Scaddan strolls past their huge music library to his corner office. His coffee table is stacked with months’ worth of printed music media: street press, monthlies, international imports. A recent issue of triple j magazine sits conspicuously atop the pile.

    He turns down the live broadcast to a quiet gurgle as he considers a question: how would he describe triple j to someone who’d never heard it before?

    “It’s uniquely Australian,” Scaddan says. “We’re about new music; mainly, new Australian music. We’re targeted at 18-24 year-olds, so we’re here for young Australians. We play diverse styles of music; we’re independent and non-commercial, which is important. At this point, we’re a brand that reaches across quite a few different platforms. We’re our audience as much as anything, as well. We’re really in touch with our listeners, and we hope that what we’re doing is reflecting and inspiring what they want, and what they want to listen to, and what they want to know about.”

    Eight minutes into the interview, in response to a question about whether triple j’s support is crucial to the success of Australian bands on a national scale, he cites a recently discovered statistic that he’s clearly very proud of: in October 2011, the station posted audience figures of 1.5 million in the five capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide).

    “At the moment, we’ve got as many people listening as we ever have. But are we crucial to a band’s success? I don’t think so,” Scaddan says. “Certainly we’re a national broadcaster, and we’ve got a really strong audience. I wouldn’t say it’s crucial to whether you make it or don’t. There are so many different ways that you can find a career or an audience through the Australian music industry. There’s so many examples of bands who may not have been played by triple j who are doing just fine.”

    “Just fine” is a relative term, of course. For every Art Vs Science, Boy & Bear or Washington playing to thousands-strong crowds on the national stage, there are dozens – perhaps hundreds – of acts across Australia who enjoy strong support within their hometowns or capital cities, but struggle to make the jump to national notoriety without the nod from triple j. Does Scaddan find that bands get pissed off when they get told, ‘thanks, but no thanks’ in response to their latest release?

    “That does happen,” he replies. “That’s the nature of the business we’re all in. Just like artists who are pitching for articles in Rolling Stone and don’t get a mention get pissed off, and can’t understand it sometimes. It is really, really difficult. We’re always looking to try and find a really good balance of genres, of locations – nationwide, so we’re not just picking bands from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane all the time.”

    “It’s difficult, and sometimes bands who want to get triple j airplay might not crack it on the playlist. That doesn’t mean they’re still not getting played in other ways on the station. They tune in and they’re not getting played as often as Gotye, or Florence + The Machine, and they think they should be. You just hope they can understand that there’s a limit to how much music can fit on the station and make it work.”

    Such programming decisions lie not with Scaddan, nor with music director Richard Kingsmill, but with the entire triple j staff. When Kingsmill is questioned – in jest – about whether he’s the most powerful man in Australian music, he practically explodes in exasperation from a couch positioned nearby the station’s carefully stacked CD collection.

    “It is not anywhere near the truth. It is just such a misconception to think this place isn’t a team of people,” Kingsmill says. “I have said this time and time again, and if people still think that I sit there and basically call all the shots, they are wrong. I can’t say it enough. This station is built on teamwork. It always has been. If you’ve got a bad framework, or teamwork vibe happening in this place, it shows on the other end of the radio. When we all work together, we get the results. It’s as simple as that.”

    ++

    What happens when your band wins the musical equivalent of the lottery, the triple j Unearthed slot to open the main stage of Splendour In The Grass? In 2011, the competition was won by Brisbane indie pop band Millions. Twenty-two-year-old drummer James Wright is being a little humble by equating the contest to a lottery: those rely on luck alone, not songwriting talent.

    Still, it’s curious to hear Wright honestly state Millions’ intentions upon forming in December 2010. “The entire objective of the band was using triple j to get where we want to go,” he says. A four-piece comprised of members from three Brisbane bands you’ve never heard of, Millions realised during their initial rehearsals that their sound might appeal to the national broadcaster.

    “There was the fleeting chance that, if we maybe more deliberately went towards the triple j sort of sound, in terms of being more accessible than our previous bands, then we might have a shot at actually doing some good, and getting played,” Wright says. “We didn’t exactly have high aspirations for it, but we were really happy with the two songs we’d written [at the time].”

    He says that Millions are “the exact opposite” of their previous bands, in that their path was “extremely thought through, to the point of calculating exactly how many shows it would take us to get where we wanted to go, and to who we should play these shows with and why we should do them and where we should play them.” The Splendour 2011 slot was unexpected for the band, and “pretty much blew everyone’s mind” according to Wright, but not unsurprising given their ambitions.

    Stephen Green is well acquainted with this kind of mindset among artists. Since beginning as a radio “plugger” – a guy who pitches new music to stations across the country – he now runs his own publicity consulting business, SGC Media.

    “The problem of triple j being so dominant is that it artistically skews what some bands are coming out with,” he says. “If you’ve got the opportunity to do the song that’s in your head that’s not very ‘triple j’, or you tweak it somewhat and make it sound like bands that are getting airplay… I think a lot of bands are going down [the second] path a little more.”

    “The tracks that I think work least are the ones that the band have gone, ‘right, we’ve got to get on triple j’, and they’ve tried to write a ‘triple j song’,” Green adds. “If it just happened like that, then – great. But I think too many bands push down that path. Being generic so that you sound like every other band is not usually the way to stand out and have a particularly successful career.”

    When Green works on publicity with Australian artists, he never plans a campaign assuming that the act will get triple j airplay. “If you do that, you’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment,” he says. “I don’t think you can make assumptions that anybody’s going to play anything.” So what happens when triple j rejects the song or record you’re pitching them? “Well, you kick the wall, the client gets shitty and says, ‘you didn’t rep it properly’. You break up, and that’s the end of that!” he laughs, clearly joking.

    Like Green, Megan Reeder Hope places a high value on including triple j in her marketing plans. As general manager at Secret Service Public Relations, Reeder Hope works regularly with the Brisbane-based record label Dew Process, whose roster includes Mumford & Sons, The Grates and Seeker Lover Keeper. “triple j is essential,” she says. “It’s probably the crux of my plans of how we work at Dew Process.”

    “That’s not to say that we don’t value the rest of the media: community radio is really important, as is commercial radio when you get to a certain point,” Reeder Hope says. “But I think triple j is that centrepiece that needs to be in place to be able to do all of the other ones, as well. From our perspective, triple j has a high level of integrity. They really do things in a way that’s uncompromising of their own editorial policy, while still always putting the music first. It really is all about the music for them. They support artists, and they support them throughout their careers.”

    Back at the station’s Sydney studios, music director Richard Kingsmill is clearly proud of the station’s success, and unapologetic to its critics. “If anyone’s got any complaints and arguments against us, or thinks that we’re in some ways trying to monopolise the Australian industry….” He pauses. “You get damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If we sat back and went, ‘Well, we shouldn’t monopolise the Australian music industry, we should sit in this corner and do our little job and not try to do anything,’ we’d get criticised for being negligent and not proactive. If you’re proactive, then you tread on toes a little bit, I guess, but we’re not meaning to tread on toes.”

    “It’s not supposed to be 100 per cent,” Kingsmill continues. “No one can be 100 per cent, and no one should expect triple j to be 100%. We do what we do to the best of our abilities, and we try as hard as we possibly can, with the best of intentions. But at the end of the day, we’re all humans. So we’ll take chances and we’ll take risks, and sure, we’ll piss people off, but we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t think there was a section of the community out there who was actually enjoying it.”

    Further reading and discussion:

  • Qweekend story: ‘The Long Dry Spell’; Chris Raine and Hello Sunday Morning, June 2011

    This is my first story for Qweekend, The Courier-Mail’s Saturday magazine. It appeared on the cover of the June 4-5 2011 issue.

    Click the below image to read the story as a PDF in a new window, or scroll down to read the article text underneath.

    The Long Dry Spell

    Story: Andrew McMillen. Photography: Russell Shakespeare.

    When Chris Raine gave up drinking for 12 months just to see if he could, he started a Gen Y revolution.

    ++

    At just after nine on a Saturday night, Chris Raine greets me at the door of his Fortitude Valley apartment in Brisbane’s inner city and leads me upstairs where he fixes a couple of French martinis (vodka, raspberry liqueur and pineapple juice). It’s my first alcoholic beverage of the night; it’s his sixth. Or seventh. He’s not really sure. On the couch, his friend Tamara, 26, sits in front of an Apple TV streaming photographs, mostly of people and nature scenes. Dance music is playing on the stereo.

    Raine’s two housemates – an engaged couple – are downstairs in the jacuzzi, requesting top-ups for their martinis. Plans for the rest of the evening are discussed. Raine and Tamara intend to head to a dance club in the CBD. I have plans to meet friends at a British pub at midnight to watch live soccer games. Some of Raine’s friends arrive at the apartment, already liberally soused and keen to continue drinking.

    None of these momentary decisions will have much bearing on any of our wider lives. It’s just another Saturday night in Brisbane and a handful of young people are deciding how they will spend the next few hours. The only difference is that one man in the room – 24-year old Raine – is actively turning the tide of his generation’s unhealthy obsession with binge-drinking. Although he’s wearing a loud shirt and a new haircut, nothing about him screams “revolutionary”. Yet his idea – Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) – could be seen as such, at least by a growing army of Gen Y binge-drinkers.

    Raine has spent two years developing, nurturing and disseminating the HSM philosophy. The project began humbly, but is now chipping away at Australia’s imbibing culture, one young drinker at a time. Raine’s idea acknowledges that Australia has a drinking problem, one that is both unhealthy and unsustainable. But it’s here that any resemblance to government-funded, multimillion-dollar anti-bingeing public health campaigns ends.

    HSM is not about guilt or scare tactics. While federal taskforces and marketing teams execute plans that admonish and demonise young Australians who drink to excess, HSM prefers to start conversations around alcohol use by challenging those people to give up booze for three, six or 12 months at a time.

    Built into this process – known as “doing a HSM” among self-dubbed “HSMers” – is a request that participants publish blog entries on the project’s website (hellosundaymorning.com.au). Many HSMers prefer to write their own blogs; some film and upload video versions. Most choose to share these confessional entries with friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. You could call it abstinence by social network.

    Blogging is a request, not a demand. Some HSMers choose not to blog, in the same way that some partygoers refuse to stop drinking. Instead, they work through their HSM by keeping their cards close to their chests, and telling only their close friends. But those who do blog add to an online resource that – with each additional webpage visit, comment, Facebook “like” and retweet – infiltrates the culture.

    As Raine mixes my second cocktail, I ask him if he’s had many doors shut in his face over the past few years. “Constantly. Of course,” he replies. “Even the idea of being abstinent for a short period is confronting [to some people]”.

    Then it hits me – isn’t the founder and CEO of Hello Sunday Morning “binge-drinking”, according to the National Health and Medical Research Council definition of the term? He’s had more than four standard drinks in a night.

    “All that kind of public policy is important, but it’s not really my cup of tea,” he shrugs. “I’m more interested in individuals working out what works for them. And tonight, having French martinis is working for me.”

    Raine’s a realist. And besides, he’s just completed a three-month break from the booze. In fact, since he began waving the HSM flag in January 2009, he has spent 15 of those 29 months stone-cold sober. If anyone deserves a few casual martinis, it’s him.

    ++

    Christopher Keith Raine was born at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital on November 28, 1986. He has a younger sister, Jess, 22. Their parents, Ellen and David – both GPs – split when Chris was eight years old.

    As a child, his first love was tennis. In primary school he would spend his lunch breaks with a ball, a racquet and a brick wall. Nothing else mattered. His father recalls that Chris “had a bit of McEnroe in him at one stage”. He routinely threw tantrums and launched his racquet over fences if he lost even a single game. Like his older half-brothers, Chris later boarded at Brisbane Grammar School in inner-city Spring Hill. Early on, a teacher’s offhand remark earned him the nickname “Nugget”, owing to his adolescent chubbiness.

    The first time Chris got drunk was at his father’s third wedding. He was ten years old. “As a parent you hear about these things later on,” David laughs. “It’s amazing what goes on at the time.”

    Chris Raine’s next formative experience with alcohol was when he was 13 and in Year 8. It was at a farewell party for his half-brother Andrew, who was leaving for Cambodia where he lived for a year as a junior diplomat. Chris “got written off” and embarrassed himself. He slept it off, then returned to boarding school.

    His parents were vehemently opposed to excessive drinking. “Chris wasn’t allowed to drink [without our approval] until he was 18,” Ellen confirms. David was also very much against what he saw as the schoolies tradition “where they try to stuff as much alcohol into their systems as they possibly can”.

    For a time, drinking and partying became Raine’s tennis; his obsession. There was no history of alcohol abuse in his immediate family, nor did he consider himself a problem drinker.

    Raine’s entrepreneurial flair became apparent in Year 10 when he would smuggle $10 bottles of alcohol into his dorm and sold them for $20 each. This went on for six months, until he and most of his friends in their senior years progressed to obtaining fake IDs so they could drink in pubs. While Raine was never caught drinking on the school campus, his teachers might have been grudgingly impressed by the lengths to which he and his mates would go to sneak out of the dorm at night to attend boozy parties. Raine still relishes the chance to “push the social envelope” to see how far he can take things.

    His academic results at school were never exceptional. “He spent 12 years not really knowing why he was at school,” mother Ellen says. “He thought it didn’t relate to his life [beyond school].” It was her idea for Raine to travel through South America for a year as an exchange student when he was 17. He recalls it was a time of “lots of drinking, lots of partying”.

    On his return he began a Bachelor of Communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC), also at his mother’s suggestion, and lived in his parents’ Caloundra apartment. He had no career plans, though he knew his talents lay in marketing because he’d always been a good communicator.

    Raine hit what he calls “rock bottom” halfway through his degree after he broke up with a girlfriend. His parents were worried about him – he was depressed and drinking heavily, and often. He says he was stuck in a rut where his life had “no real purpose or vision”. Yet getting his heart broken was the impetus for him to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself.

    Simon Maher – a marketing and management student at USC – was Raine’s flatmate at the time. Maher had just gone through a difficult relationship break-up of his own when he first moved in with Raine. He says the pair of them shared a lot of thoughts, experiences and feelings at the time – unusual for two young men. Although there were times when Maher would arrive home and find his flatmate halfway through a bottle of tequila, he’d just as often be woken by a 5am knock on the door by Raine inviting him out on a morning jog.

    “I developed a lot as a person, living with Chris. He challenges people in positive ways,” says Maher, who now works as a HR and marketing manager for Telstra and retains a strong friendship with Raine. “Sometimes he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.”

    As a budding entrepreneur, Raine booked Mooloolaba’s Wharf Tavern for regular Thursday night alcohol-fuelled events for his fellow students. At 21 he became the venue’s marketing manager but says he found it unconscionable to participate in the exploitation of young drinkers.

    Later, he hustled an internship at a Brisbane-based youth advertising agency called Fresh, his first job on graduating. It was here that he made his first pitch to a government client whose brief was to reduce alcohol-related violence among teens. “[But] none of what we were coming up with was going to change the way I drank,” he recalls. At the time Raine was drinking “quite a lot”, which led to another crisis of conscience.

    His colleagues challenged him to come up with something better, so he decided to make it personal. Raine swore off alcohol for a year on New Year’s Day, 2009, just a couple of hours after midnight. He decided his findings should be made public, because he’d never heard of anyone sharing such an experience socially.

    Naming his blog Hello Sunday Morning, he wanted it to be “something positive, fun, lighthearted, and focused on individuals”. “It was like ’carpe diem‘, you know?” he says. “Hello Sunday Morning, for me, was a call to action. It’s about making the most of every day, not just Sunday. You only have one opportunity to make the most of your life. And it all starts with ’hello’.”

    ++

    Raine was a barely competent blogger at first. His web entries were brief, shallow and gave the impression he wasn’t too keen on teetotalling. But he was just too proud to back down in front of his mates or, more importantly, to reveal the truth about himself.

    His first entry, grandly titled “The Odyssey Begins”, reads:

    “[It’s] Sunday morning and I am actually sitting at my desk, typing in a mildly coherent fashion on my laptop … as apposed [sic] to being completely hungover, bedridden and dreading doing absolutely anything except lay [sic] in my bed and eat KFC. This is a blog about what crazy things can happen to a normal, social, 22-year-old when they don’t drink alcohol for an entire year. It is a real-time look into the wonderful Australian pastime of drinking through the eyes of someone who isn’t.” – January 11, 2009

    Unexpected challenges soon cropped up. Just a week into his year of sobriety, Raine was dumped by another girlfriend.

    “There would be nothing more I would like to do right now than go straight to [a bar] and write myself off on tequila shots,” he wrote. “But I can’t, so I type. It’s a strange place, having to sit in your own emotions.” – January 18, 2009

    In the same blog entry, he confessed he had been dependent on the relationship with his ex-girlfriend because it meant he didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of chatting up other women without the aid of liquid courage…

    “I don’t think I ever actually learnt how to socialise with girls, sober. I mean, I’m good at talking to women. I have lots and lots of women friends, but when it comes to putting the moves on – horrible. What I don’t understand is: why aren’t young men taught how to communicate with women? 1. There would be less violence. 2. People would drink less, and 3. Kebab sales would plummet.” – July 28, 2009

    Rather than suffering in lonely silence, during his HSM abstinence adventure Raine chose to put himself in social environments on a regular basis. He was going out on most weekends, taking notes and blogging all the while. By April, his new role as a sober observer led to an epiphany – while he was watching his hero Michael Franti, an outspoken 45-year-old American musician and social justice activist, perform at a festival in Byron Bay, northern NSW.

    “In the past three months I have gone through a lot of realisations and I feel that Hello Sunday Morning is my life’s purpose. Even if it is small now, I feel like we are making a bit of a difference. I feel so good when people tell me that it makes them think about their own actions around drinking. It makes me believe.” – April 15, 2009

    Over the next few months, Raine’s passive observations of drinking culture metamorphosed into deep, detailed essays – on drinking, social interaction, sobriety – which showed how seriously he now took his role. He left Fresh in September that year to give HSM his full attention and by November, five of his close friends had agreed to undertake their own HSMs. Their support strengthened his resolve.

    “I’m humbled by the willingness of young people to stand up and make a choice not because they have to, but just because they believe in a better way,” he wrote. “They believe they can challenge those belief systems around alcohol which have been handed to them from one generation to the next. More importantly, they believe they can change it for the generations that will follow them. We are not many. But we have conviction and purpose, which is stronger than any number.”

    Against the odds – and in defiance of his peers’ initial disbelief – Raine completed the year-long dry spell, and then decided to postpone that first drink a little longer, despite being out at a bar surrounded by friends…

    “I didn’t end up drinking at 2am because I didn’t think it would add any value to the experience I was having. I look forward to giving it a ’yes’ sometime soon, but it will have to be for the right reasons. Wow. One year. One year of change, evolution and freedom. I’m 23 years old and my life has never been more full.” – January 1, 2010

    ++

    Our martinis drained, Raine, Tamara and I catch a taxi to Rosie’s, a club on Edward St in Brisbane’s CBD. We head downstairs where dozens of young adults are dancing to dubstep (a sub-genre of electronic dance music) beneath strobe lights. We sip mixed drinks and take in a few songs. I leave them at the club and meet friends nearby at Brit-themed pub the Pig ‘N’ Whistle. After watching two full games of live English soccer, I walk home to New Farm. It is 4am.

    Over the course of the night I’ve consumed two French martinis, a vodka raspberry, a gin and tonic, two pints of full-strength beer, a Coca-Cola, and two pints of water – about eight standard drinks, all up. By government definition, it’s a binge; by mine, an anomaly. I’m usually in bed, sober, by 1am.

    On the walk home, my low-level booze buzz has been replaced by overwhelming exhaustion. I think of the parallels between Raine’s experiences with alcohol and my own. Though he’s a year older than me, we’ve both made poor decisions under the influence. He’s lost his licence for drink-driving. I was once taken home in the back of a police car as an underager. But as Raine points out, we’re no better or worse people for having made these decisions.

    Since starting Hello Sunday Morning, Raine’s persistent networking – hustling, as he calls it – means he has positively influenced hundreds of young lives while also building a business around his idea. HSM is now primarily funded by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation which, in turn, is funded by the South Australian Government. TACSI’s $200,000 contribution to HSM last year allowed Raine to hire a full-time operations manager, plus a handful of part-timers specialising in research, web creative (programming, design and branding), membership coordination, and university relations. Raine halved his own salary so he could afford those five part-timers, although he says they’re still not paid half what they deserve.

    Michael Thorn, CEO of the Canberra-based Alcohol Education & Rehabilitation Foundation (AERF) – who recently awarded HSM $20,000 in funding for a web documentary series – describes HSM as a logical step. “It’s dealing with a demographic where we know there are serious causes for concern,” he says. AERF research published in April this year found that most Generation Y survey respondents drink specifically to get drunk. “Over one-third (35 per cent) of all drinkers consume alcohol for this purpose,” the survey said, “but [it particularly] applies to the majority of Gen Y drinkers (61 per cent).”

    HSMer Anthea Flint, 22, fell firmly into that category. She got drunk for the first time at 14 after raiding the liquor cabinet at a mate’s house. After that she drank every weekend until one too many public mistakes under the influence led her to HSM at age 21. During her seven months of sobriety, she saved money, travelled to India, regained her physical fitness and is finishing a degree in PR and advertising at Queensland University of Technology.

    Flint remains a strong advocate of HSM. “It’s exciting to be a part of this as it gains momentum and as you see the reactions of other people to what you’ve achieved through not drinking,” she says. “It makes you feel like you’ve achieved something, and you’re a part of something really special.”

    More than 800 Australians like Flint have publicly committed to taking a break from drinking through HSM. One of them, Jill Stark, a 35-year-old health reporter for The Age in Melbourne, condensed her blog posts into a feature story run by the newspaper in April. It summarised her own HSM experience, an initial three months without alcohol.

    “Politicians, drug and alcohol sector workers, teachers, mental health experts – they’re all wringing their hands about this booze-soaked culture that we have in this country,” she says. ”Everyone talks about changing that culture, but no-one really knows how to do that.

    “HSM is about changing a culture. You do that by engaging the people that you’re trying to reach with the problem. I’m not sure why it works, but it does. Possibly because young people can see someone like Chris, who looks like them, is the same age as them, and came from the same background. Even those who haven’t taken up HSM are looking at their own drinking habits and saying, ’Hold on, maybe I could do this a better way’.”

    ++

    Footnote: As of June 4 2011, I’ve undertaken a three-month HSM of my own. You can read about that on my HSM blog.

    ++

    This story in Qweekend was accompanied by a smaller, summarising story inside the main section of The Courier-Mail, on page 18. Article text below.

    Social group leaving hangovers behind

    ALL across Queensland on New Year’s Day, the words “not drinking again” escape the lips of innumerable hangover sufferers.

    Most of them soon back down in the face of both social pressures and a desire to regularly imbibe alcohol that seems practically etched upon the DNA of our national identity.

    A beacon of hope in dark, drunken nights is named Chris Raine. He uttered that commitment on January 1, 2009, and kept his word for an entire year.

    Then 22 years old, Raine adhered to the straight and narrow through what could be called abstinence by social network. Rather than carry it close to his chest, he opted to create a blog and document his experience online.

    Raine’s curiosity toward Australia’s cultural obsession with alcohol – and his desire to subvert that culture – was dubbed ‘Hello Sunday Morning’. Now, two and-a-half years later, Raine’s “HSM” community now numbers more than 800.

    Not all of them blog about their experiences on the HSM website, but many do. In turn, its word-of-mouth marketing approach propels Raine’s message deeper into Australian culture with every subsequent blog comment and pageview.

    Raine, now 24, and living in Fortitude Valley calls HSM “an opportunity for anyone who is ready to take a three-month break from our drinking culture and find out what life is like without a hangover”.

    It’s not a life-long abstinence movement. Many who undertake an HSM a nominal period of three, six or 12 months without alcohol find that, once they return to the drinking scene, their relationship with alcohol has significantly changed … for the better.

    Ask 32-year-old Shane Yearbury, who is midway through a six-month break from booze.

    Previously, Yearbury business manager at a Motorama car dealership in Moorooka had subscribed to the “weekend warrior” mentality for over half his life.

    Since signing on to HSM in March, his perspective has shifted and already the benefits are apparent in his work.

    “I noticed an increase in productivity as soon as I stopped (drinking). I wanted to be involved in every process that we have here,” he said.

    Raine’s long-term goal is to halve Australia’s cultural dependency on alcohol. If that seems a tall order, consider that, just over two years ago, the concept of HSM was real for just one person: him.

    Now, it’s a part of daily life for hundreds of former binge drinkers.

    For more on Hello Sunday Morning, visit hellosundaymorning.com.au.

  • Rolling Stone story: ‘The Truth About Jebediah’, May 2011

    My first artist feature for Rolling Stone, which appeared in the May 2011 issue.

    You can click the scanned images below for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    The Truth About Jebediah

    After a decade and a half together, the Perth foursome have discovered a new type of success.
    By Andrew McMillen / Photograph by Carine Thevenau

    It wasn’t meant to be like this. Our interview was scheduled to take place hours ago in less risky confines, yet here we are in Jebediah’s hotel room; well-fed, and on our collective ways to well-drunk. Sitting on the couch are bassist Vanessa Thornton and singer/guitarist Kevin Mitchell, who places a near-full bottle of red wine on the coffee table and unceremoniously removes his shoes. At the table, drummer Brett Mitchell nurses a bourbon and cola. Across from him, lead guitarist Chris Daymond is chopping a nugget of weed into an egg cup. He rolls a joint, and he and Brett step out onto the balcony to smoke it. All the while, the band’s record company representative sits silently within earshot, wondering just how honest the band will be, now that they’re all stoned, or drunk, or both.

    Most of their day was spent filming a video for their single “She’s Like A Comet” at a workshop in Sydney’s inner city. To say that the thrill of watching the band run through countless takes to a backing track had lost its lustre would be an understatement. Earlier, over dinner at an organic restaurant in Newtown, Kevin sneaks in a seemingly innocuous question. “Was the video thing boring?” It’s a shit-test. He’s checking whether they’re here to star in a fluff piece, or whether something deeper is being sought.

    “Yeah, it got a bit old after a few hours.”

    He and his bandmates laugh, agree, and seem relieved by the response. From that point on, honesty flowed as freely as the booze. Hours later, in the hotel room, we begin the interview with a blunt question: why do they play music? Immediately, Thornton retorts: “Why not?”

    It’s a fair, if expected, riposte. These four Perth friends have been playing music together since 1994. It’s been a successful vocation. Their seventh gig won them the 1995 Australian National Campus Band Competition; their thirteenth won the national final in Lismore, N.S.W. Their first single, “Jerks Of Attention”, was a monster: backed by Triple J, the fast-paced tale of youthful excess was hastily embraced by a generation. The band signed to Sony imprint Murmur, whose roster included Silverchair and Something For Kate. To celebrate, they hosted a four-day bender at their house, while friends filmed their first music video. Fitting, for a song whose chorus describes the feeling of knowing it all while “wasted”.

    Jebediah arrived at a time when the national fascination with alternative rock was peaking. The band’s debut album, Slightly Odway, was released in September 1997, and went on to achieve double-platinum sales (140,000-plus). Thornton recalls Murmur founder John O’Donnell admitting that he’d “really love for this record to go gold”.

    “And we were like, ‘good luck to you!’” laughs Thornton.

    “It was all just shits and giggles. We honestly thought he was absolutely dreaming,’” says Kevin Mitchell.

    ++

    A lot has changed since those heady days. The band’s subsequent releases failed to achieve Odway-like success. The band-label relationship became strained after the release of their self-titled third album in 2002, a subject that arises when I ask them to pinpoint the moments where the band came closest to breaking up.

    Kevin Mitchell chooses his words carefully. “There have been a couple of times where maybe my level of enjoyment has been at a low point, where perhaps I’ve questioned it. Everybody goes through periods where they question whether what they’re doing is what they’re supposed to be doing. I think that’s healthy.”

    “But that’s as far as it gets,” Thornton adds.

    “Is it possible to do anything for 15 years, and enjoy it the whole time?” Brett Mitchell asks. “If you’re a vet, you’re going to have to shove your hand up an animal’s bum every once in a while. But that’s not why you got into veterinary school – it’s just part of the deal.”

    It seems fitting to ask: what were some of the hand-up-arse moments of the band’s career?

    “My time was after the third record, where things turned to shit,” Thornton says. “I probably made it bigger than I should’ve. But my heart was invested in it, and that’s just the way it turned out. And it was my own reality that I’d created, and that got totally shattered. It fucking broke me.”

    What happened?

    “Just label shit. Pressures. Everything was second-guessed. Our manager at the time couldn’t be fucked fighting the label for anything that we wanted, and he’d made the decision that we were just going to go with whatever the label reckoned. Near the end, it was fucking soul-destroying for me.”

    “It just felt like the technicalities overshadowed everything else,” offers Brett.

    “All the things that I enjoyed about playing music were no longer relevant,” Thornton adds.“That’s when I thought, ‘Fuck, is this what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, play this fucking game?’”

    That game was the business side of music, the bottom-line crunch that elevates the idea of records that sell far above the idea of records that sounds good. “Yeah – singles, videos, radio, tracklisting,” Thornton continues. “Like I said, I probably took it more to heart than I should’ve, and made too much of it in my own mind, but at the same time, it wasn’t about us four anymore. It was about what everyone thought was going to sell a record, which, to me, was not what we were even about. That was what the label did.”

    It was at this point that the band severed ties – the 2003 compilation Gleesides & Sparities was their final release on Murmur – and released their fourth album, 2004’s Braxton Hicks, on their own label, Redline Records. Thornton is in two minds about the wisdom of that decision.

    “But if it’d gone down the path that you’re talking about…” Brett begins, before his brother finishes his sentence.

    “We wouldn’t be here now.”

    “Putting it out on our label was an antidote,” Brett says.

    “It saved everything for me,” says Thornton.

    As it turns out, Braxton Hicks was Kevin’s hand-up-arse moment, and after the release, the band decided to take a break from writing, recording and performing together. “We always had the intention of getting back together, but if ever there was a time we were going to question it, it was then,” says Kevin. “Because that six months did turn into three years.”

    ++

    In the intervening years, Kevin concentrated on his stylistic reinvention as acoustic singer-songwriter Bob Evans, a persona significantly removed from fronting a band like Jebediah. Though they still got together to play a handful of shows per year, the four were living separate lives. With the exception of Kevin, they’re still based in Perth, for the most part: Chris Daymond works at a record store, Brett Mitchell is a manager at a logistics company, and Thornton has just spent four years completing a Bachelor of Science, while still playing bass on the side for Felicity Groom & The Black Black Smoke.

    Owing to his success with Bob Evans, Melbourne-based Kevin is the only one able to earn a living from music – “I’ve never had a full-time job in my life,” he reports – but that doesn’t mean team Jebediah aren’t in a good position. There is still enormous goodwill for the band, and having lived through the music business’s attempts to judge their career purely in financial terms, these four old friends have a more balanced understanding of “success” these days.

    “My idea of success when the band first started was supporting You Am I or Tumbleweed or Magic Dirt at The Planet Nightclub in Perth,” says Kevin. “If we could support one of favourite bands at one of our favourite venues, that was like, ultimate success. But it changes: now, for me, success is all about longevity. The fact that we’re about to put out our fifth record is a huge source of pride for me. To be able to do it for this long, and still believe in what we’re doing – that to me, is success.”

    The desire to make the most of this release is as keen as ever, and some of their intentions with new album Koscuiszko are refreshingly reminiscent of a band just at its beginning. “If I can quit my day job, that’ll mark a success,” replies Brett.

    “If we’re still together, that’d be good,” offers Daymond.

    “Geez, you’re easy to please!” laughs Thornton, as her bandmate runs around the room high-fiving everyone.

    The band recently signed to Brisbane-based indie label Dew Process for Koscuiszko. The label is behind the likes of Sarah Blasko, the Grates and the Living End, and by modern standards it’s a stand-out success in marketing local music. A fact that is apparently lost on Thornton.

    “You know what? I don’t care anymore,” says the bass player. “I feel so relaxed about everything. I just want to play songs that I love. I don’t care about the other shit.”

    With one eye on the Dew Process rep sitting out on the balcony, Kevin – the most media-experienced of the group, by far – hastily lightens the mood by changing topics. “I think it’s important to note that the way we made this record has been so incredibly different to any other record that we’ve made. For most of it we had no manager, no label – nothing. The first three records were all with Sony, the biggest record label there is. For the fourth record, we were doing it on our own label, but we were still very much part of a process. With this record, absolutely all of that stuff had been completely stripped away.”

    “For nearly two years, only five people had heard these songs,” says Thornton, in reference to the band and Dave Parkin, who has worked with Perth groups Sugar Army, Snowman and Karnivool.

    “We were only making a record because the four of us wanted to make a record,” Kevin adds. “There wasn’t a single other person involved in the process. We’ve never made a record in those circumstances before. We did it over a long period of time; normally, we go into the studio for a month, bash out the songs, and bang out a record. This one’s easily the most fun I’ve had making a Jebs record since the very first one, and I also think it’s the most playful we’ve been in the studio. It’s the closest thing to the first album, where we made a record without considering anyone except ourselves.”

    “We weren’t making a ‘product’,” says Brett.

    ++

    Two days later we meet in Brisbane, ahead of a sold-out gig at The Zoo. Last night, Jebediah played to a capacity Annandale Hotel. Over pizza and milkshakes in the Brunswick Street Mall, Kevin reflects on some of the things that came out last time we met. “There were a couple of moments where things were said, where I was like, “ooh”,’ says Kevin. “Not from me, though. As long as it’s clear who said what,” he adds, throwing a glance at Thornton.

    “It was probably a surefire way to be excused from doing interviews in the future. Print it all. Whatever,” she shrugs with a smile.

    A few prickly moments aside, it’s clear the vibe in the Jebediah camp these days is a positive one, and that atmosphere is reflected in the lyrical themes on Kosciuszko. “A lot of the lyrics are pretty positive, because it was an exciting stage,” explains Kevin, who is the band’s sole lyricist. “Getting new songs together, and making a new record. Even the angrier lyrics are still about changing for the better. There’s not a lot of self-indulgent negativity going on. There’s no angst.”

    No angst? “Well, less angst,” he replies. “And so there bloody should be; I’m fuckin’ 33 years old. There’s nothing worse than a married 33 year-old who lives in the suburbs.”

    “What have you got to be angsty about?” his brother asks.

    “Everybody’s got something to be angsty about,” Kevin quips, recalling a conversation between the songwriters in his other group, Basement Birds – Josh Pyke, Kav Temperley, and Steve Parkin. “We were talking about how, when you first start writing songs as a teenager, you’re writing about break-ups. You’re full of angst, and writing all these negative things. You get older, you find love; you get married, you get settled in a nice house – basically, you’ve got less and less to be angry about. So in order to write angsty lyrics, you start writing political songs. Because the world is always going to have problems!”

    There’s a line in the album’s first track, “Lost My Nerve”, about being “fuckin’ sick of listening to some rich kids playing on their guitars”, which would seem to suggest there are still a few things Kevin can be pissed off about.

    “If there’s a young dude that lives at home with his parents, and has all the best gear bought for him; if he’s trying to rock out on stage, I can’t get anything from that,” he says. “It’s not about anyone in particular. I’m still attracted to a lot of romantic ideals about rock & roll.”

    Thornton helps him out: “Rock and roll’s gotta come from your guts, not from your parents’ hip pocket.”

    Before they head off to soundcheck, I ask the band what Australia should know about Jebediah now. “They already know too much, and that’s what I’m concerned about,” says Kevin. “I’m sure that there’s some people out who would be happy if they never heard the word ‘Jebediah’ ever again.”

    “Gee, they must have enjoyed their last few years then, mustn’t they?” replies Thornton.

    “Yeah. And I’m going to enjoying thinking about those people when the record comes out, and our songs are on the radio. The people that don’t like your music, in some ways it can be more fun, that antagonising aspect of it.”

    “It’s an emotional response. Indifference is way more insulting,” says Brett.

    “Absolutely,” Kevin agrees. “Indifference is the ultimate insult for anything creative. If people aren’t going to love it, the next best thing is for them to hate it. The whole idea of art is to move. And if you don’t move someone, you’re not doing your job.”

    ++

    For more Jebediah, visit their website. The music video for ‘She’s Like A Comet‘ is embedded below.

  • Mess+Noise interview: Chris Bailey of The Saints, February 2011

    An interview with Chris Bailey for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Interview – Chris Bailey: ‘I Really Enjoy Being An Old Slut’

    Ahead of a one-off performance in Sydney tonight, ANDREW MCMILLEN speaks to Chris Bailey about his multiple plans for 2011; his on-again, off-again relationship with Ed Kuepper; and what he learned from American singer Judy Collins.

    When it comes to Chris Bailey, you’ve probably already heard it all before. If not, a potted history: Bailey is co-founder and vocalist of Brisbane-born punk rock act The Saints, who formed in 1974 and relocated to England in 1977 after signing a three-album contract with EMI and thumbing their noses at the limited opportunities for their music to be heard and supported here in Australia. They burned bright enough to release all three records within 18 months, before being dropped by their label after the jazz-influenced Prehistoric Sounds (1978) was a commercial flop. Despite three-quarters of the band departing soon after – including co-founders Ed Kuepper (guitar) and Ivor Hay (drums) – Bailey soldiered on with The Saints moniker, releasing an additional 10 albums, up to and including 2006’sImperious Delirium. (Kuepper, annoyed by Bailey’s ongoing usage of the name, formed The Aints and performed reworked versions of vintage Saints material.)

    An accomplished solo singer-songwriter with seven full-length releases to his name, Bailey’s only ever really done music. Born in 1959 to Irish parents in Kenya, he was 17 when The Saints took off, and he’s yet to let age slow his artistic progress. If anything, he seems to grow hungrier with each passing year: as he reveals in our 20-minute phone conversation, he’s got three albums due for release within the next six months; each separate projects, with different musicians.

    Though we’re speaking ostensibly because of a planned show tonight (February 11) at Trackdown Studios in Sydney, it seems foolish to overlook the series of residencies that Bailey undertook with his right-hand axeman, Kuepper, throughout May last year – during which much was made of the tension, both real and perceived, between the two feted musicians – as well as the last occasion that The Saints (proper) played in their hometown of Brisbane, as part of the 2009 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. Bailey – now based overseas – is a lively conversationalist. During our interview, I get the impression that there’s little difference between his playfully pompous stage manner, and the man himself.

    To begin, let’s talk about the upcoming show. How did you come up with the idea to re-imagine some of your well-known songs?
    In January, I actually came out [to Australia] to do some dates with [American singer] Judy Collins, and while a lot of people thought that was very odd, I really like Judy. I think she is in fact what the Americans call the “real deal”, and the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks in very close company, I just couldn’t resist because I have bucketloads of respect for the woman. I’ve got to tell you; it was the best couple of weeks of my recent life. It was really quite stunning. We were doing club shows and the occasional theatre, and in either environment, in a club show she was a 17-year old girl in New York in 1964. And then when we were doing theatres, she was this incredible show diva. When a performer knows how to take control of a room, it’s actually stunning. It was the best couple of weeks.

    So ostensibly, that’s the thing that got me out there. The gig that’s coming up on Friday week is, for many years, I’ve been part of what we call the “Trackdown family”. We started off in very humble origins, and they’ve gone off to become a pretty major player in lots of areas. For the past couple of years [managing director] Geoff and I have been talking about going back and doing something rootsy. Even though I’ve just finished an album in France, and I’m not planning another Saints album until later in the year, I thought it would be just a really good opportunity to come back to this particular studio, which I love. I’m actually in here with an engineer at the moment, and we’re building up an album. That’s then linked to the fact that Geoff was going to do a little showcase for his new label, the Highway 125, which of course I shall play a part of, and he thought that it would be good if I put together a combo and re-imagined a couple from my catalogue. In fact, I’m just going to put together an eclectic little bunch of musos, all acoustic, and we’re just going to bang out some songs.

    The press release says you’re planning a “surprise line-up”. What can you reveal about who’s playing?
    [Puts on German accent] “It will be people. People, not machine. Man defeats machine.” Okay, I don’t usually write press releases, obviously. I mean, it’s not a rock band … In fact I’m going to be using a piano, lots of cellos; probably a banjo, because I quite like that instrument at the moment. Geoffrey just gave me carte blanche because they’re a scoring stage, so we have all these musicians on tap. I can indulge myself. Which is what I fully intend to do.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise.

  • Rolling Stone story: Halfway – ‘Between Alt-Country and a Rock Place’, September 2010

    A story for the October 2010 issue of Rolling Stone on the Brisbane-based alt-country/rock band Halfway.

    Click the below image for a closer look, or view the article text underneath.

    Halfway story in Rolling Stone magazine, September 2010, by Andrew McMillen

    Halfway: Between Alt-Country and a Rock Place
    Brisbane collective embrace pared-back approach, Forster wisdom on third LP

    by Andrew McMillen

    Three albums into a ten-year career, Brisbane alternative country act Halfway have hit their stride with An Outpost Of Promise, released in July through +1 Records. If you’re unfamiliar with their earlier work, fear not: their latest is “definitely a good place to start,” according to Halfway’s John Busby, who alongside Chris Dale forms the band’s core duo. “It’s the least country record that we’ve done before, so maybe that makes it more accessible.”

    Put Dale and Busby in the same room and you’ll soon find them finishing each others’ sentences. Both in their late 30s, their friendship was forged in the central Queensland city of Rockhampton in the 1990s before they relocated to Brisbane and formed Halfway in 2000. But while the pair are the heart of the band, they are bolstered by an extended family – all Halfway’s eight band members meet twice a week at ‘Halfway House’ (a room underneath Busby’s mother’s house) to “have a beer, play music, and just talk,” says Busby. “It’s never really toil. I love hanging out; it’s the best part of being in the band.”

    The country tones that coloured their first two albums – 2004’s Farewell To The Fainthearted and 2006’s Remember The River – are marginalised on Outpost, which features 10 songs played “straight up, with tension and drama,” according to its producer and former Go-Between Robert Forster.

    Forster’s wisdom triggered a shift in the pair’s approach to songwriting. This time, the pair ensured that every song worked with just guitar and vocal first, before soliciting embellishments from their bandmates. Busby suggests Forster gave them confidence by exposing each song’s acoustic core; “rather than just trying to make a lot of racket”. “That’s how we ought to go forward,” Dale concludes.

    “Just let the songs do their thing.”

    For more Halfway, visit their MySpace. I reviewed An Outpost Of Promise for Mess+Noise earlier in the year. It’s ace!