The Hot Licks Festival

A friend of mine told me that he was playing in a little festival called The Hot Licks Festival in Mount Gambier, 4 hours in between Melbourne and Adelaide. The lineup is mostly local bands in Melbourne. When he told me that one of his friends Riley Ellard is running the festival, I contacted her to find out just why she has decided to undertake such a massive project on her own. The whole vibe of DIY initiative and going out to see new local bands is something that we promote strongly here at whothehell.net . So this is what she had to say:

The festival was initially conceived based on my own experiences growing up in Mount Gambier and really craving a stronger arts presence in the region. The community is extremely sports-focussed and in terms of accessing live music, performance, contemporary art, photography, e.t.c. you are very much at a disadvantage. Its a sentiment that’s definitely been echoed by the majority of young people from the region – there are very few activities for young people and a strong sense of sociocultural hardship. When I moved to Melbourne to study I realised just how completely divorced rural and regional areas tend to be from the creative arts, particularly the kind of flourishing underground music scene that exists in Melbourne.

The original idea was to start taking bands down to the region to do shows – something akin to a $5 gig at The Tote – and try and make live music more accessible. Although kids in the region will sometimes travel to the city for kind of grand-scale arena shows with international artists or the larger festivals like Big Day Out, they really have no way of experiencing those very intimate, grassroots gigs where you make a gold coin donation on the door and get that sense of being a part of something as you charter the growth of a band from when they first start playing.

The bands were chosen with that concept in mind and we very deliberately shied away from approaching more prominent or recognised artists. Somewhat unexpectedly all the bands said yes straight away, the city council jumped on board by awarding us a permit to hold the event in the Valley Lakes area and so Hot Licks was born.

Its definitely been a struggle to start the event with no real infrastructure in terms of existing sponsors or funding – we’ve had some really great feedback from potential sponsors who want to be involved in future events, but this first one has very much been built from scratch. Particularly in Melbourne we’ve received overwhelming support – graphic design and web design has all been done for free and the bands have really risen to the occasion by helping with poster runs.

The biggest issue has been that this is quite a novel event for the Mount Gambier community so we’ve had some barriers in terms of people getting on board – surprisingly its been older people in the community who have really supported the project, probably because there were similar events when they were younger and in the last couple of decades there’s been a real lull. We’ll be going down with the bands early Friday to do some surprise guerilla shows and spread our enthusiasm, so there should be a real sense of anticipation come Saturday morning.

Riley.

www.hotlicksfestival.com.au