The rock festival where today’s unknowns could be tomorrow’s headliners

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You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. In their short life, fledgling Melbourne rockers Salmon Sisters have rehearsed…

In their short life, fledgling Melbourne rockers Salmon Sisters have rehearsed in all manner of spaces. “We had a shed, a bedroom, a studio in an old lingerie factory, then we had none of them for a while,” says 19-year-old singer Delilah Reynolds.

Eventually, they found a garage – which is just as well, as this summer they will be one of the headline acts of Garage Band, a showcase of up-and-coming rock music at Federation Square.

Announced on Thursday as part of the Open Air at the Square summer program, Garage Band will bring together 20 acts – including headliners The Gnomes – across four hours and three stages in an event that is equal parts professional leg-up, community building exercise, and party.

The brainchild of musician/curator/creative director JOF (aka Joseph O’Farrell), it was born in 2021 as part of the Always Live program conceived to reboot the local music scene after COVID.

“I was living in an apartment block in Fairfield at the time, and this young punk band had moved upstairs, and I watched them for a year not being able to play a gig,” he recalls of the idea’s origins. “They were awesome people, and I just thought, ‘What if I make an event that could engage young musicians to play again, in the most public space possible, and they got to connect with a whole heap of other people their age?’”

What it’s not, he insists, is a battle of the bands, because its focus is on collaboration and connection rather than competition.

“It was about building a peer group, and using that as a launching pad so they can record music together, tour together, meet each other,” says JOF. “It was about rebuilding a music scene for young people who hadn’t had the chance to go out in public and play gigs for a whole heap of reasons, but mostly because they’d been locked down.”

Each band gets to play just one song, but they also walk away with a professionally shot video of their performance, a vital aid for promotion, booking future gigs and building a fan base.

Just as…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Sydney Morning Herald. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.