Podcasts about australian top

“There's no faster way to learn than to do. And the beauty of VR is that it allows you to learn through experience without the physical or emotional risk.” This is a special episode only available to our podcast subscribers, which we call The Mini Chief. These are short, sharp highlights from our fabulous CEO guests, where you get a 5 to 10 minute snapshot from their full episode. This Mini Chief episode features Angus Stevens, Co-Founder and CEO of Start Beyond. His full episode is titled Taking learning by experience to new frontiers, putting guardrails on innovation, and creating useful technology for tangible real-world problems. You can find the full audio and show notes here:

“There's no faster way to learn than to do. And the beauty of VR is that it allows you to learn through experience without the physical or emotional risk.” In this episode of The Inner Chief podcast, I speak to Angus Stevens, Co-Founder and CEO of Start Beyond on taking learning by experience to new frontiers, putting guardrails on innovation, and creating useful technology for tangible real-world problems.

Russell 'The Real Thing' Morris has arrived at Ramble City showcasing his evolution in music across multiple eras, touching on the origins of some of his highest-selling albums like 'Sharkmouth' and the minds behind his Day of the Dead album 'Jack Chrome and the Darkness Waltz'. Interview was originally recorded in 2021. Watch video of this episodeFollow the RC Music PlaylistListen to Russell MorrissListen to Bradley McCaw's musicFollow Brad everywhere @bradleymccawofficialBrought to by True Arts Podcast NetworkCreated, produced, hosted & engineered by Bradley McCaw.Original sound design by Matt Erskine at Crosspoint SolutionsOriginal Video designed by Adam Shaw at Axis Productions Theme composed by James RyanAbout Russell Morris:Russell Morris is an Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist who had five Australian Top 10 singles during the late 1960s and early 1970s. On 1 July 2008, the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) recognised Morris' status when he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.The Real Thing was added to the National Film and Sound Archives Sounds of Australia registry in 2013.

Henry talks with Louka Parry, the CEO + Founder of The Learning Future, an organisation that supports schools, systems and companies to thrive in tomorrow's world. An Australian Top 100 Innovator, he is a former teacher and became a school principal at only 27 years old, and awarded the Inspirational Public Secondary Teacher of the Year for South Australia. This conversation was broadcast on 97.7FM Casey Radio in November 2023. Produced by Rob Kelly.

AUSTRALIAN TOP 10 SINGLES CHART* – WEEK ENDING 27/09/1987 Songs Played; 10 TRUE FAITH New Order 1987 9 WHEN YOU WALK IN THE ROOM Paul Carrack 1987 8 STAR TREKKIN'... LEARN MORE The post TTBA Replay 29SEP2023 Pt. 3 appeared first on Turn the Beat Around.

Whether you love it, hate it, don't get it or your grandma's trending on it, TikTok is a cultural phenomenon. But how did it become so popular and should we be worried by its reach?Join our host Sarah Taillier as she chats with Crystal Abidin, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University and Founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network. They explore why TikTok is so popular, how its algorithms might work and its influence on society, now and into the future. Why is TikTok so popular? [00:52]Activism is trending on TikTok [02:59]The ‘algorithmic imaginary' [06:12]‘Social media is not an arbiter of morality' [10:43]What comes after TikTok? [12:42]First Nations on TikTok [15:48]TikTok Research Cultures Network [19:01]Read the book: TikTok and Youth Cultures [23:20]Finding content on TikTok [28:15]Learn moreOn internet culture and social mediaTikTok Cultures Research NetworkConnect with our guestsProfessor Crystal AbidinProfessor of Internet Studies, Curtin UniversityProfessor Crystal Abidin is a social media researcher, digital anthropologist and Founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network, which shares research into TikTok cultures with scholars based in the Asia-Pacific. Crystal's notable awards include the WA Tall Young Poppy Science Award (2022), The Australian Top 40 Early Career Researchers (2021) and ABC Top 5 Humanities Fellow (2020).Crystal has published multiple books and more than 80 articles and chapters on various aspects on internet celebrity and vernacular internet cultures. Her most recent book, TikTok and Youth Cultures, is due to be published later this year. Staff profileTwitter profileWebsiteJoin Curtin UniversityThis podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.Work with usStudy a research degreeStart postgraduate educationGot any questions, or suggestions for future topics?Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.auSocial mediaTwitterFacebookInstagramYouTubeLinkedInTranscriptRead the transcript.TeamHost: Sarah TaillierContent creator: Zoe Taylor and Daniel Jauk Recordist: Anita ShoreProducer: Emilia JolakoskaExecutive Producers: Anita Shore and Jarrad LongFirst Nations AcknowledgementCurtin University acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which Curtin Perth is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation, and on Curtin Kalgoorlie, the Wongutha people of the North-Eastern Goldfields; and the First Nations peoples on all Curtin locations.MusicOKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library.Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.

Listen to the latest bitesize top news from Australia in Nepali. - गोप्य र संवेदशील विवरणहरू समावेश भएको भन्दै डेलोइटद्वारा तयार पारिएको एक रिपोर्ट मेडिब्याङ्कले सार्वजनिक नगर्ने लगायत आजका प्रमुख अस्ट्रेलियाली समाचार सुन्नुहोस्

Listen to the latest bitesize top news from Australia in Nepali. - सन् २०२३ को इद-अल-फित्रको स्वागतार्थ पश्चिमी सिड्नी स्थित लकेम्बाका सडकहरूमा दसौँ हजार मानिस उपस्थित लगायत आजका खास-खास अस्ट्रेलियाली समाचार सुन्नुहोस्

Manuela: This is The Download from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I'm Manuela Bedoya. Shreya: And I'm Shreya Sharma.This week: The App Tracking Transparency Recession, Streamers struggle with frequency capping, Bumper calculates listen time, and IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse Adspend.Manuela: The Download is brought to you by Magellan AI. Track the trends in spend, ad load, podcasts on YouTube, and more with Magellan AI's advertising benchmark report for Q4, available now. Link in the description or at Magellan dot AIShreya: Let's get started. The App Tracking Transparency recession Manuela: While not hot off the presses, an early January article from Eric Benjamin Seufert discussing the effects of Apple's App Tracking Transparency has come across The Download's desk. As with most things in advertising, there's nuance in the numbers.Quick refresher for those who haven't seen the letters ATT dozens of times: App Tracking Transparency was a privacy policy introduced to iOS in 2021 that turns most forms of mobile data tracking into an opt-in service. As a result, a significant portion of iOS users have digitally disappeared for advertisers. An upset to the status quo, for sure, but the overall numbers provided by Seufert show the digital advertising market is not in a cyclical downturn. That said, social media platforms and other industries most likely to be affected by ATT have experienced a significant downturn due to a combination of both ATT-influenced changes and changing consumer preferences.Which is to say, not macroeconomic factors. A market-wide downturn, as well as more stress on those companies most affected by ATT, would primarily come from an actual 2023 recession. Overall, digital advertising has been working as intended. Consumers are consuming. Seufert points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph tracking US employment in December of 2022. According to these, unemployment is the lowest it has been since August 1969. From Seufert's piece:“But one might assume that the economy has utterly imploded from reading the Q3 earnings call transcripts of various social media platforms. Alphabet, Meta, and Snap, in particular, cited macroeconomic weakness, headwinds, uncertainty, challenges, etc. in their Q3 earnings calls.”In the weeks since Seufert's article, the overall numbers are trending to agree. The Download has recently mentioned podcast ad spend has remained up while others decline, but the same holds true for other areas. Last week a piece by Ethan Cramer-Flood for Insider Intelligence reports mobile app install ad spending increased 24.8% in 2022, on track to a market growth of 12% this year. Meanwhile, still on Insider Intelligence, Daniel Konstantinovic reports that while market concerns aren't gone, ad-cost inflation has slowed. 84% of ad executives told Insider Intelligence they're not lowering budgets for 2023. From Konstantinovic:“But now, the industry is adjusting to a new normal. With inflation steadily falling and the cost per ad decreasing, some of the advertising spending that was staunched in the second half of last year may return.”The future may be uncertain, but for the wider advertising economy, podcasting included, things tend to be stable or trending upward. And, it bears repeating, podcasting has never benefited from mobile device IDs. From this industry's perspective, at least, ATT has had little to no impact. It feels fitting to end with this quote from Seufert's article:“While one might materialize, the belief that an advertising recession is currently and comprehensively depressing advertising spend is difficult to support with analytical rigor.”Streaming advertisers continue to struggle with frequency caps. Shreya: If you've used a video streaming service with advertisements, you're likely intimately aware of the industry's issue with frequency caps. Last week's Future of TV Briefing from Digiday's Tim Peterson zooms in on this particular issue with the section Capping Out. Streaming advertisers are in a bind. Some viewers are getting underexposed to ads, while others are overexposed. Problems that will only exacerbate as digital video streaming continues on its overtake of traditional television. According to a recent eMarketer graph, US adults only averaged five minutes less digital video time than television last year, and are projected to overtake TV's declining numbers for the first time this year. Of course, addressing the frequency issues isn't as easy as it sounds. A myriad of reasons exist, from lack of ability to track exposures across multiple streaming platforms, to multiple DSPs buying from the same pool. Even when the solution exists, sometimes it comes at a price. Peterson reports some streamers are charging more in exchange for placing stricter frequency caps. An anonymous ad agency executive told Digiday:“Some will endeavor to charge more for more restrictive frequency caps, which could be prohibitive or incentivize lower spend from partners. But more and more, they're willing to waive those fees. And hopefully that will be the case going forward as I think these lower frequency caps are the expectation, not the exception anymore.”This particular piece made the cut this week for two reasons.It's a good overview of the situation as it currently stands for streamers. It serves as a reminder that issues we experience in the business of podcasting are not always unique to podcasting, nor is the onus on our industry to magically fix the problem ourselves. Something to keep in mind before the next headline about ‘podcasting's frequency capping problem' rolls around. Bumper Calculates Listen TimeManuela: Back in January, Bumper's Jonas Woost posted a proposal for the podcasting industry to move past the download and evolve similarly to how YouTube has evolved past the view. While not abandoned by any means, video view counts have taken a back seat to watch time metrics in recent years. Bumper's future aims for podcasters to have their own metric with listen time. This week Dan Misener has followed up Jonas' post by calculating listen time on an episode of his podcast Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. From the article:: “Inconveniently, many podcast apps simply do not report Listen Time, or equivalent metrics. At Bumper, we try not to let perfect be the enemy of good. So to calculate Listen Time for podcast episodes, we do the best we can with what we have, then use reasonable estimates for the rest.” While not a herculean effort, Misener's step-by-step guide on how to pull your own numbers from Apple and Spotify require some arithmetic and a teeny bit of opening your browser's code to find a specific JSON file. For anyone finding themselves interested for business reasons, or perhaps for a geeky weekend math project, the article also provides a Google Sheets template to start from.In addition to the guide for Apple and Spotify, Misener tosses in a few extra-credit opportunities into the assignment with suggestions for also implementing YouTube watch time, Google Podcasts ‘minutes played', and ‘hours listened' data from applicable embedded web players.As Misener says in his closing bullet points, the download isn't going anywhere. Bumper's goal is to aim for a future where downloads are not the only metric considered. Now to see if various platforms and apps share a similar outlook and make steps to provide Listen Time. We'll keep our ears open. IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse AdspendShreya: This month the IPG Mediabrands Equity Upfront event in New York brought together around thirty publishers to focus on media with owners of diverse backgrounds. Ryan Barwick of Marketing Brew was in attendance to cover the event. From his article:“Nearly two years after many in the advertising industry revealed plans to invest more money in Black-owned media, those publishers said they are still educating media buyers and advertisers about what they have to offer.” According to Magna US president Dani Benowitz, IPG Mediabrands increased its ad spend in Black-owned media 61% between 2021 and 2022, as well as a 7% increase in Hispanic-owned media and 32% in AAPI-owned media.Still, money isn't flowing in as fast as old promises implied. According to Magna's estimates from Nielsen data, only 2% of total ad spend goes to Black-owned media, despite 14% of the US population being Black.This week Marketing Brew's Katie Hicks writes on similar pay inequity in influencer marketing: “In December 2021, influencer education platform The Influencer League and PR agency MSL US released a study that found that Black creators, on average, made 35% less than white creators. While the issue has gotten more attention in the last year, Brittany Bright, founder of The Influencer League, told us that efforts to address it are still in their early stages.”Cavel Khan, CCO of Group Black, a collective of publishers and creators focused on bringing more ad dollars to Black-owned media, ends Barwick's piece explaining events like IPG's Equity Upfront put a stop to excuses for industries not prioritizing minority-owned media companies. From Khan: “Everyone who's going to present to you is creating value…You're going to have an overwhelming amount of evidence when you sit here for three days. You have to act.”Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:If you work for a podcast network, we've got a webinar signup link you'll want to check out. Clear your calendar for Wednesday, March 1st, when Bryan Barletta takes to the virtual stage with Frequency CEO Pete Jimison to talk about Frequency's next generation of podcast workflow tools. Catch a live demo and hear directly from Pete about automating vetting processes that can help you gain speed, efficiencies, and scale your network. Visit the link in our show notes to register. Please note, registration requests will only be accepted for those that work at podcast networks.ARN's iHeart and Magellan AI have released the Australian Top 15 Podcast Advertisers for Q4 2022. From Amazon to Aldi, the list covers a wide spectrum of businesses. The Digiday Media Awards deadline for submissions is approaching, with the regular deadline being March 9th and the last-chance deadline on April 20th. This year will be the first edition of the awards to include Top Podcast.IAB Tech Lab's First Data Clean Room Standard is Open for Public Comment by Allison Schiff. A solid explanation of the standard and what impacts it could have. Manuela: And that was The Download, brought to you by Sounds Profitable! Today's episode was built using Spooler and hosted on ART19. Find out more at Spooler.fm and Art19.comI know we went through today's stories fast, so be sure to check out the links to every article mentioned, right in your podcast listening app, or on SoundsProfitable.com. And thank you for sticking with us as we bring you the top stories you might have missed from the past week. I'm Manuela Bedoya.Shreya : And I'm Shreya Sharma. Our producers are Bryan Barletta, Gavin Gaddis, and Tom Webster. Our editors are Reece Carman and Ron Tendick. Special thanks to Art19 for hosting The Download. And thanks to you for joining us.

Manuela: This is The Download from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I'm Manuela Bedoya. Shreya: And I'm Shreya Sharma.This week: The App Tracking Transparency Recession, Streamers struggle with frequency capping, Bumper calculates listen time, and IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse Adspend.Manuela: The Download is brought to you by Magellan AI. Track the trends in spend, ad load, podcasts on YouTube, and more with Magellan AI's advertising benchmark report for Q4, available now. Link in the description or at Magellan dot AIShreya: Let's get started. The App Tracking Transparency recession Manuela: While not hot off the presses, an early January article from Eric Benjamin Seufert discussing the effects of Apple's App Tracking Transparency has come across The Download's desk. As with most things in advertising, there's nuance in the numbers.Quick refresher for those who haven't seen the letters ATT dozens of times: App Tracking Transparency was a privacy policy introduced to iOS in 2021 that turns most forms of mobile data tracking into an opt-in service. As a result, a significant portion of iOS users have digitally disappeared for advertisers. An upset to the status quo, for sure, but the overall numbers provided by Seufert show the digital advertising market is not in a cyclical downturn. That said, social media platforms and other industries most likely to be affected by ATT have experienced a significant downturn due to a combination of both ATT-influenced changes and changing consumer preferences.Which is to say, not macroeconomic factors. A market-wide downturn, as well as more stress on those companies most affected by ATT, would primarily come from an actual 2023 recession. Overall, digital advertising has been working as intended. Consumers are consuming. Seufert points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph tracking US employment in December of 2022. According to these, unemployment is the lowest it has been since August 1969. From Seufert's piece:“But one might assume that the economy has utterly imploded from reading the Q3 earnings call transcripts of various social media platforms. Alphabet, Meta, and Snap, in particular, cited macroeconomic weakness, headwinds, uncertainty, challenges, etc. in their Q3 earnings calls.”In the weeks since Seufert's article, the overall numbers are trending to agree. The Download has recently mentioned podcast ad spend has remained up while others decline, but the same holds true for other areas. Last week a piece by Ethan Cramer-Flood for Insider Intelligence reports mobile app install ad spending increased 24.8% in 2022, on track to a market growth of 12% this year. Meanwhile, still on Insider Intelligence, Daniel Konstantinovic reports that while market concerns aren't gone, ad-cost inflation has slowed. 84% of ad executives told Insider Intelligence they're not lowering budgets for 2023. From Konstantinovic:“But now, the industry is adjusting to a new normal. With inflation steadily falling and the cost per ad decreasing, some of the advertising spending that was staunched in the second half of last year may return.”The future may be uncertain, but for the wider advertising economy, podcasting included, things tend to be stable or trending upward. And, it bears repeating, podcasting has never benefited from mobile device IDs. From this industry's perspective, at least, ATT has had little to no impact. It feels fitting to end with this quote from Seufert's article:“While one might materialize, the belief that an advertising recession is currently and comprehensively depressing advertising spend is difficult to support with analytical rigor.”Streaming advertisers continue to struggle with frequency caps. Shreya: If you've used a video streaming service with advertisements, you're likely intimately aware of the industry's issue with frequency caps. Last week's Future of TV Briefing from Digiday's Tim Peterson zooms in on this particular issue with the section Capping Out. Streaming advertisers are in a bind. Some viewers are getting underexposed to ads, while others are overexposed. Problems that will only exacerbate as digital video streaming continues on its overtake of traditional television. According to a recent eMarketer graph, US adults only averaged five minutes less digital video time than television last year, and are projected to overtake TV's declining numbers for the first time this year. Of course, addressing the frequency issues isn't as easy as it sounds. A myriad of reasons exist, from lack of ability to track exposures across multiple streaming platforms, to multiple DSPs buying from the same pool. Even when the solution exists, sometimes it comes at a price. Peterson reports some streamers are charging more in exchange for placing stricter frequency caps. An anonymous ad agency executive told Digiday:“Some will endeavor to charge more for more restrictive frequency caps, which could be prohibitive or incentivize lower spend from partners. But more and more, they're willing to waive those fees. And hopefully that will be the case going forward as I think these lower frequency caps are the expectation, not the exception anymore.”This particular piece made the cut this week for two reasons.It's a good overview of the situation as it currently stands for streamers. It serves as a reminder that issues we experience in the business of podcasting are not always unique to podcasting, nor is the onus on our industry to magically fix the problem ourselves. Something to keep in mind before the next headline about ‘podcasting's frequency capping problem' rolls around. Bumper Calculates Listen TimeManuela: Back in January, Bumper's Jonas Woost posted a proposal for the podcasting industry to move past the download and evolve similarly to how YouTube has evolved past the view. While not abandoned by any means, video view counts have taken a back seat to watch time metrics in recent years. Bumper's future aims for podcasters to have their own metric with listen time. This week Dan Misener has followed up Jonas' post by calculating listen time on an episode of his podcast Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. From the article:: “Inconveniently, many podcast apps simply do not report Listen Time, or equivalent metrics. At Bumper, we try not to let perfect be the enemy of good. So to calculate Listen Time for podcast episodes, we do the best we can with what we have, then use reasonable estimates for the rest.” While not a herculean effort, Misener's step-by-step guide on how to pull your own numbers from Apple and Spotify require some arithmetic and a teeny bit of opening your browser's code to find a specific JSON file. For anyone finding themselves interested for business reasons, or perhaps for a geeky weekend math project, the article also provides a Google Sheets template to start from.In addition to the guide for Apple and Spotify, Misener tosses in a few extra-credit opportunities into the assignment with suggestions for also implementing YouTube watch time, Google Podcasts ‘minutes played', and ‘hours listened' data from applicable embedded web players.As Misener says in his closing bullet points, the download isn't going anywhere. Bumper's goal is to aim for a future where downloads are not the only metric considered. Now to see if various platforms and apps share a similar outlook and make steps to provide Listen Time. We'll keep our ears open. IPG Equity Upfront Spotlights Lack of Diverse AdspendShreya: This month the IPG Mediabrands Equity Upfront event in New York brought together around thirty publishers to focus on media with owners of diverse backgrounds. Ryan Barwick of Marketing Brew was in attendance to cover the event. From his article:“Nearly two years after many in the advertising industry revealed plans to invest more money in Black-owned media, those publishers said they are still educating media buyers and advertisers about what they have to offer.” According to Magna US president Dani Benowitz, IPG Mediabrands increased its ad spend in Black-owned media 61% between 2021 and 2022, as well as a 7% increase in Hispanic-owned media and 32% in AAPI-owned media.Still, money isn't flowing in as fast as old promises implied. According to Magna's estimates from Nielsen data, only 2% of total ad spend goes to Black-owned media, despite 14% of the US population being Black.This week Marketing Brew's Katie Hicks writes on similar pay inequity in influencer marketing: “In December 2021, influencer education platform The Influencer League and PR agency MSL US released a study that found that Black creators, on average, made 35% less than white creators. While the issue has gotten more attention in the last year, Brittany Bright, founder of The Influencer League, told us that efforts to address it are still in their early stages.”Cavel Khan, CCO of Group Black, a collective of publishers and creators focused on bringing more ad dollars to Black-owned media, ends Barwick's piece explaining events like IPG's Equity Upfront put a stop to excuses for industries not prioritizing minority-owned media companies. From Khan: “Everyone who's going to present to you is creating value…You're going to have an overwhelming amount of evidence when you sit here for three days. You have to act.”Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:If you work for a podcast network, we've got a webinar signup link you'll want to check out. Clear your calendar for Wednesday, March 1st, when Bryan Barletta takes to the virtual stage with Frequency CEO Pete Jimison to talk about Frequency's next generation of podcast workflow tools. Catch a live demo and hear directly from Pete about automating vetting processes that can help you gain speed, efficiencies, and scale your network. Visit the link in our show notes to register. Please note, registration requests will only be accepted for those that work at podcast networks.ARN's iHeart and Magellan AI have released the Australian Top 15 Podcast Advertisers for Q4 2022. From Amazon to Aldi, the list covers a wide spectrum of businesses. The Digiday Media Awards deadline for submissions is approaching, with the regular deadline being March 9th and the last-chance deadline on April 20th. This year will be the first edition of the awards to include Top Podcast.IAB Tech Lab's First Data Clean Room Standard is Open for Public Comment by Allison Schiff. A solid explanation of the standard and what impacts it could have. Manuela: And that was The Download, brought to you by Sounds Profitable! Today's episode was built using Spooler and hosted on ART19. Find out more at Spooler.fm and Art19.comI know we went through today's stories fast, so be sure to check out the links to every article mentioned, right in your podcast listening app, or on SoundsProfitable.com. And thank you for sticking with us as we bring you the top stories you might have missed from the past week. I'm Manuela Bedoya.Shreya : And I'm Shreya Sharma. Our producers are Bryan Barletta, Gavin Gaddis, and Tom Webster. Our editors are Reece Carman and Ron Tendick. Special thanks to Art19 for hosting The Download. And thanks to you for joining us.

It's World Pride 2023 and the queer globe is converging on Sydney Australia to celebrate diversity, inclusion, community and fabulousness! To mark this momentous event the STAGES podcast is saluting the cast of captivating drag divas and personalities who have been featured on the podcast during the past 5 seasons. They are artists who have appeared on national and global stages; thrilling audiences, making a difference, healing community and expressing unique and wondrous talents. We spotlight these episodes so you can savour a second listen - or so you can sample the delights of these entertainers for the very first time. A Diva a day for each day of World Pride! One of Australia's most loved and enduring comedy characters, Bob Downe, is the creation of journalist, comedian, actor and broadcaster Mark Trevorrow. Born in Melbourne, Mark started his working life at 17 as a copyboy with The Sun News-Pictorial, before co-founding cabaret comedy group The Globos, who released two Australian Top 20 hit singles, Tintarella di Luna (1982) and The Beat Goes On (1983). He created Bob Downe in1984 and has toured the world as the Prince of Polyester ever since. Bob's stage shows have played to acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide Cabaret Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with decades of touring across Australia and the UK including P&O Comedy Cruises and performing for the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance. Bob's TV appearances range from Countdown to The Project, from the Mike Walsh Show to Studio 10, and hosting multiple Sydney Mardi Gras broadcasts. As Mark he has been heard regularly on ABC local radio and presented The Way We Were, a ratings winner on ABC TV in 2004. He was also featured regularly on Kath & Kim as ‘Darryl' the menswear salesman. Bob's comedy/chat series, The Bob Downe Show (Foxtel/ TV1), went to air in December 2000. Bob Downe's national theatre tours, Whiter! Brighter!, Cold August Night and iBob have been sellouts everywhere, including the Sydney Opera House and the State Theatre. Mark Trevorrow and Rupert Noffs perform their show, ‘Old Friends' at Claire's Kitchen at Le Salon on Monday February 20th and Tuesday February 21st. Bookings at wwwclaireskitchen.com.au The STAGES podcast is available from Apple podcasts, Spotify and from where you find your favourite podcasts. Tune in daily for a history of drag in Sydney. Tell your friends, share the podcast, relish the stories and embrace your own sense of Pride.

There is no checklist for success when it comes to leadership. What works for one person may not work for another, and what might be successful in one organisation may not be successful in another. Because every situation is unique, leadership is all about making quick decisions based on the information you have and adapting as needed. It's not about following a script – it's about being creative, innovative, and resourceful. In this episode of Frontline to Boardroom, Martin chats with Chris Huet, who has taken his hard-won leadership experience into business development, consulting and leadership communications.

In this week's episode, Jade and Lauren will be discussing the following: - What have our hosts been up to? - Our Sponsor of the Month! - Some great recommendations from our team that you MUST check out -  Ash Barty has retired -  Next lot of BAS & FBT lodgements -  The Australian Top 10 Richest People List - Lauren drops our next Sustainability Tip -  The Table of Knowledge - The BIG Budget Blowout - 2022-23 Federal Budget Explained Check out  our sponsor Jigsaw Tax and Advisory here - www.jigsawtaxandadvisory.com.auLinks  (if links are not clickable please visit moneyhoneymedia.com.au ) - The Tax Offset ExplainedThe Big Budget BlowoutAustralian Apprenticeships IncentivesThe Budget  Follow, share and support our podcast so we can get in the ears and help as many small family businesses around!  Until next week,  Jo & Jade - Co-Hosts Joel - Producer Lauren - Marketing/Sustainability Guru and this week's Guest Co-Host 

On this episode of the Torque n Power Podcast Nick Dicembre discusses Formula 1 testing, round 2 of the Australian Top Fuel Championship in Mildura, NHRA Gatornationals, NASCAR from Phoenix Raceway, Supercars from SMP and MotoGP from Qatar.

One of Australia's most loved and enduring comedy characters, Bob Downe is the creation of journalist, comedian, actor and broadcaster Mark Trevorrow.Born in Melbourne, Mark started his working life at 17 as a copyboy with The Sun News-Pictorial, before co-founding cabaret comedy group The Globos, who released two Australian Top 20 hit singles, Tintarella di Luna (1982) and The Beat Goes On (1983).He created Bob Downe in 1984 and has toured the world as the Prince of Polyester ever since, becoming one of Australia's most loved and enduring comedy characters.Bob's stage shows have played to acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide Cabaret Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with decades of touring across Australia and the UK including P&O Comedy Cruises and performing for the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.Bob's TV appearances range from Countdown to The Project, from the Mike Walsh Show to Studio 10, and hosting multiple Sydney Mardi Gras broadcasts. As Mark he has been heard regularly on ABC local radio and presented The Way We Were, a ratings winner on ABC TV in 2004. He was also featured regularly on Kath & Kim as ‘Darryl' the menswear salesman.Bob's comedy/chat series, The Bob Downe Show (Foxtel/ TV1), went to air in December 2000. Bob Downe's national theatre tours, Whiter! Brighter!, Cold August Night and iBob have been sellouts everywhere, including the Sydney Opera House and the State Theatre. Bob is presently touring Viva Bob Vegas. Catch it if you can. It's a joyous celebration of camp, crooners, lounge and laughter. Bob always delivers!So does Mark, in this fervent and fabulous chin-wag for STAGES.The STAGES podcast is available from Apple podcasts, Spotify and Whooshkaa. Also where you find your favourite podcasts. www.stagespodcast.com.au

From COVID-19, to political tensions impacting trading partners, to boats stuck sideways in major shipping channels, 2021 has been a difficult year for those in logistics and freight trades. In this episode, we chat with Jackson Meyer, the Managing Director at Verus and Fickle. A Forbes 30 under 30 Alumni, and an Australian Top 100 Young Entrepreneur winner (just to name a few achievements), Jackson highlights some of the challenges facing the shipping and logistics industry due to changing trends, as well as the ongoing pandemic. In this episode you'll learn about: Social and economic impacts of lockdowns New trends in logistics and shipping to watch out for Challenges of operating an international business within closed borders Resilience in uncertainty

In our weekly technology start-up podcast, analyst Elise Kennedy hosts Flavia Tata Nardini, Co-founder of Fleet Space.Fleet Space is a global leader in nanosatellites. The company is making it faster, simpler and cheaper to connect the world's devices through the placement of small satellites into space. Featured in The Australian Top 100 Innovators 2021, the company has grown from three employees at its launch in South Australia to now over 30 employees and is aiming for mass production of its nanosatellites by the end of the year. In this podcast, we discuss the company, industry, competitive landscape, and strategies for growth.

My guest this week is LEGENDARY AUSTRALIAN MUSICIAN Russell Morris the singer-songwriter and guitarist who had five Australian Top 10 singles during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2008, the Australian Recording Industry Association recognised Morris' status when he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. HIs life mission is 33 Counsellor. When I told him he is a perfectionist he begged to differ… listen in for if he is or not. www.russellmorris.com.au   Is it time to discover your SoulLife® Map? Connect with me on my website https://tonireillyinstitute.com/ Find out your Life Mission here - http://soullifemap.com Instagram https://www.instagram.com/soullifemap/ Facebook join my group Life Map Podcast https://www.facebook.com/groups/soullifemap Special thanks to The Polish Ambassador feat. Zion I & Nitty Scott for their fab music connect with them https://thepolishambassador.bandcamp.com/track/mystic-matterz See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our listeners Top 5 Guns 'n' Roses songs, "Mistaken Lyrics" classics from Toto and The Go-Gos, a Forgotten Gem from Rod Stewart and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1995.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Gloria Estefan songs, "Singers with one name" classics from Bjork and Des'ree, a Forgotten Gem from Real Life (with a special message from band member, David Sterry) and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1986.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Duran Duran songs, "Driving Song" classics from Regurgitator and Haddaway, a Forgotten Gem from Split Enz and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1981.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Kim Wilde songs, "songs reminding of us our Dad" classics from Meatloaf and M People, a Forgotten Gem from Jon Secada and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1993.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Elton John songs, "Eurovision" classics from Johnny Logan and Dana International, a Forgotten Gem from Amy Grant and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1980.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Bangles songs, "one word" classics from Oasis and Annie Lennox, a Forgotten Gem from Soul II Soul and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1989.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

In episode 4 of Writers and Fighters I recap the UFC on ABC event and interview Athena Martinez, an amateur MMA fighter training with Australian Top Team in Sydney. We talk about her start in the fight game and her mindset as a fighter. She shares a story about an injury sustained during a cryotherapy session which derailed a scheduled bout. We end with a chat about her reading and writing habits and how that translates into the fighter mentality.  You can find Athena on Instagram: @athena_martinezz

Our listeners Top 5 Belinda Carlisle songs, Girl Group Classics from Wilson Phillips and En Vogue, a one hit wonder from Meredith Brooks and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1981.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 David Bowie songs, Kiwi Classics from Dave Dobbyn and Margaret Urlich, a one hit wonder from Lou Bega and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1993.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! We're heading to Australia this week and we're going to check out Go-Set Magazine's National Top 40 from October 23, 1971. While we're at it, we might box some kangaroos, check to see if the toilets are running backwards, and do the eagle rock... Plus Cat Stevens, The Who, CCR, Helen Reddy, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, The Partridge Family, and more!

Our listeners Top 5 Celine Dion songs, Soundtrack Classics from Limahl and the Pointer Sisters, a one hit wonder from Nu Shooz and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1998.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

The Chrises get the last dance with the man who can't stop moving, James Lott Jr. Sir-Does-A-Lot does it all including writing books, producing podcasts, penning poems, audio dramas, and much more through his JLJ Media company. Mr. Worldwide talks about reaching number one in four countries on his most recent book collaboration “You Can Overcome Anything” and making the Australian Top 100 with his podcast “Darth Vader Is Your Father”. This generation's James Earl Jones dives into his upcoming Christmas audio adventures, Mistletoe Road and The Clause Series. Like koalas eating eucalyptus, James intoxicates The Chrises with his trademark sultry voice while describing why Christmas and Mariah Carey might be the G.O.A.T.

Our listeners Top 5 George Michael songs, Disney Classics from Christina Aguilera and Vanessa Williams, a one hit wonder from Dimples D and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1982.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.You can find bonus episodes at https://www.patreon.com/YouMethe80sandthe90s 

Our listeners Top 5 Billy Joel songs, "emotional male ballad" classics from Peter Cetera and The Goo Goo Dolls, a one hit wonder from Groove Theory and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1987.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.

Our listeners Top 5 Bananarama songs, "Sexy Time" classics from Ginuwine and Lisa Stansfield, a one hit wonder from 4 Non Blondes and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1992.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.

In this Episode Gavin chats with Russell Morris AM.Russell is a singer songwriter and guitarist, with a staggering 50year career & counting. Russell had 5 Australian Top 10 singlesduring the late 1960's and early 70's. The Real Thing was addedto the National Film and Sound Archives – Sounds of Australiaregistry in 2013. His most current album Black and Blue Heart.Let's chat to the Real Thing – Russell Morris AM

Our listeners Top 5 Phil Collins songs, "Name Song" Classics from Michael Jackson and Iggy Pop with Kate Pierson, a one hit wonder from Princess and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1990.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.

Our listeners Top 5 Madonna songs, Boyband Classics from Hanson and Take That, a one hit wonder from Martha Davis and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1986.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.

Our listeners Top 5 INXS songs, Aussie Hit Songs in the US from Natalie Imbruglia and Divinyls, a one hit wonder from Jennifer Paige and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1983.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast with Wayne and Emma.

Our listeners Top 5 Mariah Carey songs, New Wave classics from Philip Oakley & Giorgio Moroder and Tears For Fears, a one hit wonder from Climie Fisher and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1993.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast.

Our listeners Top 5 Pet Shop Boys songs, "Rain" classics from The Weather Girls and Belinda Carlisle, a one hit wonder from Tasmin Archer and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1985.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast.

Steve Cooper talks with musician Andrew Farriss. Andrew is best known as the keyboardist, backing vocalist, main composer and one of the founding members of the rock band INXS. To date INXS has sold well over 50 million records. They have had 10 Australian Top 10 Singles, 7 U.S. Top 10 Singles, 3 Grammy nominations, a BRIT Award (for Best International Group), 5 MTV Music Video Awards, 7 ARIA Awards and elevation into the ARIA Hall of Fame. Andrew has written, produced, and performed music all over the globe for the last 40 years. He has written for or produced various other acts, such as Yothu Yindi, Tom Jones, Alisan Porter, Tania Kernaghan, and Jenny Morris. His personal awards include: Producer of the Year at the ARIA Music Awards for his work on Jenny Morris’s album Shiver which went triple platinum and he was inducted into the Australian Songwriter Hall of Fame in 2016. He recently recorded his first solo album.

For our 10th episode we celebrate by looking back at 1996. We countdown the Australian Top 5 for 1996, have a one hit wonder from Deep Blue Something, classics from The Corrs and Toni Braxton; and we countdown our listeners Top 5 (6) songs from 1996 - featuring artists Madonna, Alanis Morrisette, Everything But the Girl, Gina G, George Michael and No Doubt.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Relive the music you love with "You, Me, the 80s & 90s" podcast.

Our listeners Top 5 Whitney Houston songs, 1985 classics from Debarge and Pat Benatar, a one hit wonder from Gyan and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1998.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast.

Our listeners Top 5 U2 songs, 1999 classics from Pearl Jam and S Club Seven, a one hit wonder from Julee Cruise and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1984..Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast.

Caligula’s Horse is a name that has garnered an ever-increasing amount of attention within the dynamic world of progressive metal, turning heads in 2017 with the ambitious concept album “In Contact.” Met with critical acclaim and a spot on the Australian Top 50 charts, “In Contact” was the launchpad for Caligula’s Horse to embark on [...] The post JIM GREY of CALIGULA’S HORSE Discusses New Album “Rise Radiant”: “It Feels Like the Album We’ve Been Trying to Make for Nine Years” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

Our listeners Top 5 Kylie Minogue songs, 1982 classics from Laura Branigan and J Geils Band, a one hit wonder from Deee-Lite and the Australian Top 5 from this week in 1991.Songs are memories, music is therapy. Join us for, "You, Me, the 80s and 90s" podcast.

Within two short years, music quite literally carried 22-year-old singer, songwriter, and artist Noah Kahan around the world—a long way from his native Strafford, VT (pop. 1,045) and the 133-acre tree farm where he resides. On the trip, the alternative troubadour notched an international hit in the form of “Hurt Somebody” [feat. Julia Michaels], which tallied 200 million-plus streams in the span of a year, went triple-platinum in Australia and gold in six other countries, and was the third most played song on Australian Top 40 radio in all of 2018. Additionally, he performed the single on Late Night with Stephen Colbert during his late-night television debut.As Noah steadily averaged over 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, his songs “Young Blood” and “False Confidence” racked up millions of streams and he sold out tours in North America, Europe, and the UK. Not to mention, he garnered acclaim from Billboard, Stereogum, Clash, Idolator, and more. In the midst of this whirlwind, he assembled his highly anticipated upcoming debut album.The first single “Mess” illuminates his marked growth as a songwriter and storyteller by way of its biting lyrics and undeniable sing-a-long. The song underscores a heartwarming and often hilarious portrait of hometown longing.Follow Sidewalk Talk:https://twitter.com/sidewalktalkshw (all updates)https://instagram.com/sidewalktalkpop See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Iva Davies is one of Australia's most accomplished musicians and composers with a career spanning over 30 years with his band Icehouse, and as a composer for film and theatre. I produced this feature music show with him in 2014.The number one song on the Australian pop music charts in 1980 was The Buggles 'Video Killed The Radio Star', accompanied through the year by such gems as Michael Jackson 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough', The Village People 'You Can't Stop The Music', Split Enz 'I Got You', The Vapours 'Turning Japanese' and Queen 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'.In May 1980, Australian radio stations started playing a song by Sydney band, Flowers. 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Australian Top 10 and was the first song from their debut album, 'Icehouse'. I think I was first in line at my local record store to by the single and was enormously envious of my older brothers who would regularly see Flowers playing at the local pub. IVA DAVIES: We came from quite a distinct stream of music which generated by the punk movement out of Britain, but then it morphed into a strange hybrid because of technology. There was an explosion of technology, especially synthesiser technology, at that period, so we were a kind of punk band with synthesisers which was a bit odd. But clearly, these other people were not, including Michael Jackson! There were all sorts of strange things going on, strange fashions; it was a very interesting time."The first song we put out was called 'Can't Help Myself' and we'd been playing all these classic punk venues for about three years before we put out that first record. I remember being told it had become a disco hit in Melbourne and I was semi-horrified. I was very pleased it was a hit, of course, but a disco hit - we weren't a disco band!By the time we got to 1980 we'd been playing quite a few of our own songs but still had lacings of the odd cover version of things not even particularly fashionable at the time, things like T-Rex songs, but by then we'd really turned into an original band and signed with a small independent label in Sydney called Regular Records and we'd recorded our first album, and although they constitute really the first 10 songs I ever wrote, they did have a certain flavour about them that I guess was, again, a hybrid of punk with synthesizers.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you mustn't have been very long out of the Conservatorium by this stage?IVA DAVIES: I dropped out of the (Sydney) Conservatorium when I was about 21, so I was about 23 or 24 by this point.CAROL DUNCAN: So how did you decide to steer your songwriting and music releases in that environment at that time?IVA DAVIES: It's a terrible admission to make considering that 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Top 10, that I was probably fairly unaware of radio except for 2JJ. That's a terrible admission for somebody who's trying to break into getting airplay on radio!CAROL DUNCAN: Something like The Vapors 'Turning Japanese' would have been all over 2SM (in Sydney) at the time. 2SM would have been the number one commercial pop music station in the late 1970s.IVA DAVIES: Indeed, and I missed a great deal of that. I think we were pretty well buried in our own world and our own world had been dominated by what I'd listened to as I grew up, quite a lot of classics, psychedelic and heavy rock bands including Pink Floyd and so on. And then when Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols) arrived, the world was turned upside-down quite literally.He put all of those big bands out of business overnight and London was the place to be. I remember very clearly when Keith (Welsh) and I, our bass player and co-founder of Flowers, we'd been playing almost every night of the week, sometimes nine shows a week. There were clubs all over Sydney, there were clubs all over Melbourne, there were really great bands everywhere and on any given night down the road there'd be Midnight Oil and INXS and any number of bands.When we arrived in London for our very first international tour, we looked at each other and said, 'Let's get a copy of New Musical Express (NME) and go and see a band 'cause this is where it's all coming from!' And there was nothing on!I was absolutely gobsmacked that Sydney was a hundred times more active than London on a club scene. It absolutely mystified me. All the pubs shut early, there was nowhere to go!CAROL DUNCAN: Who did you admire at the time?IVA DAVIES: I didn't buy albums of anybody, I didn't consume music. I was very curious about music but most of what I listened to was via 2JJ. 2JJ was a very progressive station; I think it's been forgotten to some degree. 2JJ were playing things that had been bought on import - they hadn't even been released in Australia yet - and so it was fascinating.We were hearing things we thought before anybody else in the world had heard them, things like Elvis Costello, XTC, mainly British bands but the odd thing coming out of America. There was a real movement of punk and new wave.CAROL DUNCAN: So you and Keith have taken off to London, you're going to see all the bands, but there's no-one home?IVA DAVIES: There's no-one home! I remember thinking at the time, 'Well where did The Cure come from and where did The Clash and The Damned and The Jam come from? Where are they all'?I had imagined that London was heaving with little clubs with all those names playing in them every night but it was really something created through the tyranny of distance, I guess. We had amplified that whole thing that had started with Carnaby Street, The Beatles, and Rolling Stones; and in my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of many other Australians, this was the mecca that we were going to visit. But it turned out it was really as much a product of BBC1 and radio and record companies than it was of an active pub music scene which was exactly what we had in Australia.CAROL DUNCAN: So, what did you do, turn around and come home?IVA DAVIES: We went off touring. We went off touring with Simple Minds who were just starting to break through in Europe. They'd a quite successful album, and we did a reciprocal deal with them where we said, 'OK, if we are your support band in Europe, that will help us, and you come to Australia and be our support band there because nobody knows you. In fact, to this day, and I'm sure Jim Kerr from Simple Minds would take credit in saying that tour we did with them really broke Simple Minds in Australia - it was off the back of that tour that they started achieving success here. Of course, many many albums and many many successes later I still catch up with Jim Kerr quite frequently.CAROL DUNCAN: I remember seeing the two bands at the Manly Vale Hotel.IVA DAVIES: Very possible! That was one of many hotels in that northern beaches area, and I ended up living on the northern beaches by accident. It was quite tribal. There was a very big pub at Narrabeen called the Royal Antler and it was our first proper gig, I guess, and almost residency. At one point we and Midnight Oil were alternating weekends. We never met them, but there was this kind of unspoken rivalry for the same audience of mad, drunken surfies.CAROL DUNCAN: It was one of Sydney's great beer barns.IVA DAVIES: It was and they were mad, of course, mad drunken surfies and probably a few other substances, as well. But they were great nights. It was a big place; I think it held something like 1500 people. And you're right, we probably did attract slightly different audiences, and certainly we also had the other side of us which was playing the inner city hotels which, of course, were very driven by the punk movement, so we'd look out on a place like the Civic Hotel and there'd been a sea of black and safety pins.CAROL DUNCAN: Why did the name change come about? Was it as simple as swapping the band name and album title?IVA DAVIES: It was, but we actually had no choice. What we hadn't realised was that while we were happily going along as Flowers in Australia and New Zealand, as soon as we signed to an international record company and they said, 'We're going to release this around the rest of the world, we need to do a little check on the name. It hadn't even occurred to me that a band name is like a company trading name and, unfortunately, there were at least three other acts around the world trading on the name 'Flowers'. One of them being the very, very famous session bass player, Herbie Flowers, who you probably know best for being the creator of that wonderful bass line that introduces Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side'.So there were objections and we simply had no choice, we had to come up with another name. This has happened to a number of Australian bands. It happened to Sherbet who became Highway, and The Angels who became Angel City. Our logic was fairly simple - people here in Australia and New Zealand only know us by two things, that is the name of the band 'Flowers' or the name of the album 'Icehouse'. So, we became Icehouse.A band name becomes its identity in a far bigger way that just a set of letters. I've had this discussion with my 17-year old son who has got a collection of friends in a band and they haven't been able to think of anything. I keep asking what the band is called and they're called something different every day. I said 'you better get it right because it will end up owning you'.CAROL DUNCAN: Your son has actually played with you?IVA DAVIES: Yes, oh you know about this! I had a fairly mad idea last year, although the idea had been around since 1983. I remember we were touring in Europe and we had a number one song in Europe so there was a lot of pressure on me. I was doing millions of interviews and we were playing very big festivals of 30,000 people.We were playing on one and I was standing on the side of the stage next to my band and Peter Tosh's band was playing - Peter Tosh was the co-founder of Bob Marley's Wailers - and it was a big band, 9 or 10 people on stage, backing singers and whatnot, and I said to my bass player, "See the guy at the back going chukka, chukka, chukka on the guitar, the laziest job in the world? I want his job. I had a conversation last year with somebody about this moment and they said, 'Why don't you do it?'Our manager thought I was mad, a number of promoters thought I was mad, too, but what we did was completely re-invent Icehouse as an eight-piece reggae band. We added some extra guys from Melbourne to give us a brass section and we re-arranged every one of the hits that we'd been playing in the classic repertoire as reggae songs.We put two shows on - one in Melbourne, one in Sydney - as a kind of Christmas party because my feeling was that the reason we were doing it is because reggae makes you want to dance and smile and laugh, and we had the best possible time, it was just fantastic. We've just released the recording of the Sydney show and re-named the band DubHOUSE - the album is DubHOUSE Live.I wanted to get my children to come. My daughter is OK because she's 20 but my son was under age, under the drinking age, and the only way I could get him in was to put him in the band. So I said to him, 'Look Evan ...' he's17 and a very good guitarist, 'I'm sorry, you're not going to get a rehearsal, you're not going to get a sound check. Here's a recording of a rehearsal of Street Cafe done in this style, you've got the guitar solo, go home and learn it and I'll see you on stage."And so the poor guy was thrown on stage with absolutely no preparation whatsoever, but fortunately, he had done his homework and had a great night.CAROL DUNCAN: How do the kids see your career, Iva?IVA DAVIES: Well the strange truth is that they didn't. I finished the last tour that we did back in the day, as it were, when my daughter was six weeks old. Effectively, we didn't play again and my children grew up.In 2009, our long-time tour manager, Larry, who works for a very big audio production company - he'd been working for with us since 1984 - came up with the idea for Sound Relief (concerts held in Sydney & Melbourne for 2009 bushfire relief) and actually volunteered us, so we were the first band on the bill for Sound Relief.By that time in 2009, my daughter would have been 14 or 13, and my son 12 or 13, and that was the first concert they ever saw me play. So they'd grown up all those years not knowing anything about it, or relatively little.CAROL DUNCAN: Did they think Icehouse was cool or were you 'just Dad' and therefore couldn't possibly be cool?IVA DAVIES: Strangely enough, I seem to have breached the cool barrier into the cool area. A very strange thing happened, before that Sound Relief show and before my daughter really got to appreciate my association with it. She came home from school one afternoon, waltzed in the door and announced, 'I LOVE THE EIGHTIES! I love EVERYTHING about the eighties!'Strangely enough, the eighties are going through a whole new generation of cool at the moment. Except for the hair, and a lot of the clothes.CAROL DUNCAN: When you look at that part of your career, the pop/rock part of your career, what do you see, Iva?IVA DAVIES: I'm proud that we worked very hard, I believe, to maintain a kind of class and a quality. That went through everything, even the recordings themselves. I went through the graduation from vinyl to CD, which was a massive turnaround, and it happened incredibly quickly.I remember having a talk to a record company about it and they said, 'Last year we manufactured 80% out of vinyl and 20% out of CD, this year we're manufacturing 80% out of CD and 20% out of vinyl, and the following year we're not making any vinyl at all. That's how fast it turned around. But 'Measure for Measure', our fourth album is one of the first three fully digital recordings ever made in the world, which was a real milestone, so it's the first completely noiseless recording that was made for the new format of CD. It's moments like that that I reflect on and think, well, that's because we really put a lot of care and attention into these things.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you're also seen as one of the pioneers in Australia of bringing in synthesizers, computers, the Fairlight and so on. You mentioned an interesting word there, 'noiseless', and that's perhaps where the feud happens between the vinyl purists and people who are very happy to purchase their music in a digital form whether on CD or via digital download. How do you see the vinyl vs CD war when it comes to audio quality?IVA DAVIES: I noted with some amusement touched with horror a program that Linda Mottram did on 702 in Sydney where there was this discussion about vinyl, and she spoke with a so-called expert who was out of a university, and with due respect to that professor I desperately wanted to call in and say, "Can I just tell you about what actually happens when you're making pieces of vinyl and why they sound the way they do, and how it is absolutely possible to make CDs sound exactly like vinyl IF that were the endgame that you wanted to have in mind.I won't go into it now but the fact of the matter is it's all about a process called mastering. The way that tapes, mixes, were mastered for vinyl had to be very particular because of the intolerance of vinyl - vinyl can't carry very much big bass. I found that out with the Flowers album when I insisted to the co-producer that we put lots of bottom end into it and then realised a bit later on when the mastering engineer said to me, "I can't cut this to vinyl, it's got too much bass in it." They're the sorts of mistakes that you make when you're young.I'm a firm believer in anything that doesn't have moving parts and that is digital. I'm afraid I've moved on from anything old-school quite happily.CAROL DUNCAN: Did you call in?IVA DAVIES: No, I didn't, I just thought it's probably too difficult a conversation to have in detail over the radio but it does infuriate me because I'm sure if you got any mastering engineer on to the radio they'd say to you it's mainly because people don't understand how these things are made.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to leap into these new technologies?IVA DAVIES: Perhaps it was more out of ignorance than anything, I certainly didn't see any risk involved, but the main driver for me was that these were new toys. Every time something new was invented, my eyes would light up and I'd think, 'Imagine the possibilities!'I remember expressly that conversation I had with our management where, out of sheer co-incidence they'd moved offices from where they were in Bondi Junction to the top storey of a two-storey building in Rushcutters Bay and the ground storey was where they made Fairlights, believe it or not. Management were oblivious to this, they had no idea what was going on down there. But I did and I came to the managers one day and said, 'I desperately want to get one of these machines, they are amazing.'Of course, I was proven correct because they revolutionised music forever. I think apart from the technology of recording, the sampler - which is what a Fairlight was - was the single most influential piece of technology ever created. I said this to my management, that I was desperate, that I'd really like one, but the catch was they were $32,000. That was in 1981 or 1982 so you can imagine how much money that was then - it was half a small house.But I got one, and interestingly enough my management were quite philosophical about it. They said, 'Well, it's a lot of money, but according to our calculations you'll pay for this with the first two projects you use it on.' And they were right. The first project I used it on was my very first film score for Russell Mulcahy's 'Razorback', which is about 95% Fairlight.The great irony of that was that I kept producing bits of music, because Russell Mulcahy was out in the desert filming scenes and he kept dragging up Peter Gabriel's fourth album, the one with Shock The Monkey on it, and they were out in the desert with this blasting away on a ghetto blaster and I got it into my head that this was what Russell likes. So I kept producing Gabriel-esque soundscapes and so on, and the producers of the movie kept coming back to me and saying, 'No, no no - that's not what we want, we don't want this.' In the end I was getting various clues from them but didn't really know, but I had another go along the lines of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - a fairly mad piece of classical music. I constructed all this with the Fairlight, it was a quasi-orchestral thing. I took it back to them and they said, 'Yes! That's exactly it!' and I said, 'Well, if you wanted that sort of thing why didn't you go and get a classical composer.'In its day, 'Rite of Spring' was a controversial piece of music, and Iva Davies shares a birthday with Stravinsky.Considering that it was 1913 when that piece first hit the stage for Diaghilev's ballet company. It wasn't just the music; it was actually the subject matter of the ballet that I think was fairly upsetting to a lot of people. It's all about primal sexualism, basically, so you can imagine that to an audience of 1913 that sort of idea was fairly horrifying.CAROL DUNCAN: In 1984, you've got Razorback, also 'Sidewalk' - the third album from Icehouse, at this point did you consider that you didn't actually have to be a pop star?IVA DAVIES: No, I had a very strange life prior to that because I had a completely Jekyll and Hyde existence. I took up the guitar when I was 13, and taught myself, and it was probably also the year that I started taking oboe lessons. I had these two parallel lives and completely separate lives. I had a set of classical people - when I was in high school I played in a wind quintet and we used to rehearse every Saturday morning. We all had our first cars at that point. They were my friends and we went off and won the City of Sydney Eisteddfod and so on. They never, ever met the guys that I was in the acoustic band with. Ever! Because I just had these two lives. So my course was fairly accidental all the way through, it was probably always going to be accidental.To this day, I keep remembering things that I did. I remembered that I was in the orchestra that was primarily made up of members of the Sydney Symphony and the senior Conservatorium orchestra, of which I was a member, for the staging of the two first Australian ballets in the Opera House. I would have been about 19 and, of course, that's a fairly big moment for the Opera House to have a night featuring Australian opera in that building, and I'd completely forgotten about it. There are things from both lives that I've forgotten about.CAROL DUNCAN: 1985, your double life really starts to change as you start working with the Sydney Dance Company.IVA DAVIES: I have to give credit to our managers to some degree who recognised - Ray Hearn was managing us from the beginning. I think he considered himself to be a very erudite individual, he was very widely read, he'd seen every movie possible, and he had a huge record collection. He wasn't a musician but I think he spotted in me the potential that if I kept on that very two-dimension wheel of 'write an album, record an album, tour an album, write an album, record an album, tour an album ...', that I would burn out, that I needed something else to do. So it was he who went and pursued the soundtrack idea with Russell Mulcahy, and it was he who introduced me to the Sydney Dance Company who were a very dangerous company at that point. People forget that they did ballets entirely naked and this was quite revolutionary stuff in its day. They had a very young, hip audience. So it was a very smart move. But it was also a move that was good for the dance company. I had also forgotten until reminded about a month ago that in the Opera House's entire history this has never been repeated, but they did a very dangerous thing. They put two shows on a Friday and a Saturday night, one at a conventional hour and then a whole other audience would turn up at 10.30 at night and we'd do it all again. The staff at the Opera House thought this was going to be an absolute disaster, 'Nobody's going to go to the Opera House at 10.30pm to see a show', but they did and they were all my audience and they were coming to see what all the fuss was about. It was the most successful season the dance company has ever had.CAROL DUNCAN: Were you worried about your pop/rock audience coming over to see what you were doing and being disappointed?IVA DAVIES: I've always utterly failed to understand what the problem is between the various tribes of music. I started of as a bagpipe player when I was six, and although I went through that very, very particular stream of classical musicians, and they are, and they are a very exclusive lot - a lot of them, and they are a very intolerant lot - a lot of them, I think things have improved. But at that time they very much looked down their nose at 'popular music' and rock and roll, but by the same token it was equally prejudiced the other way around. I've never understood why. I don't get that you have to be one or the other but not all of them. In my head, there was absolutely no problem with my audience turning up to the ballet.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to follow both streams?IVA DAVIES: Only because I can kind of speak both languages. I had a discussion with somebody the other night about music and it is another language. It's certainly a language when you read and write it and I learned how to do that. But my dialogue with rock and roll musicians has to be completely different because most of the people I played with all these years don't read and write music. But rock and roll musicians communicate in a different kind of way. So because I'm comfortable in both of those languages, I can happily flick between the two of them, at whim almost.CAROL DUNCAN: Which is why I don't' let my kids drop out of their violin lessons - I want them to have that other language.IVA DAVIES: From my point of view, by miles, the single biggest advantage I've had in my work and succeeding in the broad framework of popular music is the fact that I was highly trained. That is the most sure, certain way to cut every corner you can - to actually know what you're doing.CAROL DUNCAN: December 31, 1999, and Icehouse is performing at the Millennium New Years Eve concert outside the Sydney Opera House and there is a moment on your face where it's just occurred to you how very special that moment is.IVA DAVIES: The penny really didn't drop, I mean, there was such a lot of pressure involved in that. The transmission, the TV director, Greg Beness, had synchronised a whole lot of footage to be running in parallel with shooting the performance. We had backups of backups because, of course, everybody thought that every computer in the world was going to blow up at midnight being the Y2K bug and so on. It was going out to about four billion people. It's not as if you can get to the end of it and go, 'Oh, we mucked that up, can we have another go?', 'Oh, they've already counted down; we're in a new millennium'. So I was incredibly aware of all of that and actually I've watched back some of the footage and it takes me a fair old while to settle down, it's (The Ghost Of Time) a 25-minute piece and it took me a number of minutes before I was, 'OK, we're up and running, everything seems to be working, everybody knows where they are, I can hear everything ....'I got to the end of it and stepped off the stage, Frank Sartor the Lord Mayor of Sydney gave me a glass of champagne, Richard Wilkins counted down from 10 and the fireworks went off directly over my head and I went, 'Wow!'CAROL DUNCAN: From this point, your other career really takes off and you head off to work on Master and Commander.IVA DAVIES: Yes, I've said to other young bands over the years, 'Just be aware - you never know who will be listening,' and so it was with thus that one person who was listening to The Ghost of Time on the millennium eve as it was going out, one of those four billion people, was one Peter Weir - an iconic Australian film director.This is how bizarre the next few years ended up being for me in terms of things just popping out of seemingly nowhere. I was sitting in my studio one day up on the northern beaches and the phone rang. A voice said, "Iva, this is Peter Weir. I'm filming Master and Commander on location in Baja, Mexico. I've fallen in love with The Ghost of Time. I want you to reassemble your team and give me a score like that."The whole experience was incredible, to go to Hollywood. I remember I had a colleague of mine, my music editor, had worked quite a bit in Hollywood on 'Moulin Rouge' and other things. He took me to the Fox lot and was very well recognised, but the thing that became immediately apparent was how incredibly well-respected Peter Weir is in Hollywood. Even though you don't necessarily associate him with massive blockbuster success time and time again, he's respected by directors and quality people in Hollywood and that's the difference.CAROL DUNCAN: Is it difficult to do this sort of work, to create something to someone else's demands?IVA DAVIES: I was very fortunate because Peter Weir has immense respect for music. He said to me not once, but twice, 'Music is the fountainhead of the arts,' that's how important it is to him. But having said that, he uses it very sparingly and in a very subtle way. So I had the great luxury to have three months to work on what equated to, in the end, not much more than 35 minutes worth of music. If you go and see a movie like 'Lord of the Rings', the composers had to write music from end to end of the film, so we're talking two and a half hours of music. Three months to produce that amount of music meant that it could be done with care but at a fairly unstressed pace, as it were. And that was fantastic. I have no doubt that Peter Weir quite deliberately planned the whole thing that way, so that it would be NOT a stressful operation. He's a consummate film-maker and he knows exactly what he's doing, so he schedules and plans things very well.Having said that, I always knew that the brief of a score writer is to write what the director wants to hear, not what the score writer wants to hear, so that was very apparent and so be it. Very often these films are the vision of a director and music is just one component of that. It should feed into their vision.CAROL DUNCAN: What are the professional moments that you hold dearest to your heart?IVA DAVIES: In terms of recording, I had a quite surreal moment. I was very influenced by one Brian Eno who was an absolute pioneer of synthesizers and electronic music, and in fact probably invented the term 'ambient music'. Of course, he was a founding member of Roxy Music but went on later to become incredibly successful in his own right and especially as a producer, he produced almost all of the U2 albums - massive albums. But I'd been following him since he was an early member of Roxy Music and especially been guided by his approach to synthesizers, which was very esoteric and completely at odds with a lot of the nasty noises that were being produced in the 1980s, for example. And I thank him for that because it probably stopped me from making a lot of bad sonic mistakes.The producer I was using at the time was a friend of his and I found myself having a conversation with the producer about the song we were working on at the time - a song called Cross the Border - I had in mind Brian Eno's backing vocal style. I knew that the producer, Rhett Davies, had worked with Brian Eno. I turned up to Air Studios, another very famous studio in London, to do the vocal session and in came Brian Eno. So there was a moment where I was standing in the studio, standing next to Brian Eno who was singing my lyrics and my backing vocal line. That was a real moment for me because he was a real hero of mine.CAROL DUNCAN: At what point did you realise that you had been successful enough to truly pursue anything that you wanted to do?IVA DAVIES: I spent most of my career not quite believing that things would work. In fact, I remember very clearly - we'd been working for years and years, working around these pubs, the first album came out, and I remember the first royalty cheque turned up. The accountant for the management company asked me into the office and said, 'Well, here's the cheque for the Flowers album for you,' and I looked at it and I'd been broke for years. My parents had to keep paying the odd rent payment for me and so on. We weren't earning any money at all, the album had only just come out, and I saw this cheque and it was for $15,000.I looked at Gino, who I had lunch with today - same accountant, and I said, 'Gino. This is amazing. This is incredible. I know I'm just going to fritter this away. I know I'll never get any more money out of this business. What's the deposit on the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest house in Sydney? Well, I bought the cheapest house in Sydney with that deposit, but of course, it wasn't the last cent that I made out of the music business.But for many years, for a long time, I really didn't consider that it was going to last, that I was going to make any money out of it. It's that classic thing where, luckily my parents didn't call me on the phone and say, 'When are you going to get a proper job?' they were very supportive. I think I was the one secretly calling myself and saying, 'When are you going to get a proper job?'CAROL DUNCAN: What are you still learning?IVA DAVIES: I'm still learning technology because unfortunately, it won't sit still! The industry standard for recording is a system called Pro-Tools, you very possibly use it in the studio there and it's certainly in every recording studio in the world. I've been working with Pro-Tools for a very long time but, of course, like any other software, there's a new release of it every five minutes. So I'm actually getting to the stage when I really am going to have to run to catch up! So unfortunately at my age, I'm still having to learn technology because it's the basic tool of my trade and that's never going to stop.CAROL DUNCAN: Are you still as excited by it as you were in the mid-1970s when you and Keith Welsh started 'Flowers' and when you went and harassed your management to allow you to buy that first Fairlight for $32,000?IVA DAVIES: I think I take it a bit more for granted these days because things have exploded in the way that they have. You can imagine the climate in which a piece of technology like the Fairlight came out; it was just mind-numbing. It was unlike anything anybody could ever imagine, whereas I suppose every time there's a new release of Pro-Tools, it's got a couple of lovely new features but it is a development of something which has been around for much more than a decade now.However, having said that, there seems to be a whole new generation of software writers who are incredibly interested in music and incredibly interested in playing with sound, and these are the people who are coming up with all the new noise generating bits - soft synthesisers and all that sort of stuff. That's kind of where the interesting new area is.CAROL DUNCAN: And Keith Welsh has been on this whole journey with you?IVA DAVIES: Indeed. In the music industry the whole time. He and I have been working closely over the past three years and we've started playing again and we re-released the entire catalogue. We put out a compilation called 'White Heat' which is about to go platinum.CAROL DUNCAN: What would you want the young Iva Davies to know?IVA DAVIES: That's a good question! I think I probably did seize most opportunities that came my way so I wouldn't necessarily say, 'just go as fast as you can with every opportunity that you can', I probably would have said, 'Put more attention to the money and where the money is going and who's getting it!' As a forensic accountant, I'm a kind of 'overview guy' as opposed to a 'detail guy'.

Iva Davies is one of Australia's most accomplished musicians and composers with a career spanning over 30 years with his band Icehouse, and as a composer for film and theatre. I produced this feature music show with him in 2014.The number one song on the Australian pop music charts in 1980 was The Buggles 'Video Killed The Radio Star', accompanied through the year by such gems as Michael Jackson 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough', The Village People 'You Can't Stop The Music', Split Enz 'I Got You', The Vapours 'Turning Japanese' and Queen 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'.In May 1980, Australian radio stations started playing a song by Sydney band, Flowers. 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Australian Top 10 and was the first song from their debut album, 'Icehouse'. I think I was first in line at my local record store to by the single and was enormously envious of my older brothers who would regularly see Flowers playing at the local pub. IVA DAVIES: We came from quite a distinct stream of music which generated by the punk movement out of Britain, but then it morphed into a strange hybrid because of technology. There was an explosion of technology, especially synthesiser technology, at that period, so we were a kind of punk band with synthesisers which was a bit odd. But clearly, these other people were not, including Michael Jackson! There were all sorts of strange things going on, strange fashions; it was a very interesting time."The first song we put out was called 'Can't Help Myself' and we'd been playing all these classic punk venues for about three years before we put out that first record. I remember being told it had become a disco hit in Melbourne and I was semi-horrified. I was very pleased it was a hit, of course, but a disco hit - we weren't a disco band!By the time we got to 1980 we'd been playing quite a few of our own songs but still had lacings of the odd cover version of things not even particularly fashionable at the time, things like T-Rex songs, but by then we'd really turned into an original band and signed with a small independent label in Sydney called Regular Records and we'd recorded our first album, and although they constitute really the first 10 songs I ever wrote, they did have a certain flavour about them that I guess was, again, a hybrid of punk with synthesizers.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you mustn't have been very long out of the Conservatorium by this stage?IVA DAVIES: I dropped out of the (Sydney) Conservatorium when I was about 21, so I was about 23 or 24 by this point.CAROL DUNCAN: So how did you decide to steer your songwriting and music releases in that environment at that time?IVA DAVIES: It's a terrible admission to make considering that 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Top 10, that I was probably fairly unaware of radio except for 2JJ. That's a terrible admission for somebody who's trying to break into getting airplay on radio!CAROL DUNCAN: Something like The Vapors 'Turning Japanese' would have been all over 2SM (in Sydney) at the time. 2SM would have been the number one commercial pop music station in the late 1970s.IVA DAVIES: Indeed, and I missed a great deal of that. I think we were pretty well buried in our own world and our own world had been dominated by what I'd listened to as I grew up, quite a lot of classics, psychedelic and heavy rock bands including Pink Floyd and so on. And then when Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols) arrived, the world was turned upside-down quite literally.He put all of those big bands out of business overnight and London was the place to be. I remember very clearly when Keith (Welsh) and I, our bass player and co-founder of Flowers, we'd been playing almost every night of the week, sometimes nine shows a week. There were clubs all over Sydney, there were clubs all over Melbourne, there were really great bands everywhere and on any given night down the road there'd be Midnight Oil and INXS and any number of bands.When we arrived in London for our very first international tour, we looked at each other and said, 'Let's get a copy of New Musical Express (NME) and go and see a band 'cause this is where it's all coming from!' And there was nothing on!I was absolutely gobsmacked that Sydney was a hundred times more active than London on a club scene. It absolutely mystified me. All the pubs shut early, there was nowhere to go!CAROL DUNCAN: Who did you admire at the time?IVA DAVIES: I didn't buy albums of anybody, I didn't consume music. I was very curious about music but most of what I listened to was via 2JJ. 2JJ was a very progressive station; I think it's been forgotten to some degree. 2JJ were playing things that had been bought on import - they hadn't even been released in Australia yet - and so it was fascinating.We were hearing things we thought before anybody else in the world had heard them, things like Elvis Costello, XTC, mainly British bands but the odd thing coming out of America. There was a real movement of punk and new wave.CAROL DUNCAN: So you and Keith have taken off to London, you're going to see all the bands, but there's no-one home?IVA DAVIES: There's no-one home! I remember thinking at the time, 'Well where did The Cure come from and where did The Clash and The Damned and The Jam come from? Where are they all'?I had imagined that London was heaving with little clubs with all those names playing in them every night but it was really something created through the tyranny of distance, I guess. We had amplified that whole thing that had started with Carnaby Street, The Beatles, and Rolling Stones; and in my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of many other Australians, this was the mecca that we were going to visit. But it turned out it was really as much a product of BBC1 and radio and record companies than it was of an active pub music scene which was exactly what we had in Australia.CAROL DUNCAN: So, what did you do, turn around and come home?IVA DAVIES: We went off touring. We went off touring with Simple Minds who were just starting to break through in Europe. They'd a quite successful album, and we did a reciprocal deal with them where we said, 'OK, if we are your support band in Europe, that will help us, and you come to Australia and be our support band there because nobody knows you. In fact, to this day, and I'm sure Jim Kerr from Simple Minds would take credit in saying that tour we did with them really broke Simple Minds in Australia - it was off the back of that tour that they started achieving success here. Of course, many many albums and many many successes later I still catch up with Jim Kerr quite frequently.CAROL DUNCAN: I remember seeing the two bands at the Manly Vale Hotel.IVA DAVIES: Very possible! That was one of many hotels in that northern beaches area, and I ended up living on the northern beaches by accident. It was quite tribal. There was a very big pub at Narrabeen called the Royal Antler and it was our first proper gig, I guess, and almost residency. At one point we and Midnight Oil were alternating weekends. We never met them, but there was this kind of unspoken rivalry for the same audience of mad, drunken surfies.CAROL DUNCAN: It was one of Sydney's great beer barns.IVA DAVIES: It was and they were mad, of course, mad drunken surfies and probably a few other substances, as well. But they were great nights. It was a big place; I think it held something like 1500 people. And you're right, we probably did attract slightly different audiences, and certainly we also had the other side of us which was playing the inner city hotels which, of course, were very driven by the punk movement, so we'd look out on a place like the Civic Hotel and there'd been a sea of black and safety pins.CAROL DUNCAN: Why did the name change come about? Was it as simple as swapping the band name and album title?IVA DAVIES: It was, but we actually had no choice. What we hadn't realised was that while we were happily going along as Flowers in Australia and New Zealand, as soon as we signed to an international record company and they said, 'We're going to release this around the rest of the world, we need to do a little check on the name. It hadn't even occurred to me that a band name is like a company trading name and, unfortunately, there were at least three other acts around the world trading on the name 'Flowers'. One of them being the very, very famous session bass player, Herbie Flowers, who you probably know best for being the creator of that wonderful bass line that introduces Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side'.So there were objections and we simply had no choice, we had to come up with another name. This has happened to a number of Australian bands. It happened to Sherbet who became Highway, and The Angels who became Angel City. Our logic was fairly simple - people here in Australia and New Zealand only know us by two things, that is the name of the band 'Flowers' or the name of the album 'Icehouse'. So, we became Icehouse.A band name becomes its identity in a far bigger way that just a set of letters. I've had this discussion with my 17-year old son who has got a collection of friends in a band and they haven't been able to think of anything. I keep asking what the band is called and they're called something different every day. I said 'you better get it right because it will end up owning you'.CAROL DUNCAN: Your son has actually played with you?IVA DAVIES: Yes, oh you know about this! I had a fairly mad idea last year, although the idea had been around since 1983. I remember we were touring in Europe and we had a number one song in Europe so there was a lot of pressure on me. I was doing millions of interviews and we were playing very big festivals of 30,000 people.We were playing on one and I was standing on the side of the stage next to my band and Peter Tosh's band was playing - Peter Tosh was the co-founder of Bob Marley's Wailers - and it was a big band, 9 or 10 people on stage, backing singers and whatnot, and I said to my bass player, "See the guy at the back going chukka, chukka, chukka on the guitar, the laziest job in the world? I want his job. I had a conversation last year with somebody about this moment and they said, 'Why don't you do it?'Our manager thought I was mad, a number of promoters thought I was mad, too, but what we did was completely re-invent Icehouse as an eight-piece reggae band. We added some extra guys from Melbourne to give us a brass section and we re-arranged every one of the hits that we'd been playing in the classic repertoire as reggae songs.We put two shows on - one in Melbourne, one in Sydney - as a kind of Christmas party because my feeling was that the reason we were doing it is because reggae makes you want to dance and smile and laugh, and we had the best possible time, it was just fantastic. We've just released the recording of the Sydney show and re-named the band DubHOUSE - the album is DubHOUSE Live.I wanted to get my children to come. My daughter is OK because she's 20 but my son was under age, under the drinking age, and the only way I could get him in was to put him in the band. So I said to him, 'Look Evan ...' he's17 and a very good guitarist, 'I'm sorry, you're not going to get a rehearsal, you're not going to get a sound check. Here's a recording of a rehearsal of Street Cafe done in this style, you've got the guitar solo, go home and learn it and I'll see you on stage."And so the poor guy was thrown on stage with absolutely no preparation whatsoever, but fortunately, he had done his homework and had a great night.CAROL DUNCAN: How do the kids see your career, Iva?IVA DAVIES: Well the strange truth is that they didn't. I finished the last tour that we did back in the day, as it were, when my daughter was six weeks old. Effectively, we didn't play again and my children grew up.In 2009, our long-time tour manager, Larry, who works for a very big audio production company - he'd been working for with us since 1984 - came up with the idea for Sound Relief (concerts held in Sydney & Melbourne for 2009 bushfire relief) and actually volunteered us, so we were the first band on the bill for Sound Relief.By that time in 2009, my daughter would have been 14 or 13, and my son 12 or 13, and that was the first concert they ever saw me play. So they'd grown up all those years not knowing anything about it, or relatively little.CAROL DUNCAN: Did they think Icehouse was cool or were you 'just Dad' and therefore couldn't possibly be cool?IVA DAVIES: Strangely enough, I seem to have breached the cool barrier into the cool area. A very strange thing happened, before that Sound Relief show and before my daughter really got to appreciate my association with it. She came home from school one afternoon, waltzed in the door and announced, 'I LOVE THE EIGHTIES! I love EVERYTHING about the eighties!'Strangely enough, the eighties are going through a whole new generation of cool at the moment. Except for the hair, and a lot of the clothes.CAROL DUNCAN: When you look at that part of your career, the pop/rock part of your career, what do you see, Iva?IVA DAVIES: I'm proud that we worked very hard, I believe, to maintain a kind of class and a quality. That went through everything, even the recordings themselves. I went through the graduation from vinyl to CD, which was a massive turnaround, and it happened incredibly quickly.I remember having a talk to a record company about it and they said, 'Last year we manufactured 80% out of vinyl and 20% out of CD, this year we're manufacturing 80% out of CD and 20% out of vinyl, and the following year we're not making any vinyl at all. That's how fast it turned around. But 'Measure for Measure', our fourth album is one of the first three fully digital recordings ever made in the world, which was a real milestone, so it's the first completely noiseless recording that was made for the new format of CD. It's moments like that that I reflect on and think, well, that's because we really put a lot of care and attention into these things.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you're also seen as one of the pioneers in Australia of bringing in synthesizers, computers, the Fairlight and so on. You mentioned an interesting word there, 'noiseless', and that's perhaps where the feud happens between the vinyl purists and people who are very happy to purchase their music in a digital form whether on CD or via digital download. How do you see the vinyl vs CD war when it comes to audio quality?IVA DAVIES: I noted with some amusement touched with horror a program that Linda Mottram did on 702 in Sydney where there was this discussion about vinyl, and she spoke with a so-called expert who was out of a university, and with due respect to that professor I desperately wanted to call in and say, "Can I just tell you about what actually happens when you're making pieces of vinyl and why they sound the way they do, and how it is absolutely possible to make CDs sound exactly like vinyl IF that were the endgame that you wanted to have in mind.I won't go into it now but the fact of the matter is it's all about a process called mastering. The way that tapes, mixes, were mastered for vinyl had to be very particular because of the intolerance of vinyl - vinyl can't carry very much big bass. I found that out with the Flowers album when I insisted to the co-producer that we put lots of bottom end into it and then realised a bit later on when the mastering engineer said to me, "I can't cut this to vinyl, it's got too much bass in it." They're the sorts of mistakes that you make when you're young.I'm a firm believer in anything that doesn't have moving parts and that is digital. I'm afraid I've moved on from anything old-school quite happily.CAROL DUNCAN: Did you call in?IVA DAVIES: No, I didn't, I just thought it's probably too difficult a conversation to have in detail over the radio but it does infuriate me because I'm sure if you got any mastering engineer on to the radio they'd say to you it's mainly because people don't understand how these things are made.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to leap into these new technologies?IVA DAVIES: Perhaps it was more out of ignorance than anything, I certainly didn't see any risk involved, but the main driver for me was that these were new toys. Every time something new was invented, my eyes would light up and I'd think, 'Imagine the possibilities!'I remember expressly that conversation I had with our management where, out of sheer co-incidence they'd moved offices from where they were in Bondi Junction to the top storey of a two-storey building in Rushcutters Bay and the ground storey was where they made Fairlights, believe it or not. Management were oblivious to this, they had no idea what was going on down there. But I did and I came to the managers one day and said, 'I desperately want to get one of these machines, they are amazing.'Of course, I was proven correct because they revolutionised music forever. I think apart from the technology of recording, the sampler - which is what a Fairlight was - was the single most influential piece of technology ever created. I said this to my management, that I was desperate, that I'd really like one, but the catch was they were $32,000. That was in 1981 or 1982 so you can imagine how much money that was then - it was half a small house.But I got one, and interestingly enough my management were quite philosophical about it. They said, 'Well, it's a lot of money, but according to our calculations you'll pay for this with the first two projects you use it on.' And they were right. The first project I used it on was my very first film score for Russell Mulcahy's 'Razorback', which is about 95% Fairlight.The great irony of that was that I kept producing bits of music, because Russell Mulcahy was out in the desert filming scenes and he kept dragging up Peter Gabriel's fourth album, the one with Shock The Monkey on it, and they were out in the desert with this blasting away on a ghetto blaster and I got it into my head that this was what Russell likes. So I kept producing Gabriel-esque soundscapes and so on, and the producers of the movie kept coming back to me and saying, 'No, no no - that's not what we want, we don't want this.' In the end I was getting various clues from them but didn't really know, but I had another go along the lines of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - a fairly mad piece of classical music. I constructed all this with the Fairlight, it was a quasi-orchestral thing. I took it back to them and they said, 'Yes! That's exactly it!' and I said, 'Well, if you wanted that sort of thing why didn't you go and get a classical composer.'In its day, 'Rite of Spring' was a controversial piece of music, and Iva Davies shares a birthday with Stravinsky.Considering that it was 1913 when that piece first hit the stage for Diaghilev's ballet company. It wasn't just the music; it was actually the subject matter of the ballet that I think was fairly upsetting to a lot of people. It's all about primal sexualism, basically, so you can imagine that to an audience of 1913 that sort of idea was fairly horrifying.CAROL DUNCAN: In 1984, you've got Razorback, also 'Sidewalk' - the third album from Icehouse, at this point did you consider that you didn't actually have to be a pop star?IVA DAVIES: No, I had a very strange life prior to that because I had a completely Jekyll and Hyde existence. I took up the guitar when I was 13, and taught myself, and it was probably also the year that I started taking oboe lessons. I had these two parallel lives and completely separate lives. I had a set of classical people - when I was in high school I played in a wind quintet and we used to rehearse every Saturday morning. We all had our first cars at that point. They were my friends and we went off and won the City of Sydney Eisteddfod and so on. They never, ever met the guys that I was in the acoustic band with. Ever! Because I just had these two lives. So my course was fairly accidental all the way through, it was probably always going to be accidental.To this day, I keep remembering things that I did. I remembered that I was in the orchestra that was primarily made up of members of the Sydney Symphony and the senior Conservatorium orchestra, of which I was a member, for the staging of the two first Australian ballets in the Opera House. I would have been about 19 and, of course, that's a fairly big moment for the Opera House to have a night featuring Australian opera in that building, and I'd completely forgotten about it. There are things from both lives that I've forgotten about.CAROL DUNCAN: 1985, your double life really starts to change as you start working with the Sydney Dance Company.IVA DAVIES: I have to give credit to our managers to some degree who recognised - Ray Hearn was managing us from the beginning. I think he considered himself to be a very erudite individual, he was very widely read, he'd seen every movie possible, and he had a huge record collection. He wasn't a musician but I think he spotted in me the potential that if I kept on that very two-dimension wheel of 'write an album, record an album, tour an album, write an album, record an album, tour an album ...', that I would burn out, that I needed something else to do. So it was he who went and pursued the soundtrack idea with Russell Mulcahy, and it was he who introduced me to the Sydney Dance Company who were a very dangerous company at that point. People forget that they did ballets entirely naked and this was quite revolutionary stuff in its day. They had a very young, hip audience. So it was a very smart move. But it was also a move that was good for the dance company. I had also forgotten until reminded about a month ago that in the Opera House's entire history this has never been repeated, but they did a very dangerous thing. They put two shows on a Friday and a Saturday night, one at a conventional hour and then a whole other audience would turn up at 10.30 at night and we'd do it all again. The staff at the Opera House thought this was going to be an absolute disaster, 'Nobody's going to go to the Opera House at 10.30pm to see a show', but they did and they were all my audience and they were coming to see what all the fuss was about. It was the most successful season the dance company has ever had.CAROL DUNCAN: Were you worried about your pop/rock audience coming over to see what you were doing and being disappointed?IVA DAVIES: I've always utterly failed to understand what the problem is between the various tribes of music. I started of as a bagpipe player when I was six, and although I went through that very, very particular stream of classical musicians, and they are, and they are a very exclusive lot - a lot of them, and they are a very intolerant lot - a lot of them, I think things have improved. But at that time they very much looked down their nose at 'popular music' and rock and roll, but by the same token it was equally prejudiced the other way around. I've never understood why. I don't get that you have to be one or the other but not all of them. In my head, there was absolutely no problem with my audience turning up to the ballet.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to follow both streams?IVA DAVIES: Only because I can kind of speak both languages. I had a discussion with somebody the other night about music and it is another language. It's certainly a language when you read and write it and I learned how to do that. But my dialogue with rock and roll musicians has to be completely different because most of the people I played with all these years don't read and write music. But rock and roll musicians communicate in a different kind of way. So because I'm comfortable in both of those languages, I can happily flick between the two of them, at whim almost.CAROL DUNCAN: Which is why I don't' let my kids drop out of their violin lessons - I want them to have that other language.IVA DAVIES: From my point of view, by miles, the single biggest advantage I've had in my work and succeeding in the broad framework of popular music is the fact that I was highly trained. That is the most sure, certain way to cut every corner you can - to actually know what you're doing.CAROL DUNCAN: December 31, 1999, and Icehouse is performing at the Millennium New Years Eve concert outside the Sydney Opera House and there is a moment on your face where it's just occurred to you how very special that moment is.IVA DAVIES: The penny really didn't drop, I mean, there was such a lot of pressure involved in that. The transmission, the TV director, Greg Beness, had synchronised a whole lot of footage to be running in parallel with shooting the performance. We had backups of backups because, of course, everybody thought that every computer in the world was going to blow up at midnight being the Y2K bug and so on. It was going out to about four billion people. It's not as if you can get to the end of it and go, 'Oh, we mucked that up, can we have another go?', 'Oh, they've already counted down; we're in a new millennium'. So I was incredibly aware of all of that and actually I've watched back some of the footage and it takes me a fair old while to settle down, it's (The Ghost Of Time) a 25-minute piece and it took me a number of minutes before I was, 'OK, we're up and running, everything seems to be working, everybody knows where they are, I can hear everything ....'I got to the end of it and stepped off the stage, Frank Sartor the Lord Mayor of Sydney gave me a glass of champagne, Richard Wilkins counted down from 10 and the fireworks went off directly over my head and I went, 'Wow!'CAROL DUNCAN: From this point, your other career really takes off and you head off to work on Master and Commander.IVA DAVIES: Yes, I've said to other young bands over the years, 'Just be aware - you never know who will be listening,' and so it was with thus that one person who was listening to The Ghost of Time on the millennium eve as it was going out, one of those four billion people, was one Peter Weir - an iconic Australian film director.This is how bizarre the next few years ended up being for me in terms of things just popping out of seemingly nowhere. I was sitting in my studio one day up on the northern beaches and the phone rang. A voice said, "Iva, this is Peter Weir. I'm filming Master and Commander on location in Baja, Mexico. I've fallen in love with The Ghost of Time. I want you to reassemble your team and give me a score like that."The whole experience was incredible, to go to Hollywood. I remember I had a colleague of mine, my music editor, had worked quite a bit in Hollywood on 'Moulin Rouge' and other things. He took me to the Fox lot and was very well recognised, but the thing that became immediately apparent was how incredibly well-respected Peter Weir is in Hollywood. Even though you don't necessarily associate him with massive blockbuster success time and time again, he's respected by directors and quality people in Hollywood and that's the difference.CAROL DUNCAN: Is it difficult to do this sort of work, to create something to someone else's demands?IVA DAVIES: I was very fortunate because Peter Weir has immense respect for music. He said to me not once, but twice, 'Music is the fountainhead of the arts,' that's how important it is to him. But having said that, he uses it very sparingly and in a very subtle way. So I had the great luxury to have three months to work on what equated to, in the end, not much more than 35 minutes worth of music. If you go and see a movie like 'Lord of the Rings', the composers had to write music from end to end of the film, so we're talking two and a half hours of music. Three months to produce that amount of music meant that it could be done with care but at a fairly unstressed pace, as it were. And that was fantastic. I have no doubt that Peter Weir quite deliberately planned the whole thing that way, so that it would be NOT a stressful operation. He's a consummate film-maker and he knows exactly what he's doing, so he schedules and plans things very well.Having said that, I always knew that the brief of a score writer is to write what the director wants to hear, not what the score writer wants to hear, so that was very apparent and so be it. Very often these films are the vision of a director and music is just one component of that. It should feed into their vision.CAROL DUNCAN: What are the professional moments that you hold dearest to your heart?IVA DAVIES: In terms of recording, I had a quite surreal moment. I was very influenced by one Brian Eno who was an absolute pioneer of synthesizers and electronic music, and in fact probably invented the term 'ambient music'. Of course, he was a founding member of Roxy Music but went on later to become incredibly successful in his own right and especially as a producer, he produced almost all of the U2 albums - massive albums. But I'd been following him since he was an early member of Roxy Music and especially been guided by his approach to synthesizers, which was very esoteric and completely at odds with a lot of the nasty noises that were being produced in the 1980s, for example. And I thank him for that because it probably stopped me from making a lot of bad sonic mistakes.The producer I was using at the time was a friend of his and I found myself having a conversation with the producer about the song we were working on at the time - a song called Cross the Border - I had in mind Brian Eno's backing vocal style. I knew that the producer, Rhett Davies, had worked with Brian Eno. I turned up to Air Studios, another very famous studio in London, to do the vocal session and in came Brian Eno. So there was a moment where I was standing in the studio, standing next to Brian Eno who was singing my lyrics and my backing vocal line. That was a real moment for me because he was a real hero of mine.CAROL DUNCAN: At what point did you realise that you had been successful enough to truly pursue anything that you wanted to do?IVA DAVIES: I spent most of my career not quite believing that things would work. In fact, I remember very clearly - we'd been working for years and years, working around these pubs, the first album came out, and I remember the first royalty cheque turned up. The accountant for the management company asked me into the office and said, 'Well, here's the cheque for the Flowers album for you,' and I looked at it and I'd been broke for years. My parents had to keep paying the odd rent payment for me and so on. We weren't earning any money at all, the album had only just come out, and I saw this cheque and it was for $15,000.I looked at Gino, who I had lunch with today - same accountant, and I said, 'Gino. This is amazing. This is incredible. I know I'm just going to fritter this away. I know I'll never get any more money out of this business. What's the deposit on the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest house in Sydney? Well, I bought the cheapest house in Sydney with that deposit, but of course, it wasn't the last cent that I made out of the music business.But for many years, for a long time, I really didn't consider that it was going to last, that I was going to make any money out of it. It's that classic thing where, luckily my parents didn't call me on the phone and say, 'When are you going to get a proper job?' they were very supportive. I think I was the one secretly calling myself and saying, 'When are you going to get a proper job?'CAROL DUNCAN: What are you still learning?IVA DAVIES: I'm still learning technology because unfortunately, it won't sit still! The industry standard for recording is a system called Pro-Tools, you very possibly use it in the studio there and it's certainly in every recording studio in the world. I've been working with Pro-Tools for a very long time but, of course, like any other software, there's a new release of it every five minutes. So I'm actually getting to the stage when I really am going to have to run to catch up! So unfortunately at my age, I'm still having to learn technology because it's the basic tool of my trade and that's never going to stop.CAROL DUNCAN: Are you still as excited by it as you were in the mid-1970s when you and Keith Welsh started 'Flowers' and when you went and harassed your management to allow you to buy that first Fairlight for $32,000?IVA DAVIES: I think I take it a bit more for granted these days because things have exploded in the way that they have. You can imagine the climate in which a piece of technology like the Fairlight came out; it was just mind-numbing. It was unlike anything anybody could ever imagine, whereas I suppose every time there's a new release of Pro-Tools, it's got a couple of lovely new features but it is a development of something which has been around for much more than a decade now.However, having said that, there seems to be a whole new generation of software writers who are incredibly interested in music and incredibly interested in playing with sound, and these are the people who are coming up with all the new noise generating bits - soft synthesisers and all that sort of stuff. That's kind of where the interesting new area is.CAROL DUNCAN: And Keith Welsh has been on this whole journey with you?IVA DAVIES: Indeed. In the music industry the whole time. He and I have been working closely over the past three years and we've started playing again and we re-released the entire catalogue. We put out a compilation called 'White Heat' which is about to go platinum.CAROL DUNCAN: What would you want the young Iva Davies to know?IVA DAVIES: That's a good question! I think I probably did seize most opportunities that came my way so I wouldn't necessarily say, 'just go as fast as you can with every opportunity that you can', I probably would have said, 'Put more attention to the money and where the money is going and who's getting it!' As a forensic accountant, I'm a kind of 'overview guy' as opposed to a 'detail guy'.

In this episode I talk to Russell Morris, an Australian iconic legend. We talk about songwriting and Russell gives some great advice for anyone getting into songwriting. Russell have 5 Australian Top 10 singles in the 60’s and 70’s. To find out more about Russell and find out where he is performing check out his website: russellmorris.com.au To find out more about all my podcasts and who is coming up on future episodes check out my website becomeaguitaristtoday.com. Or on facebook Become A Guitarist Today with Adam Roach podcast. https://www.facebook.com/BecomeAGuitaristTodayWithAdamRoachPodcast/

Hermitude are an award-winning electronic production duo hailing from Sydney. Over the past 12 months their profile has exploded off the back of their Australian Music Prize-winning album HyperParadise. They have fast become one of Australia’s most in-demand touring acts as well as an increasingly busy international schedule.In September 2011 they released the summery monster single ‘Speak of the Devil’, landing it in the triple j Hottest 100 and earning them a j Award for Australian Music Video of the Year. The single was quickly snapped up internationally by Regal/Parlophone (UK).Their album HyperParadise charted in the Australian Top 40 winning an AIR Award for Best Dance/Electronic Release and picking up nominations for two ARIA Awards (Best Dance Release/ Best Video) among others.The duo released the Parallel Paradise Remix EP in June featuring Flume’s remix of HyperParadise. The tune has racked up millions of Youtube and Soundcloud plays and is certified platinum in Australia.After multiple sell-out tours and major festival appearances Hermitude have turned their attention to their growing international fanbase signing a global publishing deal with Sony/ATV and beginning work on their next album. TRACKLISTINGHermitude - Sloucho Darx (Hermitude VIP Remix)The Presets - Ghosts (Hermitude Trapped In Heaven Remix)Hermitude - All Of YouHermitude - Get In My LifeHermitude - The VillainHermitude - The HuntFlume - Holdin On (Hermitude Remix)Hermitude - Speak Of The DevilHermitude - HyperParadise

Hermitude are an award-winning electronic production duo hailing from Sydney. Over the past 12 months their profile has exploded off the back of their Australian Music Prize-winning album HyperParadise. They have fast become one of Australia’s most in-demand touring acts as well as an increasingly busy international schedule.In September 2011 they released the summery monster single ‘Speak of the Devil’, landing it in the triple j Hottest 100 and earning them a j Award for Australian Music Video of the Year. The single was quickly snapped up internationally by Regal/Parlophone (UK).Their album HyperParadise charted in the Australian Top 40 winning an AIR Award for Best Dance/Electronic Release and picking up nominations for two ARIA Awards (Best Dance Release/ Best Video) among others.The duo released the Parallel Paradise Remix EP in June featuring Flume’s remix of HyperParadise. The tune has racked up millions of Youtube and Soundcloud plays and is certified platinum in Australia.After multiple sell-out tours and major festival appearances Hermitude have turned their attention to their growing international fanbase signing a global publishing deal with Sony/ATV and beginning work on their next album. TRACKLISTINGHermitude - Sloucho Darx (Hermitude VIP Remix)The Presets - Ghosts (Hermitude Trapped In Heaven Remix)Hermitude - All Of YouHermitude - Get In My LifeHermitude - The VillainHermitude - The HuntFlume - Holdin On (Hermitude Remix)Hermitude - Speak Of The DevilHermitude - HyperParadise

Serge’s “Fighter Pilot” book coverIt takes a special breed to push an F18 out to the edge of the envelope, fly missions ranging from surface attack to dog fights and then blow off steam with your squadron mates. It’s certainly not Top Gun but it does make amazing fodder for a book that . . . → Read More: PCDU Episode 96: “Serge” – An Australian Top Gun

Fiona Horne is known in the USA, UK and Australia as a leading expert on Modern Witchcraft and as an accomplished television/radio host and best selling author. She is also an actor and rock singer. Fiona is the world’s most recognizable author on White Witchcraft. Her titles are published by Harper Collins, Random House, Simon & Schuster and Llewellyn. In May 2006 Fiona was invited to speak at Harvard University, USA, on Witchcraft and Paganism. Born in Australia, Fiona has been based in Los Angeles for the past 6 years. She was lead singer/songwriter for popular Australian Top 40 techno/rock group DEF FX, releasing three albums and touring locally and internationally. Fiona’s personal passions include herpetology (she is a licensed snake handler) travel and SCUBA diving. She is an expert diver and works regularly for the SCUBA accreditation organization PADI, hosting, demonstrating and doing voice over for their instructional videos, television and radio commercials including voicing the National Geographic/PADI Underwater Explorer DVD series. Fiona is also a licensed skydiver – 100 solo jumps and counting! Fiona’s charity is Project Aware – an international ocean conservation effort.