Kylie gets honoured, Rob Hirst battles cancer and Aussie music is still waiting for its big break. IA music reviewer David Kowalski brings you the latest.
ON 30 APRIL, MELBOURNE will play host to the 2025 APRA Awards.
The Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA) is an organisation that collects royalties for performance and licensing all over the world and pays them to writers and copyright holders in Australia.
Kylie gets the Ted Albert Award
They are also an advocacy group on behalf of artists and an indispensable source of information and support for the young musician. Their annual awards recognise excellence in performing arts, as opposed to recognising hit records like other awards ceremonies do.
The most prestigious award handed out at this ceremony is the Ted Albert award, which honours outstanding services to Australian music. In 2024, the award went to Bart Willoughby, the leader of pioneering Indigenous band No Fixed Address. This year, the award will be presented to pop music legend Kylie Minogue.
Minogue is regarded as an icon of pop music. She came from humble beginnings with an appearance on Young Talent Time, acting in the teenage soap The Henderson Kids, before becoming one of the most famous and internationally recognised actresses on the TV series Neighbours. Her solo career in pop music began in 1987 and since then, her label Mushroom estimates she has sold over 80 million albums worldwide.
The award is selected by the APRA board and named after the great-grandson of Ted Albert, founder of Alberts Music Publishing. The young Albert wanted to start a record label as a way to bolster the family music business. His first signing was Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, and then soon after he signed The Easybeats. The label went on to establish the careers of acts such as The Angels, Rose Tattoo, Choirboys, John Paul Young, and a little band from Sydney’s inner west featuring a little bloke on guitar dressed as a schoolboy, named AC/DC.
Minogue has proven her staying power by constantly changing up her sound, thus making her music sound fresh. That explains why she is also the first woman to secure top 10 singles in the UK charts in five consecutive decades. As her career spans over 50 years, this is certainly one of the biggest and most well-deserved awards in her rather large trophy cabinet.
Rob Hirst Reveals Cancer Battle
In the glossy pages of the Weekend Australian magazine came the revelation that powerhouse drummer Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil is battling pancreatic cancer. It was first revealed to me on Facebook by the Powderworkers — a loose community of fans that have catalogued everything on Midnight Oil for decades. In the story, ably documented in a multi-page spread by Andrew McMillen, Hirst revealed his struggles with the disease and how he was lucky to have outlived the average life expectancy of the disease. Where most people only see out the subsequent seven to 10 months following a diagnosis, Hirst has had two years thus far but believes his days are numbered.
Within the cloistered circles of music industry insiders, this is not news. Esteemed music historian Glenn A Baker, via Facebook, revealed he knew about this months ago, but kept silent about it at Hirst’s request. Many people on socials are making comments about Hirst that seem to refer to him in the past tense, as though he has already passed. He isn’t even dead yet! The story in The Australian is there as a catharsis for Hirst, to take stock of his situation and highlight that his passing is sadly imminent.
Rob Hirst has been a drumming hero of mine for over 40 years. His larger-than-life performances almost outshine and draw attention away from the gregariously outlandish frontman Peter Garrett. As a primary school student, the indelible memory of seeing Hirst’s flying drumsticks bouncing off his drums in a cave in the clip for 'Read About It' moved me so profoundly that I wanted to play drums more than anything. Trying to keep up with Rob drumming along to Oils' records gives me a better workout than any gym in the country can provide.
I wish you well, Rob Hirst. Thank you for all your inspiration.
Commercial radio and Australian music
The set of rules by which Australia’s commercial radio stations govern themselves, The Commercial Radio Code of Conduct, is up for review and renewal in 2025 and you, gentle reader, have the opportunity to make a public submission indicating how you would like things on the nation’s largest radio stations changed.
I have been a vocal critic of commercial radio for many years and my biggest gripe is that Australian music gets shafted in the mix of music played on any station. I have always believed that the biggest radio stations have the power to shape listeners’ musical taste. By omitting local artists in favour of overseas music, I feel we are doing a disservice to the listeners as well as to the local music scene.
As the lads on the podcast Homebrewed reminded me recently, the Australian top 50 singles chart can be seen as a reflection of this problem. The chart this week only has one Australian song on it – 'Riptide' by Vance Joy – and that was released in 2013. Surely, radio can help promote something local that is a bit more recent?
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has put out a statement with a number of things it would like to see in the new Code of Conduct. The one that jumped out at me was the rather novel idea that 'the code must ensure local music is played during peak listening hours'. Seems logical, right?
The thing is, commercial radio has been averse to Australian music for decades. There have been requirements for radio to play Australian content dating back to the 1940s. Yet, dedicated Australian music programming will often go to air at 10pm at night, or during the graveyard shift, to fulfil the current quota.
One way that radio stations have found a way to get around the 25 per cent minimum quota is that they opt to create stations like Gold FM or Capital Radio’s dedicated 1960s and 1970s pop stations. Stations that exclusively play music older than 10 years old are currently exempt from the requirement to play new Australian music, however they have lower local content quotas — in some cases as low as 10 per cent.
I would argue that, unless the station is exclusively a talk station, that is news, sport, politics and so forth, they should be exempt from local music quotas because they don’t play music. Everyone else, and that includes the oldies stations, must play 25 per cent Australian music. It’s not as though we didn’t have any Aussie bands or singers in the 60s and 70s — we had loads of them. We run the risk of supplying a revisionist view of history if we completely ignore our own local voices of that period.
You can make a submission to Commercial Radio Australia here.
Teenage Joan’s new track
Made up of talented instrumentalists Cahli Blakers and Tahlia Borg, the South Australia-based rock/punk upstarts Teenage Joans have dropped a thumping new single, ironically called 'Sweet and Slow'. The track has throwback vibes to the early 2000s Emo music scene, however, it adds a layer of pop sheen to the sound that was often missing from the mascara-clad, existentially challenged, navel-gazing bands of that era. The video for the track throws back to an even earlier era, looking like the set of a crooked 1950s game show, complete with period costumes and gaudy curtains.
This ARIA Award-nominated band is supporting the single release with a short tour of South Australia and Victoria in May. Can’t wait until they head up further north.
Until next time…
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David Kowalski is a writer, musician, educator, sound engineer and podcaster. His podcasts 'The Sound and the Fury Podcast' and 'Audio Cumulus' can be heard exclusively HERE. You can follow David on Twitter/X @sound_fury_pod.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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