The 50 Most Iconic Australian Music Moments Of All Time

Michael Gudinski was the first to admit he didn’t know everything. Selling watermelons was one thing he had little expertise in.

As a youngster, Gudinski and his friend Ray Evans hit on a business idea at the Sunbury Rock Festival.

Gudinski was stage manager of the now-iconic early Seventies fest, and manager of several bands on the bill. Evans, he told this reporter in 2010, “came up with the idea of a watermelon concession, just truck in the fuckers, cut them in half.” All good, until the third year when “it pissed down and we got stuck with one thousand watermelons. It sort of ended in tears.”

The tears dried, and lessons were learned. “Sunbury was a great thing to be involved with. It confirmed my belief that Australian music could stand up. The first two years were run with all Australian acts.” 

Gudinski was done selling melons. Over the following four decades, the late Melbourne entrepreneur would build the Mushroom Group, a sprawling, independent music empire quite like nothing else in Australia, or anywhere.

“We try to keep most of our investments in the music business where we know them,” Gudinski would go on to say.

Gudinski, or MG as he was widely known, had cut his teeth running dance parties throughout his hometown as a teen, before forming Mushroom Records with Evans in 1972. MG was just twenty at the time. Touring arms would mushroom from it. And later, the label signed Skyhooks, a band Gudinski was guiding as manager (at the time, he was younger than all its members). The sky was the limit. 

When Gudinski passed in 2021, aged sixty-eight, the company he created was active in every conceivable area of music, from concerts and touring, publishing, agencies, merchandise, neighbouring rights, film and TV, creative services and, of course, labels. Frontier Touring is a juggernaut, recognised at times as the world’s leading independent concert promoter, and the engine room for Ed Sheeran’s Divide Tour of 2018, the all-time box office blockbuster with more than one million tickets sold.

If business is about buying, selling and playing in that space between, Gudinski was acutely aware that sometimes an offer is too good to refuse. In the Nineties, MG sold Mushroom Records to Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd (now News Corporation), in a two-part arrangement that has been branded in music industry circles as the “deal of the century.”  After selling up, “I probably went through postnatal sale depression, which is a unique Gudinski title,” he told this reporter. “I went through a period when I was a bit disillusioned, I had a lot of money.” And he reinvested a lot of that money into the business. 

When the pandemic stopped touring, along with regular life as we knew it, Gudinski didn’t back away from the challenge. He hit the phones, got business done. The Mushroom Group Chairman organised Music From The Home Front, a virtual Anzac Day concert on the free-to-air commercial Nine Network, featuring more than fifty music stars from both sides of the Tasman. And from it, the Music From The Home Front triple-vinyl set, just the second release of that scope to be issued in Australia via Mushroom, following the live Sunbury album.

The Home Front set blasted to Number One on the ARIA Albums Chart, with one hundred percent of its profits funnelled into music industry charity Support Act.

He wasn’t done there. Through a partnership with the Victorian Government’s Victoria Together initiative, MG pulled the trigger on The State of Music, a multi-part streaming series focusing on homegrown talent; and he launched The Sound, produced by Mushroom Vision and running across multiple seasons on the ABC. “This is not about my labels,” Gudinski told this reporter in late 2020. “This is about Australian music.”

Gudinski’s death was a shock that resonated around the globe. The stars came out to pay tribute to the legendary music man, an extraordinary list that included Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl, Bruce Springsteen and, of course, his close friend Sheeran. The “Shape of You” singer made the long-haul trip to Gudinski’s state memorial, where he performed a freshly-penned tribute to his friend, “Visiting Hours”. Two of MG’s close friends and artist signings, Kylie Minogue and Jimmy Barnes, performed backing vocals on the final cut.   

In 2023, Mushroom Group will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Celebrations are shaping up under CEO Matt Gudinski, MG’s son, who says the company’s two hundred staff, former employees and friends will be at the heart of those plans. MG is no longer there, though his spirit remains across the group he built. A permanent statue of MG stands outside Rod Laver Arena, with the chairman giving his familiar one-finger salute: Number One forever.

Words by Lars Brandle

The reports of music sales charts dying a sad, ignominious death, have been greatly exaggerated.

Charts, those periodical gauges of popularity, aren’t for everyone. Though, for as long as records have been pressed and released out into the public, charts have given us a glimpse at what’s hitting, what’s missing, what’s flying and what’s dying.

Charts are essential kit for the record business, and their partners in retail. And promoters, whose gamble is based on whether their act is popular enough to sell tickets.

Artists watch the charts, though few will admit to it. When Pnau’s collaboration with Elton John on Good Morning to the Night was about to rule the UK chart back in 2012, the lads received a wake-up call from the Rocket Man himself. “Elton was calling us up at 3am going, ‘why the fuck aren’t you awake?’. We’re going Number One’,” Pnau’s Peter Mayes recounts.

And yes, charts are loved the world over by anoraks; geeks plugged into this never-ending popularity contest.

2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the ARIA Charts. The peak body published its first survey — then the Countdown Chart — on July 10, 1983. For the first five years, David Kent, who’d published his own Kent Music Report, was tapped to track sales for the new, official tallies.

The first singles chart was topped by Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”, whose music video was directed by Australian filmmaker Russell Mulcahy. And the biggest album of them all was the first Number One on the ARIA albums survey, Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

When ARIA began tackling those charts in-house from 1988, few record stores even had fax machines. Forms would be mailed out a week in advance, then, on one-frenetic day each week, the four chart staff would call the shops and key it in. The process was anything but scientific, and “Chart Day” would run deep into the night.

Fast forward four decades, and all the sales and streaming data is carried online. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, ARIA’s charts carried data from a couple of hundred shops, were manually punched in; today, its system ingests information from over one thousand outlets, a mix of physical and digital data, including streams from the most popular DSPs. All but one of the charts are based on sales and consumption data, the exception being the ARIA Club Chart, which collates reports submitted by professional DJs.

As tastes change, and music finds new means of transport, ARIA’s suite of charts continue to evolve. Downloads, and then streams, were rolled into the mix. More recently, in June 2022, the trade body published its New Release Chart for the first time, a weekly examination of the most popular new local and international singles on a four-month cycle.

One of the most profound changes, for those of us who like to get the news early, came when the singles and albums charts were moved forward by a full twenty-four hours back in March 2021. And with that move, ARIA’s two main surveys became the first published in the global cycle, beating the UK’s charts by several hours.

If you don’t work in music, but you get worked up by charts, the proof of indomitable hits, the slow-burners, the flops, you’re not alone.

Words by Lars Brandle

1992 was a heady year in Australia.

We had come through the recession we had to have, ABC debuted two bananas wearing pyjamas, Queensland voted against daylight saving, the Prime Minister earned himself the moniker of ‘the Lizard of Oz’ after touching the back of the monarch and, significantly, Australian music changed forever. And it was kind of accidental.

What began as a Violent Femmes tour with a little known grunge band from Seattle, grew a bit — sort of by design, sort of by accident.

Two mates, Viv Lees and Ken West, who bonded over community service pulling down gig posters — a punishment for putting up gig posters — were touring Violent Femmes to Australia and booked a band called Nirvana as the support so they could play bigger rooms. 

Unbeknownst to Lees, West — inspired by US festival SummerFest — kept adding things to the Violent Femmes show at Hordern Pavilion in Sydney. He put a skate ramp in the forecourt and booked a few darlings of the Aussie alternative scene — You Am I and Yothu Yindi among them. A regular gig was turning into something much bigger. 

As more bands heard about what was happening, West kept adding more acts. Eventually, the Violent Femmes became Kenfest (and then Big Day Out at the last minute) with twenty-one acts playing across three stages over twelve hours. A great theory — one that has been emulated by festival promoters for decades since — the only problem was, tickets weren’t moving.

In fortuitous serendipity, the band that was booked to play the support slot had been cooking up a new album. Their debut effort, Bleach, had been a middling success — reaching eighty-nine on the Billboard 100. But their follow up, Nevermind, and its debut single “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, turned the world upside down. Alternative was mainstream and everyone wanted to hear Nirvana play.

The idea that almost flopped in the most spectacular fashion had become the hottest ticket in town.

On the back of the success of year one, Big Day Out expanded to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth the following year and added the Gold Coast and Auckland in 1994. What began as a regular gig at the Hordern eventually expanded to a multi-city festival with up to eight stages bringing the biggest acts in the world to Australia and introducing fans to the music they would love for the rest of the year.

History will remember Big Day Out for many things, but January 25, 1992 will forever be the day the hottest band in the world played the middle slot at an unknown music festival in Sydney — changing the course of music festivals in this country forever and, for the longest time, providing the blueprint for future festivals to live up to.

And, perhaps most importantly, it gave about 9,500 punters a chance to say, ‘I was there when…’

Words by Nathanael Cooper

If you weren’t of a certain age at the time it’s hard to explain the importance of Countdown. Sure, you can watch old episodes and read books about it — chiefly Peter Wilmoth’s wonderful Glad All Over — but you had to really be part of the Countdown generation to get the total impact and power of that ABC music’n’chat television show, which really did stop a nation every Sunday evening between 1974 and 1987. 

At 6pm the youth of Australia paused whatever they were doing, gathered around the television and waited for the words “COUNTDOWN… and tonight with your host Mollyyyyyyyyy Meldrum.” Then you would sit transfixed to see whose videos had made it, who was performing live, how many times Molly would say ‘um’ and ‘er’ and ‘do yourself a favour’. You would hate some artists and love others — but you would be glued to this fast paced, often train-wreck, hour of television. If you happened — heaven forbid — to miss a show, the first thing you’d ask at school the next morning was, “Who was on Countdown last night?” 

This show was the most powerful medium for popular music in the country. Prince Charles came on for an interview with Molly, Cold Chisel trashed the set at the conclusion of a performance at the Countdown Awards, Molly had exclusives with everyone. Often the conversations with Rod, or Elton or whoever it was that week, made virtually no sense; but you watched, you listened, you paid attention. Record labels would do anything — literally — to get their peeps on the show, which really came of age during the transition from black and white to colour television in this country in October 1974. Wonder why Australian artists became so visually orientated with their live shows? They had to embrace all the colour and visual aspects of performance for Countdown and colour broadcasts — and then they took it to the pubs and then to the world. 

Eventually Countdown came to an end. There were other music television shows of course — including the all-conquering MTV which arrived on Australian screens in April 1987. The ABC tried (and for a time partially succeeded with) The Countdown Revolution, best remembered for the time that hosts Mark Little and Tania Lacy went on strike while live-to-air on June 22, 1990 over all sorts of issues, most notably the policy of not allowing artists to perform live and insisting they mime to backing tracks. But really, no one remembers this version of Countdown. Not at all. 

Countdown was Molly Meldrum mumbling and stumbling, often ‘tired and emotional’, through the half hour show and world exclusive ‘interviews’. We remember the deluge of ABBA, John Paul Young (aka Squeak) as co-host, Iggy Pop calling Molly ‘dogface’, and the spats with Elton and Rod — all of that. Countdown was of a time and place. Never again will one television show carry that much weight, power and influence. Stars were made on Sunday evenings in that thirty minutes of glorious mayhem. Never before, and certainly never again, has the most important issue of the day been who was on a pop music TV show the previous evening.

Words by Stuart Coupe

Despite over forty thousand years of rich history, Indigenous Australian music existed outside the colonial consciousness until 1991. The fight for First Nations artists to break through gathered pace in the Eighties, as artists like Warumpi Band and Coloured Stone signed significant record deals. But it wasn’t until Yothu Yindi smashed through the barriers with their groundbreaking single “Treaty” that mainstream Australia began to embrace, and celebrate, First Nations music.

In 1988, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke was presented with The Barunga Statement from members of the Yolngu nation. The statement included demands for a treaty with First Nations people, which Hawke responded to with a promise to implement by 1990.

At the time, Yothu Yindi, formed by Yolngu and balanda (non-Indigenous) members, were on the rise, with their big break coming with an invitation to tour with Midnight Oil through the US in 1988. Signing with Mushroom Records upon their return, they released their debut album, Homeland Movement, in 1989.

“Treaty” was written by the band, along with Paul Kelly, in response to the 1990 deadline approaching with no action from the government — creating a powerful musical statement. The song was released to little fanfare, until being remixed by Melbourne duo Filthy Lucre; who took elements of the largely rock-based tune and turned it into a dancefloor smash.

The track broke new ground, becoming the first song with English and Yolngu lyrics to hit the ARIA Charts, peaking at Number Eleven. The video depicted the band members’ traditional dance and culture, giving non-Indigenous Australia a unique window into the world of remote First Nations communities.

The album Tribal Voice was released later that year, becoming a Top Five hit and breaking ground in the US, where they signed to Hollywood Records and peaked at Number Three on the Billboard World Music chart. 

“Treaty” was voted Song of the Year at the 1991 APRA Awards, received the Human Rights Commission’s Award for both Songwriting and Record of the Year, and Best Australian Single at the ARIA Awards. The video won Best Australian Video at the Australian Music Awards and the MTV International Awards. Singer Dr M. Yunupingu was honoured with the title of Australian of the Year in 1993 based on the significance of the band’s historical achievements.

Yothu Yindi’s legacy continued with many more albums, while the band’s record for highest-selling Indigenous album was eventually broken by Yothu Yindi member Gurrumul’s 2008 eponymous solo album, continuing the strong Yolgnu influence on Australian music. 

In 2009 “Treaty” was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry for historically important works.

In 2022, with artists like The Kid LAROI, Baker Boy and Jessica Mauboy now staples on radio airwaves, it’s impossible to downplay the significance of “Treaty” in normalising Black voices and stories in mainstream music. We are no further on our journey towards treaty, and the unfair burdens still being carried by today’s First Nations artists are significant. Despite this, the success of contemporary First Nations talent would not be possible without the doors, and minds, that were opened by Yothu Yindi.

Words by Stephen Green

Helen Reddy’s 1970s track “I Am Woman” helped redefine how women could be talked about and — more importantly — how they could talk about, and express, themselves. 

Reddy said she wrote it because she felt she had to — there were no empowering songs that accurately reflected the grit, determination and strength of the women she knew. 

Instead, the songs about womanhood that she was exposed to were about being pretty, or about being deservedly downtrodden. 

Women needed to be heard, and the opening lyrics “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore” inspired a movement and a moment. 

Now in 2022, with all that’s happened with women’s liberation — and all that still needs to be done — it seems obvious that a song with the lyrics “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman”, would inspire a movement and continue to ignite passion today. 

In reality though, the track wasn’t an immediate smash in the early 1970s when it was released. It was a long, slow roar, building a legacy over decades.

The song featured on Reddy’s debut album, but she believed it “was not hit-single material” and recalled that it got no immediate airplay. 

Despite the seeming lack of commercial success, Reddy would play it as the opening song at live shows and it was regularly referred to in fan mail. 

Then, it was used in the opening credits of Hollywood comedy Stand Up and Be Counted, and Reddy was asked to add more meat to the song so it could be released as a single. 

Reddy started performing the track on television, and then the grit, determination and strength of the women it inspired finally got the track some airplay.

Yet still, it wasn’t enough.

“I Am Woman” bounced in and out of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US between June and September 1972. 

Finally, in December of that year, it reached Number One, making it the first chart-topper for Capitol Records since Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe”. It was also the first US Number One from an Australian-born artist. 

And in 1973, Reddy was awarded a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, again another trailblazing moment as she was the first Australian to do so. 

Famously, although not uncommon at award ceremonies, Reddy took the time to thank God. Her stint on stage stands out, however, for her use of the female pronoun when referencing the deity, noting “I would like to thank God, because she makes everything possible.”

Despite its legacy, perhaps it’s lucky that Reddy was unaware the impact the song would have.

“I had no idea what the song was destined to become,” she said in the early Noughties. “If I’d known, I would have been far too intimidated to have written it.” 

Well, thank the (female) God that she did. 

Words by Vivienne Kelly 

Soap star, fashion idol, cancer survivor, gay icon, dancefloor diva, music mogul; and Aussie ambassador to the world. Kylie Minogue is Australia’s reigning queen of pop, and popular culture. In fact, the only continent Kylie hasn’t performed in is Antarctica. The Melbourne-born girl-next-door has sold more than eighty million records globally, cementing Minogue as the highest-selling Australian-born solo artist of all time.

The true-blue trendsetter has been smashing records since her on-screen wedding to Scott (played by Jason Donovan) on the top-rating Aussie soap, Neighbours. Two million Australians and twenty million Brits were glued to television screens to watch the unmissable episode on July 28, 1987. The chemistry between Minogue and Donovan was electric, helped in part by their behind-the-scenes romance. Neighbours was the launchpad for a five decade career spanning music, film, television, fashion and more. A brand in her own right, Minogue has put her Kylie stamp on everything from water and wine to fashion and fragrances. Best estimates put her net worth at about $120 million.

But it was the role of Charlene on Neighbours that perfectly parachuted Minogue into the hearts and minds of a new adoring international fanbase with the “TV wedding of the year”, which was swiftly followed by the commercial release of her debut single “Locomotion” after signing to the late and great Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Records. “Locomotion” became the best-selling single of the decade in Australia, and went on to summit the world’s top pop charts. A superstar was born.

Minogue was embraced by many, but especially gay men. Her hits remain playlist staples in LGBTQIA+ bars and nightclubs around the world, where drag artists impersonate her and gogo dancers in gold hot pants bring songs like “Love at First Sight” and “Better the Devil You Know” to life (the latter of which is played every Saturday night at 12:30am at London’s famous G-A-Y club). Kylie has reciprocated her love of the community, one that has stood by her through both good and hard times, by advocating for underrepresented communities. Her performances at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Party in 1994, 1998 and 2012 are legendary.

Also legendary are Minogue’s many collaborations.

Her first was a duet with Donovan in 1988. “Especially For You” sold more than a million copies in Britain alone and topped the charts across Europe and Australia. Minogue’s most debated musical hookup arrived seven years later on the Top Forty British television show Top of the Pops in 1995. Surrounded by Nick Cave and his band The Bad Seeds, “Where the Wild Roses Grow”  — the lead single from Cave’s ninth studio album — was introduced by Kylie as “something very special”. It was also very controversial, the convergence of two stars from alternate musical universes was groundbreaking. As two worlds collided, the incongruous pairing proved prolific. It paved the way for more genre-crossing and culture-defining moments in music, and gave Minogue another run atop the world’s pop charts. 

Words by Jake Challenor

There are many seminal moments in the history of triple j. 

The station (then known as Double J) launched in Sydney in 1975 with a song that had never been played on radio before: “You Just Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed” by Australian outfit Skyhooks. 

Its creative and cheeky cultural decisions didn’t stop there. 

In 1989, it was the only radio station willing to play N.W.A’s expletive-laden “Fuck Tha Police”. 

triple j may have been a counterculture station looking to expose young music fans to diversified music, genres, artists and ideas, but influential forces from politicians to the actual police weren’t having a bar of it.

The song ended up being banned and a staffer was stood down. Then, there was a protest in which another N.W.A song, “Express Yourself”, was played on the station for 24-hours as part of some innovative “industrial action”. 

The late Eighties and early Nineties also saw the station launch the Hottest 100 Countdown and make a concerted push beyond the NSW capital.  

In 1989 — the same year as the “Fuck Tha Police” standoff — the station began moving into the markets of Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Newcastle and Perth. 

And by 1996 it was broadcasting around Australia to more remote locations including Alice Springs, Rockhampton and Kalgoorlie. 

With this rollout, and the increasing cultural importance of the Hottest 100 Countdown, triple j became one of the most important and influential platforms for new Australian music. To this day, artists including Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, Amy Shark, and the Hilltop Hoods have credited the station for giving their tracks a run; ultimately leading to their breakout success. 

While debates raged about whether the station has a “Sydney bias” — or indeed, as others have argued, an “anti-Sydney bias” as part of an overcorrection — triple j continued to shape and influence the regions. 

Dr. Kate Ames studied triple j’s impact on regional audiences for her doctorate, and she told writer, journalist and researcher Ben Eltham that the station allowed listeners to mentally leave the remote areas they lived in. 

“triple j creates this sense of a virtual world that sits above where something is located, it brings people together with a love of music, with a sense of being a little different,” she said in 2009. 

Eltham himself said the station is a “strange hybrid” which occupies “an uncomfortable middle ground between its commercial and community radio cousins”. Nevertheless, he contended that despite its flaws, the constant raging debates about triple j — whether it’s adequately serving its audience, its place in the cultural landscape, its obligations to its target demographic, and, of course, whether the Number One song on the Hottest 100 is “deserving” each year — actually only enshrines the network’s importance and significance. 

triple j’s national rollout enabled it to bring controversy, culture and cheek to the nation’s youth. It plays more Australian music than its commercial counterparts. It’s a career launchpad. 

And as the station itself said when celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2005: “Thumbing the nose at the sensors has always been a bit of a tradition at The Js. Yea, it’s about being cheeky, but it’s also about pushing boundaries and buttons. Popular music has always been an easy target for the moral majority, and trawling back through the triple j playlists is an indication of what’s been considered offensive over the years. Generally, if it offends, we’ve played it.” 

Words by Vivienne Kelly

Like most revolutions, the Australian music industry’s reckoning on the inappropriate treatment of women began with a trickle, or perhaps a number of trickles, before it became a flood.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment the reckoning truly began. Various stories of inappropriate behaviour from artists and executives alike had appeared in the years since the #MeToo movement began. But, the near-simultaneous arrival of Jaguar Jonze’s quiet revelation of her alleged sexual assault on Twitter and Instagram, Michelle Pitiris calling out Bigsound and QMusic for their failure to act on allegations of sexual assault — social media posts that earned her a concerns notice from lawyers representing the organisation — and the appearance of the Instagram account @BeneathTheGlassCeiling were certainly the holes in the dam wall that caused the damage that would eventually see it crumble.

On November 26, 2020, Beneath The Glass Ceiling posted its first anonymised account of inappropriate workplace behaviour against a young music industry intern at the hands of a record label executive.

“I quickly learned there are no rules in the music industry […] there was a constant blurring of boundaries fuelled by alcohol, drugs and late nights — perpetuating the toxic culture of bullying, assault and mismanagement.”

The post went on to recount the grooming behaviour of the executive before the young intern was pressured into taking drugs at a work event.

It was the first of hundreds of accounts that were posted in the lead up to the industry’s greatest reckoning — the dismissal of Denis Handlin.

The music industry’s toxic culture was an open secret. In fact, a podcast that would be released in the wake of the crisis unfolding was saliently titled Everybody Knows.

Penetrating the notoriously secretive, defensive and legally sensitive music industry wasn’t an easy task, and many journalists had been trying to break through for years.

The posts came flooding in. The industry’s poorly kept secret was starting to become public and, what was more, the culture at one particular record label was in tight focus. For those who knew, the bulk of the allegations aired on Beneath The Glass Ceiling were happening at Sony Music Australia.

Suddenly, cracks were appearing in the impenetrable walls around the music industry. Victims who had previously been too afraid to speak were speaking — albeit under pseudonyms and anonymised accounts through fear of reprisals.

The first to fall was Tony Glover, a senior executive at Sony Music who had allegedly bullied and harassed junior staff at the label, and he was subsequently sacked. Those close to Glover described his offending as minor and that he was a sacrificial lamb — used to distract from the real issues at the heart of one of the biggest record companies in the country.

If that were true, Sony couldn’t have been more wrong. The dismissal of Glover emboldened victims to speak louder and eventually the rage reached head office in New York. An internal investigation began, then an external investigation.

It wasn’t enough. On June 21, 2021, Sony Music’s global boss sent a note to staff announcing Handlin was leaving the company effective immediately. The next day Handlin’s son Pat and his HR boss Mark Stebnicki were stood down pending the investigation — they would later leave without explanation, although there is no suggestion they were accused of any wrongdoing. Later, Australian artist marketing boss Wayne Ringrow would also be gone. 

The trickle became a flood and the most powerful man in Australian music was washed away with it. 

Weeks later Universal Music also faced its own reckoning, although the stop/start nature of their investigations has seen little action or change. 

The dismissal of Denis Handlin was enough to make the music industry itself finally take action. A panel was hastily assembled to explore ways to address the issue and more than a year after Handlin’s departure — a review was released that found high rates of bullying and harassment in the Australian music industry.

The findings came as no surprise. Again, everybody knows.

Some of the worst stories in the industry remain untold. For decades Australian music protected itself by paying victims large sums of money, ensuring they kept quiet with onerous non-disclosure agreements. 

Elsewhere, perpetrators are allowed to continue making music and creating new victims because they are surrounded by a powerful team of protectors who threaten and intimidate victims into silence, further perpetuating their trauma and creating space for poor behaviour to continue.

While Australian music may have had its #MeToo moment, whether that results in any kind of meaningful change or just more hand-wringing and pearl clutching remains to be seen.

Words by Nathanael Cooper

INXS have enjoyed many, many highlights in their illustrious career. But ask the surviving members to name just one moment that looms large in their consciousness and they’ll likely remember their headline performance at Wembley Stadium in the UK to 74,000 deliriously ecstatic fans. It was a moment that cemented them as one of the biggest, and most popular, bands on the planet.

INXS had already filled Wembley Arena at an earlier show in 1990. That was kids stuff for the juggernaut that they had become. The Stadium was the real game. The Kick album had come out in 1987 and had gone ballistic. They followed that with X in 1990; and the band was unstoppable. And on July 13, 1991, they really brought it home as part of the Stadium’s Summer X series of shows when they performed, enthralled, and conquered the assembled masses. 

This represented the last major world music market to capitulate to all things INXS. It was a journey that had begun in the hard and unforgiving pub circuit in Sydney. The search for world domination had initially focused on North America (which by now they’d conquered), but the UK had always been problematic. In fact in July 1986 Queen had invited them to be a lower card addition to the bill at Wembley Stadium. The legions of Queen fans hadn’t taken to INXS at all, using them as target practice with bread, tomatoes and all manner of objects. This time was different — INXS were the main game, and Michael Hutchence and his merry men swaggered, soared, grooved and rocked their way into legend.. The UK was theirs. Next stop? Outer space, baby.

Words by Stuart Coupe

It takes a special kind of musical genius to win over country radio and the mainstream in simultaneous procession. But if anyone was up to the challenge it was Keith Urban. His hard-won formative years spent as a songwriter in Nashville nurtured all the right relationships, although he’s admitted it stunted his creativity. There he was, in a small room with a yellow legal pad and an acoustic guitar, when what he really wanted to be doing was writing songs using a drum machine. 

Keith Urban transcended the traditional frontiers of country music long before his genre-fluid record Fuse in 2013, but it took careful calculation when it came to releasing singles. Speaking to Rolling Stone AU/NZ in 2021 for his cover story, Urban said he would earmark the singles for country radio and expand out and play with the others, knowing they wouldn’t have a shot in hell with country radio gatekeepers. But other radio executives were listening, and they helped turn Keith Urban into a music industry powerhouse.

His collaborations with acts like P!nk, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Amy Shark, Jason Derulo, and Julia Michaels certainly helped; as did his records Graffiti U (Number Two on the Billboard 200) and The Speed of Now Part 1, the latter of which marked his fourth simultaneous Number One album debut in the US, Canada and Australia.

With four Grammy wins, nineteen more nominations, five ARIA Awards, twenty-four country Number One hits and global Number One albums, Keith Urban is undoubtedly Australia’s most successful country-crossover export. 

Words by Poppy Reid

When Uncle Archie Roach AM was inducted into the ARIA Hall Of Fame in 2020, rapper Briggs spoke about the way the Gunditjmara and Bundjalung man took “his story, vulnerability, his heart, and made it art.”

For thirty years Roach used the power of his soulful voice and heartfelt lyrics to create a stronger, more culturally respectful national story — one that didn’t shy away from the harsh truths of colonisation. 

In particular, “Took The Children Away” — from his 1990 debut album Charcoal Lane — became an anthem for members of the Stolen Generations. Written from experience, it is arguably Roach’s most famous song, and the first song ever to receive an Australian Human Rights Award.

It’s this song that Roach performed on the night, alongside fellow singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who co-produced Charcoal Lane.

Due to illness and an inability to travel, Roach and his family gathered at the Lighthouse Theatre in his hometown of Warrnambool, where he sang seated and breathing through a nasal cannula. While it may have been a confronting sight for some, as the song built and the vibrato of Roach’s voice kicked in, it was clear the power of his music continued to hold true.

His induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame highlighted the trailblazing nature of Roach’s career similar to those of Uncle Jimmy Little and Yothu Yindi, and honoured the immense influence the singer had on Australia’s music industry; inspiring Indigenous artists to follow the path he had forged.

Capping the night off perfectly, Roach also took home Best Adult Contemporary and Best Male for his album Tell Me Why.

Words by Rudi Bremer

Every so often, a hit explodes out of Australia and crosses borders like a virus. Nothing has ever been quite so catchy as “Dance Monkey”. The 2019 creation of Tones And I, the alter-ego of singer and songwriter Toni Watson, “Dance Monkey” spread wide and crashed sales charts everywhere, smashing numerous records along the way. 

In the United Kingdom, the world’s third largest recorded music market, “Dance Monkey” logged eleven weeks at Number One, a record for a solo female artist. And in Australia, the single dominated the ARIA Singles Chart for a gobsmacking twenty-four non-consecutive weeks, easily rubbing out the fifteen weeks Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” had spent in the penthouse. In the United States, the biggest music market on the planet, Tones ruled Billboard’s Hot 100 Songwriters chart and went to Number Four on the Billboard Hot 100 — something that Nick Cave, Midnight Oil or even AC/DC have come close to achieving. Everyone was watching this beast unfold.

“It was crazy,” recounts Konstantin Kersting, producer of “Dance Monkey”. “Tones and I were texting, saying, ‘Have you seen where it’s at?’ No one expected it to happen.”

Its journey began when Watson, from the Mornington Peninsula, took her talents up and down the east coast of Australia, initially as a busker. Her story grew when she was discovered in Byron Bay. The rest is history.

When “Dance Monkey” finally cooled off, it had raced past seven billion streams and led charts in about thirty territories. It’s now recognised as the most-“Shazamed” song ever, and the third-most streamed song on Spotify. Tones has hinted at retiring “Dance Monkey” from live sets, closing the chapter on one of the all-time hits.

Words by Lars Brandle

Independent labels had been a staple of the Australian music scene since the Seventies, but in most cases (with some exceptions to the rule like Mushroom, Regular and Roo Art) had existed in the shadows, championing great alternative music and taking an important, but commercially secondary role. 

Even less prevalent were artist-owned successes. With some exceptions (including Nineties pioneers, relaxation musician Tony O’Connor and Sydney alt-rock act The Whitlams), grabbing a place on the ARIA Charts as a completely independent artist was once an unachievable goal. 

The major labels’ stranglehold on independent commercial success was broken in 2004 by an unlikely dread-locked busker from Fremantle. John Butler not only opened the gates for a generation of Australian folk-rock artists but changed the commercial model forever with his album Sunrise Over Sea. 

No longer was signing to a label a necessity if you wanted a music career, it was a choice. 

The John Butler Trio smashed the indie glass ceiling with this third album, becoming the first independent artist ever to hit Number One on the ARIA Albums Chart with his five-times Platinum smash. Casting aside the rule that you can’t get on the radio or into big-box record stores without a major label, Butler conspired with his manager Phil Stevens and MGM Distribution’s Sebastian Chase to create a plan for Butler’s own Jarrah Records that valued fan engagement and artistic control. The plan worked and has been used as a template for countless artists since, landing him at the chart’s summit — a feat he would repeat three more times (and counting) in his incredible career. 

Words by Stephen Green

Channel [V] helped beam live music and all its character, culture and craziness into Australian living rooms. 

For twenty-five years, from 1995 until the station was switched off in 2020, it lifted the profile of local and international musicians, gave young TV and media stars their start, staged a host of impressive live events for fans, and brought some unparalleled loose moments to our screens. 

In that sense it was more about creating moments and music than it was about the fact these moments and music were on television. 

“We don’t work in the television industry. We work in the music industry… with a music-first attitude,” Danny Keenan, the decade-long head of artist and music relations for Foxtel’s music channels, told The Music Network as the channel was reaching its final days. 

“From day one, [V] had a reputation of being rebellious, being cheeky, being bold, being adventurous and being massive supporters of Australian music.

“We always sought to create moments. I hope people will remember us fondly for that.” 

And there were memorable moments aplenty; Regurgitator recording an album under the watchful eyes of the public in Melbourne’s Federation Square (billed as Band In A Bubble); The Ele[V]ator bar, hanging fifty metres above the crowds at Soundwave and Homebake; a series of unannounced Guerilla Gigs (giving fans their first Australian Ed Sheeran performance); and the infamous [V] Island parties, attracting headliners like Mark Ronson, Macklemore and Delta Goodrem to floating performances on Sydney Harbour.

As former host Osher Günsberg (then Andrew G) said: “We worked our balls off. We partied hard and then we worked some more. It was incredible fun.” 

Words by Vivienne Kelly

Never underestimate a woman with decades of longevity in her career who has been given the attention of her industry gatekeepers.

Tina Arena has never been one to waste an opportunity, and when the record labels association ARIA made the unsurprising decision to honour her with an induction into its Hall of Fame in 2015, the significance of the moment — captive audience included — was not lost on Our Tina.

Following an electrifying performance of her seminal single “Chains” — backed by her feminist torchbearers Jessica Mauboy and The Veronicas — Tina Arena took the stage to deliver her speech. It started out predictably enough, Arena thanked her family, her collaborators, management, Sony, EMI publishing, Gudinski and Chugg, APRA AMCOS, Rina Ferris, Molly Meldrum… The supporters and path-makers of her forty-year career were all present and all honoured with an air of class and gratitude — as is the Tina Arena way. 

Later in the speech (as is also the Tina Arena way), she used the same sense of class and gratitude to make a grand statement on the most pressing issues of the time; issues that, seven years later, remain largely unchanged.

Arena subversively touched on the gender pay gap and difficulty for mothers in music when discussing the birth of her son Gabriel: “Like most working mothers,” she said, “when returning to work I was faced with an uncertainty […] I was worried about whether I would still be accepted in the pop world.”

She also called out streaming services’ pitiful remuneration of content creators: “Please respect the arts because without the arts we are really all screwed.” 

But it was the precision and strength she used when calling out Australian music’s ageism issue that made headlines. She implored commercial radio “to continue to support Australian music and base your playlists on the quality of the song and not the age of the artist […]. Don’t meet quotas because you have to, exceed them because you really want to,” she stated. 

After naming a few of the countless female icons adding value and wonder to music — one of which was Kylie Minogue, who was standing proud next to her onstage — she said pointedly: “Ladies over forty, we will decide when it’s time for us to stop, thank you.”

It behoves us to remember that Tina Arena was the first woman to be awarded ARIA Album of the Year, in her words she was “one of the first ethnic children on Australian TV”, and she’s also one of Australia’s highest-selling acts. When Tina talks, we listen. However, in this instance, with all her wisdom passed down, I think she’d prefer us to act.

Words by Poppy Reid

Long before AC/DC, INXS, and Men at Work had chart success in the USA, a little-known band named after a road sign in regional Victoria set the precedent for that rock’n’roll dream. 

Little River Band might be from Melbourne, but they officially formed in 1975 while in England. It was during this time they met Brisbane-born manager Glenn Wheatley who took them from underground to mainstream in four years. They got a record label deal in Australia with EMI and signed with Capitol Records in the USA by 1979. 

Known for their signature West Coast harmonies and love of melody, Wheatley had plans for the band to tour the USA — which they did in November 1976. He had cut his teeth as a musician in The Masters Apprentices before he moved into band management and knew what it took to get a career rolling overseas. Regardless of their hankering to make it abroad, the essence of what they did was quintessentially Australian — they wrote, recorded and produced their music in Australia and took it to the world. “It’s A Long Way There”, taken from their debut self-titled album, made it to Number Twenty-Eight on the Billboard Charts — a taste of what was possible. The second single “Help Is On Its Way” made it to Number Fourteen on the Billboard Charts. They managed six US Top Ten singles including “Reminiscing”, “Lady”, “Lonesome Loser” and “Cool Change” thereafter — with “Reminiscing” one of the most played songs on American radio. The band’s original members — guitarists Beeb Birtles and Graeham Goble, singer Glenn Shorrock and drummer Derek Pellicci were described by Eagles member Glenn Frey as one of the ‘best singing bands in the world’. They went on to sell more than twenty-five million records worldwide and were nominated for a Grammy in 1979 for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group alongside Barbra Streisand, Supertramp and Neil Diamond. 

Regularly touring the US from Australia proved costly, and in 1982, Glenn Shorrock decided to pursue a solo career. At the height of their careers in the late Seventies, the Australian band was among the world’s most successful rock groups, and by 1983 had secured thirteen hits in the American Top Forty. They created the template of what was possible. 

Words by Jane Rocca

Were you there? In Australian rock’n’roll folklore it’s a little like walking along Savile Row in London early on the morning of January 30, 1969. You hear the sound of music playing, wonder where the noise is coming from, look up and there’s The Beatles performing. The Australian equivalent was on February 23, 1976, on Swanston Street in Melbourne, and that noise was AC/DC. 

You might have been on your way to or from Flinders Street station, doing some shopping or getting a coffee, and suddenly there appeared a flatbed truck driving slowly down busy Swanston Street in the centre of Melbourne. There are musicians on the back, but no one knows who they are; just five guys from a comparatively new Sydney band on a visit to Melbourne to record some video footage for the Countdown television show — the most important exposure any artist could get in the day. The song — as everyone now knows – is the signature anthem “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll)”. 

What do you remember? The amazing guitar intro from Malcolm Young? Just how youthful they looked? How happy, relaxed and unpressured they seemed? The parade would mark the calm before the storm — Angus in his schoolboy uniform before it was ubiquitous, the swagger of the slightly older Bon Scott before he paraded it across global stages, and the moment bagpipes became truly cool (a round of applause for The Rats Of Tobruk Pipe band -— Alan Butterworth, Les Kenfield and Kevin Conlon).

The video cost just $380. It was directed by Paul Drane and filmed by David Olney. To date it’s been viewed by almost forty million people on YouTube alone and remains one of the most well-known pieces of footage in Australian rock’n’roll history. 

Just over a decade later, in 1988, AC/DC would become one of the first artists inducted into the ARIA Hall Of Fame along with Dame Joan Sutherland, Johnny O’Keefe, Vanda & Young, Slim Dusty and Col Joye. In 2003 they received the same accolade in the international Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame where they were inducted by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. 

These days AC/DC are so much a part of the fabric of popular culture that it’s hard to imagine that time in 1976 when that huge, massive global success still awaited them. That moment when they sang a song about wanting it all and knowing the pitfalls that awaited in the search for stardom. That snapshot in time as they paraded youthfully through the streets of Melbourne, five young guys with a head full of dreams — and three bagpipe players.

Words by Stuart Coupe

At the time of Gurrumul Yunupingu’s death in 2017 he was the most commercially successful Indigenous Australian musician, having sold an estimated half a million albums globally. 

However, Yunupingu’s importance as a cultural figure in Australia goes beyond commercial success. 

As an artist he represented an authentically Australian voice (Rolling Stone Australia even hailed the singer as the country’s “most important voice” in 2017) while simultaneously transcending any attempt to categorise him as such.

Formerly a member of Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band, Yunupingu released his first solo album in 2008. The eponymous record, released through Skinnyfish Music and produced by longtime friend and collaborator Michael Hohnen, became a sensation.

On the album, Yunupingu sang predominantly in Gumatj, Galpu and Djambarrpuyngu, his angelic voice capturing ideas of identity, spirit, connection with the land, the elements, and ancestors. 

It was in this way, more than any other mode, that his fans (including the likes of Elton John, will.i.am, Quincy Jones, and Stevie Wonder) came to learn about and understand the singer.

Former frontman of The Police, Sting, was also a fan, and a month into Yunupingu’s 2009 European tour the English singer invited Yunupingu to perform a duet of “Every Breath You Take” for French television.

Robert Hillman’s biography, Gurrumul: His Life and Music, captures the moment brilliantly — including Yunupingu’s bemusement at the idea of a blind man singing the lyrics “watching you.” Instead, he would sing “Every word you say, I’ll be listening to you” joking “cos I won’t be watching you!” as he practised the song in his hotel room.

In 2018, Yunupingu’s posthumous album Djarimirri (Child Of The Rainbow) debuted on the ARIA Albums Chart at Number One, making it the first album in an Indigenous language to achieve the feat, and at the 2022 National Indigenous Music Awards he was inducted into the NIMAs Hall of Fame.

Words by Rudi Bremer

The late record producer and talent manager Glenn Wheatley re-mortgaged his family home in Melbourne to finance the making of John Farnham’s iconic mid-Eighties comeback album Whispering Jack. At the time, Farnham couldn’t secure a record deal to make an album. While it had been almost twenty years since he recorded and released the hit single “Sadie, the Cleaning Lady” in 1967, Farnham was typecast as a pop star with teen idol appeal. His squeaky-clean reputation wasn’t inspiring the labels to give him an advance, and they didn’t see a future for him as a contemporary adult star.  

Wheatley was quietly confident that Farnham could rebrand, and took his ambition to make an album seriously. The pair met when Wheatley asked him to join as singer of the Little River Band in 1982 — recording three albums when Glenn Shorrock left the group. That didn’t end well for Farnham, but it certainly inspired the next phase of his artistry. His heyday as a Seventies pop star might have withered, and nobody in the record company world was keen on resurrecting him with a new sound — but Wheatley had a different plan, and $150,000 to make it happen. Theirs is a story about a friendship built on trust and self-belief; both of their careers depended on that gutsy move in 1985.  

It took eighteen months to make Whispering Jack, and when it was released, it spent twenty-five weeks at Number One in Australia. It became the best charting album in the 1980s and was the first album ever released to CD format. “You’re The Voice” is as close as it gets to an Australian national anthem, and nobody else kept Michael Jackson away from the Number One spot on the Australian charts like Farnham did.    

The success of Whispering Jack kickstarted a contemporary pop career for Farnham, who against all odds, proved he had what it took. Just as notably, it launched a thirty-eight year management relationship with Wheatley (thirty-five of those years without a contract) — one of the most enduring and successful partnerships in popular music history.

Words by Jane Rocca

Jimmy Barnes has been winning the chart game for over five decades. The indefatigable rocker has amassed the most Number Ones in Australian chart history, fourteen as a solo artist and five with his band Cold Chisel — an unassailable achievement in the streaming era.

The Working Class Man remains one of the hardest-working musicians in Australia, and in 2022 he maintained his grip on the record with the release of Soul Deep 30, claiming his nineteenth Number One album, strengthening his dominance on top of the ARIA Number Ones leaderboard ahead of international legends including The Beatles (14), Madonna (12), U2 (11) and Eminem (11).

Barnes is that rare artist with the power to refresh his audience across the generations; how else to explain the 30th anniversary reissue of his 1991 Soul Deep album returning to the ARIA Charts summit three decades after it sold more than 700,000 copies — ten-times Platinum in Australia — to become the biggest-selling album of his career?

That 1991 release was a huge gamble. Barnes had commanded the airwaves, and commandeered the prime real estate in Australia’s retail stores, with four solo rock’n’roll records released in quick succession after Cold Chisel disbanded in 1983, and Soul Deep was his passion project paying tribute to the Sixties R&B songs and singers who had inspired him to pursue a music career.

His partner-in-crime, Mushroom supremo Michael Gudinski, expressed some reservations about the stylistic detour; soul music had traditionally struggled for support from the industry gatekeepers at commercial radio. But as always, Gudinski backed his mate and Soul Deep remains the highest-selling record in Mushroom’s rich history.

While it may seem a Number One album by Jimmy Barnes is a fait accompli, there were some lean years in the Nineties. His late label boss Warren Costello would acknowledge this when the Flesh and Blood record debuted at Number One last year, displacing teen stream-queen Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour.

“Some of the best A&R decisions back then were taken by MG and Jimmy as they clocked up the first two decades of international touring and chart dominance for a raft of solo albums that followed,” Costello said.

“And whilst ego was never in short supply, they were never ever naïve enough to think that Number One albums grew on trees. In the late Nineties that same level of success became a little more elusive, as it does at some point in every great career, but typically, Jimmy fought back as he always does. 

“His first album for the new label, Liberation, that Michael and I had started, saw him back bigger and better than ever. Double Happiness debuted at Number One in 2005 and was a catalyst in many ways for all of us to refocus.”

Words by Kathy McCabe

Australian Idol arrived in mid-2003 at a time of upheaval for the music industry. 

A new generation of consumers were tech-savvy enough to independently unearth new acts without guidance from labels, and brand-dazzled enough to not have an issue with greater corporatisation and multi-million dollar cross-industry deals.

Colourful and sharp, an important ingredient about Australian Idol was a focus on the wannabe’s journey, starting — inevitably — with a personal trauma that led to ‘music as therapy’. 

It was a ratings bonanza, putting music before a prime time audience of millions. The first grand final surpassed three million viewers.

Previously unknown or overlooked, the likes of Guy Sebastian, Shannon Noll, Jessica Mauboy, Casey Donovan, Damien Leith, Stan Walker, Courtney Act, Rob Mills, Cosima De Vito, and Anthony Callea became household names with chart-topping records, and in record time.

Network Ten paid $13 million for each season — but the show was a cash cow. In 2003, viewers cast twenty million votes through text messages or phone calls to support their favourite Idol, making an estimated $11 million for Ten and Telstra. The second season drew twenty-nine million votes and $16 million.

Blue chip sponsors like Telstra, McDonald’s, Mazda, Village Roadshow, Procter & Gamble and Cadbury each paid $3.4 million a season, according to the AFR.

But the varying depth of the talent pool, format fatigue, and competition from other TV talent shows played havoc with ratings.

Channel 10 finally pulled the plug after just 1.4 million bothered to tune into the 2009 finale. 

Australian Idol returns in 2023 on Channel 7.

Words by Christie Eliezer