Music Strategies, Venues and Mess and Noise

With the announcement in recent weeks by both the Premier and our trusty Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood of an interest in supporting live music, now is a good time to begin looking at how we take the momentum from the Jade Monkey petition through to real changes that allow our live music industry to grow again. The key indicator of this won’t be purely political interest, strategies for future support or even funding allocations. Music scenes are heavily reliant on venues. As APRA’s report through Ernst and Young, and the Arts Victoria report through Deloitte indicate, the music industry is a venues based sector, and the presence of small venues is key. If something impacts on the commercial viability of small music venues, then you don’t have a music scene.

Discussing that topic, Licensing guru John Wardle sent me this link to a Mess and Noise article in which Andrew Ramadge interviews Peter Garrett. The two sections to pay particular attention to are:

There have been a few suggestions as to why pubs are struggling. One is that it’s a generational thing, that young music fans want to go to festivals instead of the pub. Another is that live music in Sydney is over-regulated. Do you think there’s any truth to either of those?

More to the second than the first. I think that if people have got a place to go which is somewhere they can be with friends and others that share their taste in music, then a pub’s just as good a place as anywhere else to see a band. And quite often, because you’re up close and it’s pretty intimate, it can be an exciting place, especially when the band’s starting out and you get a chance to see them in a much more intimate environment than a festival.

But it is true that it can be expensive for venues to maintain the level of security that now seems to be a requirement, and certainly there are regulation issues both around that matter but also having appropriate access facilities and the like. I think there’s no doubt that the proper provision of safe viewing conditions for audiences in any place is absolutely necessary, but it may be that the pendulum has swung a bit too far.

Some fans have suggested that perhaps there should be a national body that can oversee live music in Australia and iron out issues like regulations to safeguard the music scene. Do you think something like that would be feasible?
It’s feasible, but I’m not sure that it’s the best way to go about it. I think the fact is that most of the regulations and licensing – you know, the sorts of issues that apply to local venues – operate at either the state government or the local council level. Now, we already have some I think terrific groups, you know, the MusicNSW group is one good example, the people in Melbourne who’ve been organising as well [SLAM and Music Victoria], the people who’ve been putting on the events that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, and the pressure groups that have arisen in different places, I think, have really got onto it.

I thought the comment here about the success of ‘pressure groups’ at the State level was interesting. Certainly things like SLAM and Raise the Bar have successfully pushed for policy change by finding the sections within state and local government that do support live music, identifying clear paths towards supporting music venues and small bars and connecting that to a clear demand amongst the electorate.

Seven Ways To Save the Jade Monkey and Resurrect Adelaide’s Small Music Venues

So the Jade Monkey is now the subject of a working party reporting directly to the Premier. This a direct result of the Save the Jade Monkey survey, and a credit to those who organised it and those who signed it it. But what does the Premier’s interest actually mean?

On the one hand, quite a bit. The people sitting on it include some very senior, and very well respected advisors with the skills and networks to make change. But on the other hand, it doesn’t actually mean the Jade Monkey is ‘saved’. It means there’s a concentrated, high level effort to find a way to save it. The Jade Monkey is saved when it moves into a new building without being butchered by the same regulatory forces that have perfected their skills in butchering the small bars and venues sector over the past ten to fifteen years.

To that end, I’ve been theorizing about what you’d actually need in place to see the Jade Monkey move in October without losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to red tape and poorly applied regulations. This continues my general penchant for theorizing about how you’d resuscitate our local music scene and small venues more generally.

And, as I’m not the brightest tack in the box, I’m posting my top seven ideas on how to save the Jade below, with the hope that, as is so often the case, I can ‘crowd source’ your ideas on what’s right, wrong, overlooked and misspelt.

Hence, I present:

The Top Seven Ways To Save The Jade Monkey (and Resurrect Adelaide’s Small Music Venues)

(1) There’s a Half Million Dollar Fund Set Aside to Support the Live Music Industry. Give it to Small Venues.

The South Australian Gaming Machines Act of 1992 included a section designed to offset some of the social damage of Pokies. Pay attention to subsection 4:

73C—Community Development Fund

(1)         The Community Development Fund is established.

(2)         The Fund will be kept at Treasury.

(3)         The money paid into the Fund under this Part will from time to time be applied by the Treasurer, in accordance with the directions of the Governor, towards—

(a)         financial assistance for community development; and

(b)         the provision of government health, welfare or education services.

(4)         Despite subsection (3), at least $500 000 must be applied from the Fund in each financial year towards programs that will be of benefit to the live music industry.

I have no idea where this money is going now. But here’s a wild idea – why not make some of that half a million annual program a mass of seed funding and start-up grants for small music venues? That means the investment goes into rebuilding a sustainable, non-government reliant small venues sector? A couple of hundred grand a year given out in $20,000 to $50,000 packages for three to five years would go a long way to re-establishing our small venues.

And, while we’re at it, let’s make the Jade the first test case. They’re going to relocate. Give them $50,000 to help them do it. The social return on investment will make it worth it.

(2) Stop Talking About The Need for a Small Bars License And Just Make One.

To be honest, I’m sick of talking about small bars licenses. We’re not talking about innovative or unusual legislation. We’re talking about something that already exists in most other states. Just bring in the general bars license from NSW, with its built in entertainment and restaurant consents, and its absence of unworkable, idiotic requirements designed to cripple small business.

I know in the past I’ve said you could do this through Special Circumstances. This was based on advice from Deputy Commissioners in a meeting organised by the IDC, who have been fairly active on this front. But Licensing has since started to bring out the Facac vs Talbot Case, direct from the Supreme Court from 2001, which gives them a pretty solid groundwork to refuse to grant Special Circumstances licenses and instead direct people to apply for a Hotels License, adapted to remove most of the things characteristic of a Hotels License. Unfortunately, a Hotels License will attract objections from a much wider array of stakeholders and thus will be effectively impossible for smaller venues to obtain.

Thus, we need a license appropriate to smaller venues. To do that, all we’d need to do is get a bunch of people like Zac in a room, ask them what kind of license provisions they need and then insert something suitable into the Act. Easy.

(3) Small Bars and Venues Are Not the Opera House. Do Not Class Them As Such Under the Building Code.

Again, we’re not talking rocket science here. Just do what they’ve done interstate. Put through a Practice Note via the Department of Planning and Local Government noting that a small bar doesn’t turn from a Class 6 into a Class 9B simply because it has a stage and live entertainment rather than a screen showing football. Make it clear that a Class 6 bar with entertainment consent can apply for a General Bars License and your problem, from a regulatory perspective, is solved.

(4) When it comes to the Disability Discrimination Act, follow the Objects and Aim for the Possible.

I’ll grant that this one is more complex and, as I’ve said before, it’s also the hardest area to get real discussion around. So correct me if I’m wrong.

As I see it, the provision of accessible spaces is a major social justice issue that all too often gets ignored for convenience or petty cost cutting, hence we connect the federal Disability Discrimination Act to the Building Code. That makes perfect sense. The problems tend to arise when the connection between those two things, designed primarily to monitor new development, is retrospectively applied to smaller ventures who are trying to use an existing building and are expected to get it up to modern standards.

Let’s consider the Objects of the Disability Discrimination Act:

(a) to eliminate, as far as possible, discrimination against persons on the ground of disability in the areas of:
(i) work, accommodation, education, access to premises, clubs and sport; and
(ii) the provision of goods, facilities, services and land […]

Regardless what level of access you require, and what hurdles of discrimination you face, we all share a common theme in that most of us will not get our first gig at a the Festival Centre. We’ll all start out, and probably do the bulk of the rest of our shows, in little shoe box venues in battered, low rent buildings. It is possible for the Festival Centre to install high levels of access infrastructure. They have the budget and a building large enough and constructed recently to do so. It is not possible to apply the same rules to an 80 person venue in a battered old building trying to run a low profit enterprise like live music.

It’s not only that most small venues cannot afford to install $150,000 worth of new lifts, toilets, ramps and hearing stations, but in most cases the smaller, older and lower rent buildings they occupy aren’t physically capable of being adapted to modern standards.

All new buildings should be built to ensure 100% access. But few if any small music or Arts venues are moving into new or custom built facilities. They’re operating in what they can afford to rent, and they can’t usually afford to undertake major upgrades. The presence of the word ‘possible’ in the Act, and Hardship clauses between the Act and the BCA recognise this. Accordingly, we should work to increase access as much as ‘is possible’. It is possible to increase access in small venues by doing relatively simple things like installing Braille signage, hiring Auslan interpreters for at least a portion of performances, noting the access conditions in your advertising, not using lights that’ll trigger epilepsy, planning to install accessible toilets as soon as you know your business is viable and doing the things that don’t require major, high cost capital works. It is not possible for someone running a 100 person venue to install $150,000 worth of building upgrades on a little old building they’ve only got a two year lease on.

Do what is ‘possible’ and you can increase access conditions in most small venues to maybe 85% or 95% of the population. Expect a small venue owner to re-build the entire building and the venue doesn’t open, making it accessible to 0% of the population – which is what we’ve been doing the past few years. I’d rather the 85% than the 0%.

(5) Incentives for Developers to Support Live Music and Arts Venues

Before anyone whinges about this being impossible, it’s already being done interstate. There’s two simple means of pursuing this.

(A) Let’s say you’ve got, as a purely fictional example, a major government funded institution buying up swathes of properties in the West End. Let’s say the State Government development assessment folks told them that they can have their planning approvals on the condition that they fulfil certain conditions of benefit to the community – like allowing spaces that previously hosted nightclubs to be used as live music or arts venues whilst they’re awaiting redevelopment, rather than sitting empty or being used for cheap storage.

(B) One of the main reasons we don’t have small venues and small bars in Adelaide is because we knocked down all the smaller, ground floor spaces they used to occupy and installed car parks or huge office blocks. We can, in the longer term, alter this by ensuring new development includes smaller spaces and thereby increases the volume of smaller, cheaper to rent spaces in the future. We can do that through things like granting height exemptions if guidelines around ground floor activation are met, so there’s a financial incentive (more space to lease out/sell down the track) which I’m told is what’s been done interstate. And we can also do it by altering the Development Act to make the adaptation of old buildings less expensive than building an entirely new building, which would mean buildings like Electra House and Gawler Chambers didn’t sit empty for so long.

(6) Stop Asking the People Who Made the Problem To Make the Solution

We’ve had ten years of an administrative system that’s done it’s absolute best to turn the city in a suburb with a binge drinking strip and some universities. Great. Now apparently we want all the small bars back. Even better. But provided we’re still relying on the administrative systems and staff who’ve spent the last ten years turning the city into a suburb, we will continue to turn our city into a suburb. As the old saying goes, “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck and will continue to do the things ducks do, even if it’s started using words like ‘Laneways’ and ‘Vibrancy’ and ‘Activation’.”

This is particularly relevant for those of you interested in activism in this area. Administrative systems are hard to negotiate and monitor. It’s much easier to just yell at your local elected member. But it’s more effective if you can direct the elected members to particular sections of an administrative system that aren’t working. On the flipside of that, it’s equally important and effective to make them aware of which sections ARE working so they can empower and support the parts of our administration capable of implementing change. This is often hard to detect from the top down, but it easy to detect from the position of anyone trying to negotiate the systems from the ground up.

(7) Save the Business, not the Building.

The Jade Monkey is not a building. The Jade Monkey is a couple who run a music venue for a living. The furore around it is not about a building, it’s about the role live music plays in building a sense of community.

Thus, to save the Jade Monkey, it needs to be viable for Zac and Naomi to make a living running it. If you like the Jade Monkey, pressure for the allocation of resources to support them to run their business, and regulatory frameworks which make it possible for them to operate. The building is secondary. We’ve seen petitions work pretty well so far, so keep harassing your elected members and presenting them with clear paths through which they can help.

To that end, the points that need to be targeted right now are:

(1) The lack of appropriate licensing categories. We need a small bars license. Small venues make money from alcohol sales, not ticket sales. The door usually goes primarily to the bands.

(2)  The insurmountable development and planning regulations. The Jade Monkey is not the Festival Centre. It doesn’t have tiered seating, major egress concerns or the budget to install an elevator. It also doesn’t have a 1000 person capacity, a 24 hour license and a Pokies Lounge. Small bars and venues need to be protected from the application of standards designed for venues ten times larger than them through the provision of alternate, and relevant, regulations scaled down to reflect their size.

(3) The total absence of financial support for small and culturally focused venues. Public funding for novelty street furniture, murals and IPhone aps is great but it doesn’t produce an economically sustainable industry of small bars and venues. We need to push for small, culturally focused venues to be seen as a priority when it comes to funding. This sector cannot, in my opinion, regenerate on its own. The barriers are too harsh and the rewards too low.

Overall, the more elected members at the State Government level become aware of this need, the greater the chance not only the Jade Monkey but the small venues sector itself will survive beyond Twin Street. The change here is going to need to come from State Government. If a 4000 word petition is enough to get the attention of a Premier within 24 hours, it is entirely reasonable to think that attention can be retained until a real change is produced. We just need to keep up the pressure.

So apparently I’m not the only one upset about the Jade Monkey…

Yesterday’s blog post got more than a thousand hits in a day, which is double the previous most popular post. Usually I only get a couple of hundred. So obvious it struck a chord. There’s more I have to say on the topic, but it’ll take me a while to get time to do so. In the mean time, note that Stephen Yarwood’s been very active on this front, posted the following on his Facebook page and has been discussing the topic at length. In case you missed it, here’s his statement:

I’m disappointed the Jade Monkey is closing in Twin St but more disappointed people think it is council’s fault. The landowner has a right to develop his land and as the development is > $10 million the State Govt Development Assessment Commission is the planning authority. Truth is council is powerless so don’t blame us – we have no laws to change the decision either. Keep in mind a community movement to stop the development is not good for Jade Monkey – if they want to relocate it is not a good look that the community want to stop the development of the land. Landowners would not be keen to lease to a tenant with a community that opposes thier rights as a land owner. It is not good for live music to turn off landowners from leasing land and any campaign to stop the development is counterproductive to the Jade Monkey Team and live music in general. I have met with Zac and offered to assist finding an alternative site and already have work underway for the City to have a live music strategy to promote, support and protect live music in Adelaide. I am doing what I can within my powers and influence!!!

And this was on the news.

As I said, Stephen’s right: much of the law involved in this decision, as per much of the law impacting upon live music, is outside of his control. If he could change it, he probably would. That said, I disagree with his statement that council is ‘powerless’. Council has resources and, as a capital city, it has the capacity to push for change. I’d argue he’s already pushing for that change, the debate is probably more whether there’s enough weight behind him.

To that end, whilst the Lord Mayor evidently doesn’t need a petition to convince him, I’d still encourage you to sign the petition to support live music even if he isn’t the final recipient. Proof that there’s electoral demand for the local music scene is fundamental to producing change at the state and federal level.

One Step Forward, One Step Back: Tuxedo Cat Opens, Jade Monkey Closes.

So Tuxedo Cat is now finally up and running at 199 and 200 North Terrace. I had the extreme privilege of being the first person to buy a legal drink there at 5:15 on the afternoon of Friday, February 17th, and then sat back and watched Bryan and Cass and the Pigeon Island team working their butts off to staff and run the venue, rather than just working their butts off just to fit the whole thing out.

I’m going to assume most of the kind of people who read this blog, particularly those visiting it after a rather lengthy absence from posting, will probably be visiting the site anyway and see how amazing the set up has been.

But I’d also like you to take a solemn moment to contemplate the massive volume of effort put in my people who gave their time helping Renew get Tuxedo Cat into that building: From Callen Clarke’s ever delightful Adam Crittenden, who probably gave us close to $10,000 in legal advice so we could set up a non-commercial lease that protects both the owners and Tuxedo Cat as best as it possibly can. Second to that are Helen and Evan from Guardian Insurance. Helen is sort of an angel who came to Earth, took human form and decided to go into the insurance industry for the good of all human kind. Getting decent insurance for a public venue is nigh on impossible. And moreover, there’s Nick Gurner from Le Cordon Bleu, the owners 199 and 200. Nick’s patiently helped us work through the labyrinth of development, insurance and leasing law. Driving behind all that has been Jamie McClurg of Commercial and General (who some of you might know as the guy who opened the building up for the New New) and Steve Maras of Maras Corp (who joined the Renew Board somewhere along the way).

Now all we have to hope is that Tuxedo Cat thrives and finally reaches a point where they make enough of a profit to keep something like this going year round.

The volume of charity and pro bono support to get Tuxedo Cat into 199 and 200 is both heartening and disconcerting. On the one hand, it’s great to see a lot of people, particularly those who aren’t from a traditional Arts or community advocacy background, coming out of the woodwork to help. On the downside, it only further highlights a point I’ve made before; it’s virtually impossible to get a cultural venue off the ground in Adelaide. You have to be a zealot to do it, and you have to attract a lot of zealots who’ll do it without any element of financial gain. Which is hard to do.

And this leads us to the Topic of the Moment. Ironically, whilst the new Tuxedo Cat was busy opening its doors, a few streets over at 29 Twin Street, the ever charming Zac Coligan was preparing to announce the closure of The Jade Monkey.

The Jade’s been a very good venue to me over the years. I played there with at least five different bands. For a while it was pretty much the only small music venue left in the city and is nothing short of iconic. Whilst other small venues, like the Madlove, Allure, Swing Cat, Minke, Mojo West and their ilk all died and were never replaced, the Jade held out.

The thing that I find saddest about the closure of one of the last remaining small live music venues is knowing that setting up a new one is almost certainly beyond the resources of any of the people who’d actually want to do it. It’s not a high profit industry. People tend to run small music venues because they love live music. And I remember seeing Zac playing bass in, from memory, Bergerac in the Austral beer garden back in about 2001. He was an active part of the local music scene well before the Jade Monkey and that experience shows. It is very much a musicians’ venue.

I’ve written enough on the topic of our local music scene in the past. To a certain degree, the end of a venue that’s been a key part of that scene is actually a bit easier to swallow when it comes from decisions made by a private investor. Their job is to develop, and it’s logical that they’d do so. Buildings get knocked down and replaced as normal within the life cycle of a city and, in most cases, the relocation of a venue isn’t necessarily a major thing.

The problem here is I don’t think it’ll be possible for a new venue to open.  And, moreover, it won’t be possible because of decisions made by people who are paid out of the public purse. Whilst they’re not responsible for the closure of the Jade specifically, it is primarily people working within the public sector who have been responsible for the collapse of the small venues, the local music industry and its inability to regenerate. They’ve done that through creating a regulatory framework which cannot be overcome by small business.

Which brings us to the next point.

One of the falls outs of the Jade closure is that within hours of its announcement Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood’s Facebook page is awash with “How do we save the Jade Monkey?” comments and overnight there’s a survey with a thousand signatures on it addressed to the Lord Mayor. Which is a compliment, in a weird sort of way, to how much faith a lot of us had/still have in the potential for those who came into office at the last ACC election to produce change.

I should point out here both that Council funding part funds Renew Adelaide, and that I think the Lord Mayor and a number of Councillors are actually doing the best they can do with an outdated administrative system, both at the local, state and federal level. To that end, and in Council’s defense, unlike the attempted closure of the Tote in Melbourne, or the successful closure of the Hopetoun in Sydney, or Marrackville Council’s repetitive attempts to shut down the Red Rattler, the Jade’s closure doesn’t have much to do with Council. The owner (correct me if I’m wrong) has refused to renew the lease so they can begin development.

Even if Council had tried to block development approval, a project this large would go to State Government and I doubt the saving of a single music venue would overrule a multi-million dollar development.

For me, the real test isn’t saving one building but whether it’s possible for Zac and Naomi, and indeed anyone else who wants to open a music venue, to set up in the City of Adelaide. And, like I’ve said, I don’t think it’s feasible to run a music venue here. The disincentives, rigorously introduced and enforced over the past ten years in particular, are just too high. If they weren’t, we’d have more small venues. There is a market for them.

As a rather depressing footnote to that, take a look at how many spaces in South Australia are taking part in SLAM’s current campaign, slated for Feb 23^rd, to support small venues. Adelaide is on par with Hobart as a Vibrant City! Hooray!

Anyway, I’d argue that if Zac and Naomi tried to start a live music venue in that exact same building today, they would be refused compliance as a Class 9B due to the constraints of the Disability Discrimination Act, refused planning approval due to the sound and alcohol presence and denied a liquor license through objection from SAPOL, Council, the AHA and certain local traders. All of those things could be overcome, but it would cost an immense volume of money, and the same project could go interstate and receive active support through small business funding. So why try and do it in Adelaide?

I’m wandering off point. Let me return to the issue of the role of local government in supporting businesses like the Jade. Should we expect our Lord Mayor and Council to stop the Jade Money redevelopment? No, that’s almost certainly beyond their powers. Should we expect they ensure venues like the Jade Monkey can relocate, or that similar venues should be able to set up? Well. Keeping in mind they have no control over the Building Code, the Development Act, the Disability Discrimination Act, the Retail Tenancies Act, the hyper-active state of insurance in Australia or Liquor Licensing it’s probably a bit much to say we should expect local government Councillors to be successful. But we should expect them to try.

I would suggest that it is reasonable to expect greater engagement from local government in the process of making it possible for creative and cultural spaces like small music venues to set up in Adelaide. Council played a significant role in destroying those venues during the last decade so its reasonable to expect they’ll play a similar role in re-introducing them this decade.

Certainly, both the Lord Mayor and a number of the elected members seem pretty committed to playing that role and a lot of people voted for them because of that commitment. So the question becomes whether that commitment can translate into a change in the operations of the Council itself – an organisation which, let’s face it, spent most of the last decade trying to turn the city into a suburb. Through things like Splash Adelaide we’ve seen a fledgling willingness by Council to try something different. I’m not entirely a convert to the cause of temporary street furniture, and I thought the installation of broken cars in access parking on Gawler Place was a pretty shabby message regarding Adelaide’s support for those with mobility constraints. But at least it showed a willingness to do something more than the usual paving and security cameras.

The Splash campaign took up, I’m told, close to $200,000. Someone correct me if I’m wrong on that figure. It would be interesting to see a similar volume of resourcing and energy directed at supporting local cultural venues and creative industries. We might not be able to stop a music venue being knocked down by a developer, but $20,000 partnership grants, zoning to support business of benefit to the community and waving all DA fees – all things that happen interstate – would make it a hell of a lot easier for new venues to open. That, more so than an almost certainly impossible attempt to block a major development, might be a more successful way of ensuring that we end up with more small venues, and making it commercially viable for the Jade Monkey to find a new home.

Planning, Culture and How To Shut Down a 40 Person Theatre

One of my favourite activities is looking at the disparity between cultural and planning policy at the local government level. It’s a hobby I have to keep in check, because the volume of local government agencies who successfully connect the two is pretty limited. The silo based structure of local government, and the nuance of ‘accountable’ systems of management drawn from the Westminster system, tend to ensure cultural policy, planning and, in addition, economic development often operate at a distinct distance from each other, often to the point of contradiction. Looking into this disconnect is one of the key things I’m hoping to do (funding permitting) with Renew Australia sometime soon. Sporadically you do encounter examples of councils doing very well in this respect, but they’re exceptions rather than the rule and the change is often driven by a very small number of extremely forward thinking people in the administration, teamed with a couple of elected members.

There’s a couple of classic markers of a disconnect between planning and cultural policy that keep jumping out at me. I’m writing some initial thoughts on them up here for your thoughts, and in the hope I’ll encounter other examples which indicate alternate approaches. So my initial observations of the cultural and planning policy disconnect are:

(1) The presence of strategic planning initiatives budgeted at between $100,000 and $200,000 in synch with active attacks on community driven activity and small business already delivering upon the suggested outcomes of those policies.

At the moment City of Marrackville appears to be the best example of this with their much lauded attempts to cripple a local multi-purpose, independently community art space called The Red Rattler. In between the various renditions of the story I’ve heard, Marrackville council has invested significantly on a cultural plan to increase the volume of creative spaces in the city area, whilst simultaneously costing The Red Rattler a similar rate in miscellaneous fees, including $15,000 for parking. You can read their cultural policy here. Note the sections in which they state the following:

Council will provide a range of infrastructure and programs and services to support and reflect the diversity of local arts and culture, including arts and cultural facilities, community facilities, libraries, open spaces, and public places.

And, from there:

Council recognises the importance of urban land-use planning to the local creative industries and will work to create favourable conditions to attract and retain creative businesses within the local area through its planning controls.

This would, I assume, have been developed by either a consultancy organisation or working committee comprised primarily of senior cultural or potentially economic development staff. Unfortunately, whatever department they produced it within, it didn’t synch over to the actions of Planning and Development, and thus the policy and the practice were exact opposites.

So the sad thing here is that the council had an opportunity to work with an existing and highly successful independent initiative already delivering on their cultural policy, but the application of planning and development fees and regulations ultimately did the exact opposite. The parking fee was later waved by the elected members after a lawyer working pro-bono found the fee was somewhat legally dubious. The problem came from the administration, not the elected councillors. That’s important because it questions the idea that administrative behaviour abides by a sense of ‘accountability’ back to the community.

The organisational definition of ‘accountability’ within government is something I’m still struggling to get my head around. The Marrickville cultural plan states that their task is to ‘provide a range of infrastructure’ – not to allow or facilitate non-council businesses or associations to produce that infrastructure themselves. It seems to be a common experience that if you want to implement an activity within your community, even when it synchs with the local government cultural policy, you need to go directly to the elected members. This is a shame as it produces fractious and difficult relationships with the administration, and ultimately takes more effort, time and money for everyone. It would be cheaper and more effective for Marrickville council to simply wave fees, allocate seed fudning and support things like the Red Rattler than to ‘provide’ cultural infrastructure themselves. But this doesn’t seem to happen, and the usual excuse seems to be ‘accountability’. As far as I can tell, it IS accountable for a council to illegally charge a parking fee from an incorporated association. It ISN’T accountable to allocate resources from a council directly to an incorporated association to spend on their own infrastructure. This strikes me as being more about control over resources and keeping power within the systems of governance than being accountable to the delivery of outcomes of social or cultural good. But maybe that’s just me.

This leads us to the next commonality.

(2) Attempts by council administrators to implement cultural outcomes despite having no formal or other experience as cultural producers.

This is surprisingly common nationally. The usual indication of it is a lack of seed funding or support for existing initiatives of an ongoing nature, coupled with a series of low controversy, low impact ‘safe’ events – usually either murals or similar low cost public art or sporadic ‘street markets’. As noted above, the interesting thing about this approach to increasing cultural activity is it is actually far, far more expensive than a grants or funded partnership program for a lesser result. Sporadically I’ll find bitter ex-council employees who’ll give me figures of anything up to $30,000 for a single day events with attendence stats that are either blatantly suspect or simply don’t seem to exist. I’ve been given figures of $10,000 to $15,000 for single murals and novelty street furniture. This is usually three to four times the amount similar events cost when run by people or organisations with skills specific to cultural production.

Again, my theory here is that the issue isn’t about cost, the issue is about ‘accountablity’ or, more bluntly, control. It IS accountable to give resources to a government employee to ‘provide’ culture. It ISN’T accountable to give resources to a non-government, non-professional or community or arts focused worker, because god knows what they might do with it. Which makes sense, except cultural work is actually kind of a skilled profession, and it’s not a skill that’s usually found within the local government sector. Sorry to any council workers reading this. I’m not trying to be mean. But cultural work and government work aren’t the same thing.

The analogy I’m making here is that the local government sector increasingly views the production of culture as something they ‘provide’, whereas their structure and human resources are generally geared more towards administration. The idea that they’re going to ‘provide’ culture is a bit like a library saying it’s going to stop buying books and the librarians are all going to start writing them themselves. After all, they know about books – they spend the whole day cataloguing and managing information systems about them. And if they buy books from a publisher or author, how do they know that publisher or author is writing work relative to the community the library serves?

This attitude, as far as I can tell, is because the local government sector has it’s roots in parishes and Court appointed Justices of the Peace, which began to take on a more formal structure in the early 1800s as urban populations started to grow in the UK. As a system, local government’s administration is a mixture of Parish registers and representatives of the Crown, and thus essentially feudal in nature. It’s traditional role has been to keep records and manage the hoi polloi. The idea it should play a role in cultural policy seems fairly new, barely older than the use of the word ‘Vibrancy’, and thus the inherent nature of the system means it tends to see ‘vibrancy’ as something council should ‘provide’ or ‘produce’ for its populace, in the same way it was traditionally expected to ‘produce’ safety, hygiene and order. Hence, it’s possible to try to charge a community space $15,000 for parking despite it turning out that such a charge is actually kind of, well, illegal and still claim to be acting ‘accountably’. The power over resources has remained within Council. No real control has been given to anyone else, which is more or less how ‘accountability’ seems to work.

(3) The penchant to allow wider community need to collapse in the face of vocal minorities. 

This one is harder to understand but seems to have it’s origins in the idea that everyone should have their own little patch of land and that it’s a god given right not to have their life on that patch of land impeded on by anyone else. Which sort of makes sense, until you see it resulting in someone moving behind a live music venue, complaining about the noise and getting a focal point of their local community shut down. The old urban myth here is that the Seven Stars over on Angus Street stopped hosting bands because of a single noise complaint. I’d never really believed that, until I watched this:

This was brought to my attention by Jane Howard of the No Plain Jane blog.

 

Apparently it IS possible for a single person to cripple a focal point for the community with a few well timed noise complaints. This didn’t used to be possible because communities were too small, too cohesive, geographically fixed and if you decided to do something like shut down the local pub because it kept you up past 11PM, all the people who used that pub would probably be your neighbours and they’d, quite literally, beat the shit out of you.

That’s not an exaggeration. Reading back through histories of local government regulation, there are examples of constables and Justices of the Peace refusing to enforce certain ordinances because they feared the backlash of their neighbours. There’s examples of people who ‘dobbed’ on their neighbours for doing things like using their house as pub being tarred, feathered and driven through the streets of London.

Not that I’m suggesting we return to mob rule, but it would be interesting to see how things changed if the decision by an individual and a couple of building compliance officers had to be openly and publicly stated in front of the communities they were impacting upon, and their job security or right to continue living in that area hinged on the capacity to negotiate a compromise – preferably by a Restorative Justice methodology rather than mob rule. As it is, the regulatory system seems to preference individual rights over the collective. Thus, the accountability is to the system (which says a noise complaint breeches planning ordinances) rather than a community. Again, I’m not implying that’s all bad and we should resort to the mob mentality of 17th century London, but it is interesting that a common feature that keeps coming up is the capacity for outcomes benefiting lots of people to collapse through a system which places the greater volume of weight on individual complaints.

Again, these are just initial thoughts. Your response or ideas are, as always, appreciated.

A Very Special Christmas Blog Post: The Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011

In the course of the last year I’ve encountered a great many people, wandered around a number of empty buildings and received a lot of advice. For the most part, these things have all been immensely enjoyable. I have met and worked with some of the finest human beings in the state, for which I am eternally grateful.

But, as I’m reliably informed, people don’t read this blog to hear me wax lyrical about the beauty in the world. Apparently most of you read it because I have a great deal of bile at the immense volume of inept policy, poor decision making, brainless strategies, petty careerism and total disregard for social justice currently on display in my home town of Adelaide.

And because I know a lot of you share my frustration, I want to share a special Christmas gift in the form of a special award. It’s the Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve been given in 2011.

There’s been a lot of steep competition in this field. Keep in mind I work with people who think it’s possible for the side of a car park to host a ‘jazz bar’, it was once suggested to me that I arrange for an opera to take place in a public park and I routinely encounter people with job titles related to economic development who don’t know what globalisation is.

But there were two real contenders for the title. And so I present:

Runner Up: Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“Don’t worry about the Youth Exodus! They’ll all move back when they want to have kids!”

This wins because of its utter disregard for the decline in the mortgage/stable career based social contract laid down through New Deal politics in the face of Globalisation and Economic Rationalism, it’s successful bypass of the cultural factors behind the youth exodus and, most of all, that it’s one of those things you can keep saying without ever seeing a result.

If you really want to argue the point and keep falling back on this truism, then I’m going to suggest you either read Mike Rann’s introduction to the Thirty Year Plan for Greater Adelaide and the corresponding sections which outline the need to attract and retain more skilled labour of ‘working age’. Or, if you want it straight from the Mouth of Youth, Jane Howard’s wonderful diatribe on the topic at No Plain Jane.

Regardless, defeating that very noble runner-up there’s one piece of advice I get routinely that reveals a depth of crippling stupidity behind an otherwise meek exterior. And, thus, the winner of is…

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Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“You should run a series of for-profit bars and entertainment venues to fund Renew Adelaide! Get a liquor license and you can make heaps of money!”

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Let’s rephrase this so it reads like I hear it:

Renew Adelaide is a project designed to counteract the degree to which it has become economically unviable to run cultural enterprises in Adelaide. Renew Adelaide should fund itself by running a cultural enterprise.

Genius!

So all I need is a liquor license and I can make a live music or arts venue into a cash cow!?! Why didn’t I think of that!?! I could have kept running Format and become a millionaire!!

Let me show a picture which further proves why this is the award winner for Dumbest Piece of Advice I’ve Received in 2011.

This is the Producers Hotel. It was a major, major live music venue for decades, right up until the mid-2000s when, thanks to some particularly skilled planning decisions, housing was built behind it.

It is now vacant.

The Producers is Class 9B compliant and has an existing liquor license. There isn’t a specific regulatory issue why it can’t be used. Unfortunately, because of the close proximity to housing, the beer garden, which used to house local bands and did so for decades, can no longer do so. This limits the venue’s capacity to attract an audience and, liquor license or not, the place isn’t viable.

There are most likely further issues regarding the lease price. The comment I’ve heard on this place is to make it financially viable it’d need to be turned into a pokies bar. By building it’s economic base around gambling addiction and binge drinking, rather than cultural activity, you could simultaneously circumvent the need to deal with the noise restrictions posed by the housing and still make money off of it. But if you wanted to make a living out of it without pokies, you’d need to host cultural activity (particularly live music) three or four times a week.

Personally I don’t like the idea of funding Renew Adelaide by taking advantage of people’s gambling addiction. But that’s the only way you could make this venue pay.

Given this venue, along with the Tivoli, used to provide a major cultural venue for decades, it’s inability to do so now pretty clearly indicates that the market conditions for culturally focused venues is at a low point.

Let’s consider this further. I’ve got a diligent volunteer laboriously plotting back through live music guides from about 1997 through to 2006, which is the time period in which the majority of live music venues seem to have suffered.

This survey is fuelled partly because I played in live bands for years and I think they have a colossal and incredibly positive impact on sense of community and cultural engagement, particularly for those in their teens and early twenties.

But on top of that, I’ve reading the Deloitte Access Economics report for Arts Victoria entitled “The Economic, Social and Cultural Contribution of Venue-Based Live Music In Victoria”, released in June of 2011. If we ignore the cultural and social benefits of live music, which has certainly proved a popular approach up until now, and focus purely on the economic element, the report notes:

…it is estimated that live music in venues generated an additional $501 million in gross state product (GSP) to the Victorian economy in 2009/10, and increased full-time equivalent (FTE) employment by approximately 17,200 persons. The direct economic contribution component was $301 million in GSP and approximately 14,900 FTE positions.

Applying the average expenditure per patron attendance to the estimated increase in direct expenditure suggests there were approximately 5.4 million attendances at live performances in Victorian venues in 2009/10. This compares with approximately 4.3 million attendances to Australian Football League matches in Victoria in the home and away seasons, and 4.7 million ticketed attendances to other live performances in Victoria in 2009 (ii).

What does this mean exactly? It means the 3000 live music performances Deloittes identified as happening in Victoria per week (or 156,000 per year) are worth about $3211.53 in gross state product each week, attracting a total weekly crowd of about 103,800, or about 170 per venue. Note that this doesn’t include major festivals. It’s purely the kind of music that happens at “hotels, bars, nightclubs, cafes and restaurants” (ii).

The report noted around 600 venues in Victoria hosting live music, with 370 of them in Melbourne itself – the greatest concentration of live music venues of any city in Australia. Someone check my maths on this, but I think that means the city of Melbourne hosts about 1,850 performances a week, bringing somewhere near $1,188,000 into the city weekly or 62,900 visitors to the Melbourne city area.

Essentially what we’re looking at here is a sector fragmented into a wide array of small venues that, on their own, are fairly low profit but collectively produce an economic impact and a greater volume of engagement than, as Deloittes notes, the AFL and the wider ticketed cultural sector.

Keep in mind that this is economic impact centred on the activity within the venues: job creation, food and beverage sales and tickets. It doesn’t include the outflow of economic worth that results in attracting higher portions of people into the area around the venue, for example things like coming into the city to see a band but going somewhere else for dinner first, or going to a movie after work to kill time before going to a show or the cost spent on taxis or whatever else.

The other interesting report here is from APRA, who did an Economic Contribution of the Venue-Based Live Music Industry in Australia.

Thanks to Helen at the Adelaide West End Association for pointing out these reports.

If you apply the APRA figures, it’s a bit higher, at $3680 per performance. The APRA survey is focused on venues with APRA membership, which are likely to be a bit larger. Their inclusion of NSW and QLD, which have lesser capital city music scenes but much larger regional touring circuits, makes a city by city analysis a little harder.

And now here’s the bad bit. In wading back through the old gig guides and following from an earlier blog post about the loss of local music venues in the East End, I’ve been trying to do a sort of tentative retrospective economic impact measurement to see how much the collapse of the local music scene has cost us.

Of the nine venues in the East quarter of the city I listed in my former blog post on this topic, six had closed or ceased to have live music. If we consider that, like their Melbourne counterparts, they used to average about 5 performances a week (which, from my reading of the old gig guides, is pretty fair), there’s maybe 30 performances per week less than there was in the late nineties and early 2000s. I’d argue that’s a reasonable figure given the Tivoli, Austral and Producers might have had two or three band bills on at least three nights a week.

Thirty performances at $3211.53 is $96,345. Thirty performances at APRA’s rate of $3680 is $110,400. That’s about $5 million in lost income, lost jobs, lost food and drink sales per year, and about 53,000 lost city visitors, averaging about $94 each a year. Deloittes has that figure at about $95, so I can’t be too far off.

Again, I’m not much good at maths and I don’t have the sociology background to do solid analysis of quantitative data. If that’s your skill set, I’d absolutely love your help going through this stuff.

The hypothesis I’d like to offer here is, if we accept the Deloittes and APRA reports as guidelines on the impact of a local music scene, the decline of our venue based music scene had a direct and negative impact on other cultural activity in the city and, from there, on the city’s early evening economy. This decline could realistically, in the city area, be measured in the millions.

As I’ve said before, once the music venues shut down, the cinemas all shut down. After the cinemas shut down, Hindley Street entered into its real decline. This makes sense as it’s the area that had traditionally hosted the bulk of the early evening economy. And, notably, the youth exodus cemented itself.

If we extend the measurement of economic impact to a more ambiguous attempt to measure cultural factors in the decision making process regarding where people spend their money, things get a bit more complicated. In between 1998 and 2005, people’s cultural consumption habits changed massively, into the ‘Long Tail’ pattern described in this blog in the past. Melbourne successfully captured this by using the Postcode 3000 reforms to retain a high degree of diversity and grow its ‘Laneways’ culture – characterised by a lot of small, owner operated businesses. Notably the healthiest sections of Adelaide (to my eye) follow the same pattern: Ebenezer Place, Leigh Street and, most of all, the Central Markets feature a high density of small, owner operated businesses: a classic spatial rendition of a long tail market.

Other streets do not. They feature single buildings with large foot prints and car parks or larger, more generic enterprise built around the old ‘Anchor tenant’ mentality. The degree of diversity in the city has been undermined by the removal of our ‘fine grain’. We’ve removed that fine grain at the same time as our cultural and spatial consumption habits have shifted increasingly to a long tail pattern. If you see my point.

Think about that for a second. Our city is like Warner Brothers and Sony Music in 2002. It’s still trying to pump out block buster albums when the market is moving to buying a much more diverse array of singles by smaller acts. Major labels lost millions until they adapted their business models to better handle the division between major and minor cultural products because most of the money was coming through the smaller releases, which attracted fewer individual sales but collectively amounted to a much, much larger slice of the pie. They had to adapt their strategy to suit a significant shift in cultural consumption behaviour. Adelaide has done the exact opposite. It does a terrible job of attracting diverse and small cultural enterprise, over relies and over invests on flagships and thus continues to lose millions because it has failed to keep its strategies in synch with existing cultural markets and audiences.

This isn’t a ‘laneways’ issue or a booze issue. Anyone can stand on Rosina Street and look at the matchbox cars stuck on the wall of the car park, and they can go down Solomon Street and look at the graffiti murals from a now long forgotten public art laneways reactivation. Anyone can go to Red Square and get plastered. The problem is that, in between doing those things, and (a) staying home with Facebook and Youtube (b) going to Marion or (c) moving to Melbourne, they’re not choosing Adelaide.

Which brings us back to The Producers. This venue used to thrive on an audience primarily made of up people in their twenties and thirties who came into the city to watch live music. This audience has now been dissolved. On top of that conditions have been put in place to make it impossible to rebuild it because the necessary volume of live music required to attract and retain a commercially viable volume of customers cannot be achieved through poor planning decisions and the location of housing right behind the venue.

Thus, my choice in Stupid Advice Award to those who’ve told me I should fund Renew Adelaide by running for-profit culture venues. It is virtually impossible to run a for profit venue focused on cultural activity, and, again, I have no interest in running a pokies bar. It is impossible to make cultural ventures pay because of a lack of audience and an inability to access resources such as suitable buildings, start-up capital or regulatory concessions to start said venues. Additionally, as Adelaide still hasn’t addressed the shift in market, and still keeps its economic development, its cultural policy and its planning policy in distinct silos, it lacks the capacity to address that market shift. Unfortunately, there are other cities far more aggressively addressing these problems. Hence we’re now in the ludicrous situation of having a regional council in Queensland offering larger sums of money to one of our independent cultural managers for a couple of weeks work than they’ve received for five years activity in Adelaide.

Hence my winning award for stupid advice. It’s not just that it’s impossible to fund Renew Adelaide by running cultural enterprises. It’s that Renew Adelaide exists because this city has resolutely gone about destroying not only its venues but also its audiences and the skilled labour required to attract them to our city.

The degree to which I get this advice from people in senior government administrative positions is alarming in that it indicates a degree to which senior decision makers have yet to grasp what seem, to many of us, rudimentary elements of contemporary economic development, cultural and planning policy. They seem either unwilling or unable to grasp these facts despite both the general community, interstate research and many of their own colleagues saying, in varying degrees, almost exactly what I’ve written above.

And with that, I wish you all a good festive season. And to celebrate, here’s a lo-fi classic from Adelaide ex-patriots Hit the Jackpot now based in the US. Enjoy!

Tuxedo Cat in 2012: With support from Le Cordon Bleu, Maras Group and Commercial and General

As of December 5^th, Renew Adelaide is extremely proud to announce that Tuxedo Cat are moving into 199 and 200 North Terrace. The use of this site, owned by Le Cordon Bleu, and under development by Maras Group and Commercial and General, is slated for a major redevelopment in the near future. We were approached to consider the potential for activation whilst that development is in preparation.

Obviously, the reactivation of a site this large is a job only for the very best of cultural managers and, based on having done our best to help/hinder them in their reactivation of Electra House, we knew the only real contender was Tuxedo Cat, who’ll be turning 199 and 200 North Terrace into a six theatre complex for the Adelaide Fringe. This is, with the exclusion of the Garden of Unearthly Delights, about to become the biggest venue in the 2012 Fringe. Along with Arcade Lane, who are currently taking permanent occupation of their site off Grenfell Street, and Shimmering West’s work in the West End, it heralds a pretty significant step forward in the growth of the Fringe, with the advent of Edinburgh style ‘super venues’ finally hitting Adelaide.

For Renew Adelaide it heralds something else. Firstly, it’s the start of our new relationship with ArtsSA, who are not only taking over from TACSI as our funding body but are working with us to see that something that comes out of this site which makes it easier for people to run creative spaces and culturally focused enterprise in Adelaide.

Secondly, it’s a chance to remind ourselves that the goal of Renew Adelaide isn’t just about putting people in buildings, it’s about seeing them succeed. This is an immense project and whilst the in-kind commitment from the owners and developers is getting well over the $75,000 mark, ultimately the expenses of setting up and running the venue rest on the bankcard of Cass and Bryan from Tuxedo Cat. What we need to look at here isn’t just how to get into the building, but how to make it possible for someone to curate the kind of activity that can, within the space of a month, attract 20,000 or more people into Adelaide and thereby kick start our early evening economy, counteract the lack of small performance and rehearsal space and provide an avenue for locally produced content to seep back into our city.

The building is the medium. It’s, to use a term borrowed from a council interstate, the ‘Cultural Managers’ that produce the activity that produces the audiences that create the much fabled ‘city vibrancy’.

For us to attract and retain skilled ‘cultural managers’, we need to recognise their projects cost money, even if their industry isn’t a high yield, profit driven field. Melbourne and Sydney’s matching grants, creative spaces programs (modelled, notably, on the Renews), and direct funding through councils like Cairns, indicate that investing in this area is seen as worthwhile for cities actively trying to develop a cultural economy. Adelaide competes on a national level and, during Fringe, on a global level for people who know how to go into an empty building and, within a short time frame, give thousands of people the chance to turn off the television and visit that site.

Right now, Renew Adelaide has the capacity to arrange access to a building. This reduces a significant hurdle, but it doesn’t magically create ‘city vibrancy’. For that to happen, we need to look at the pathways for turning ‘cultural managers’ into financially sustainable enterprise. Ultimately our goal over the next six months is to identify what’s working both here and elsewhere, what’s not working, and what we need to do to make ventures like Tuxedo Cat succeed.

For those of you interested in sneak previews of the site, get in touch. We’ve already arranged one initial site inspection but we’re keen to take our supporters along on the journey.

And for those of you with a particularly nerdy interest in this area, I’d also encourage you to look at the structure, operations and funding systems creating some of the comparable spaces interstate and overseas, such as Queen Street Studios and River Studios.

The reactivation of 199 and 200 North Terrace is made possible by Le Cordon Bleu, Commercial and General and Maras Group. Renew Adelaide is funded by, and works with, ArtsSA with the specific goal of identifying further pathways for those trying to set up creative spaces. The production, venue management and reactivation of this iconic building is being undertaken by Tuxedo Cat.