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Ben Skinner

Live music gatekeepers

Updated: Jan 20



In early 2022 I engaged four lower Blue Mountains pubs to see if I could produce some live music events for them. I was met with disinterest, represented through a lack of responding to emails, a potential lack of messages being passed on from staff to key decision makers, to outright rejection. Having realized that it would be futile to keep going down that road, I decided to try to put on my own live music events using community halls. The major provider of such halls is Blue Mountains City Council. I engaged them in early May 2023. Six months, dozens of emails, numerous visits to the proposed venue with no Council staffer accompanying (and being given the wrong key), and Council will still not permit me to use their venue. It was a case of one step forward, two steps back – I would fill out pages and pages of paperwork as part of the events proposal process and would be met with issue after issue. These problems were not dealt with efficiently – rather than make a phone call to resolve issues in a timely manner, I would receive a string of emails presenting new problems with my application to resolve. This, combined with NSW Police presenting problems of their own as far as requiring a costly dedicated Responsible Service of Alcohol marshal despite the proposed event’s capacity being 75 people, has meant that it in its current state the lower Blue Mountains will be unlikely to have live music events on a consistent basis.

Inefficient communications with Council staffer.

The effects of this are significant for the mental health of any who might like to watch live music. Without such events, it is difficult for strangers to meet – the current alternative is online dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, which from my personal experience has a low success rate of matching with potential partners and presents mental health risks of their own as far as potential rejection or abuse from other platform users.

There is a gaping hole in the market for a vibrant live music scene west of Sydney. The closest “nightclub” venue to the Blue Mountains is Panthers Penrith. They consistently have live music playing with a dancefloor on Friday and Saturday nights, but in my experience, it is rarely new music, which would add an extra level of excitement and help nourish local musical artistry. Panthers is also barely within walking distance of the Western Sydney train line and thus it’s a logistical nightmare getting there unless via personal vehicle, which contributes to a higher risk of drunk driving.

About 40 kilometres west of Blaxland, where I proposed to hold my most recent live music event, is the tourist town of Katoomba, that brings visitors from all over the world due to its natural splendour. Station Bar right by Katoomba’s train station has as far as I’m aware been the only venue in the entire Blue Mountains that has consistently put on live music, a sad state for a region that has a population of almost 80,000 people. There are other live music venues in the upper Mountains area like the Baroque room, but events there are sporadic. Sporadic events are ok but are less than ideal, as not having to check whether events are on and most likely having to buy tickets to attend is not as easy or welcoming of newcomers as consistent live music events are.

Pub licensees are potentially hamstrung in running live music events due to liquor licensing laws.

I have been told that a potential reason for local pubs not wanting me to put on live music events for them is because it would bring a bigger alcohol-consuming crowd, which would heighten the risk of potential liquor licensing infringements. The current policy for liquor licensing breaches in the Australia state of NSW is a demerit points scheme, where four demerit points disqualifies the licensee. A demerit point can be earnt by permitting intoxication or “engaging in conduct or any activity or promotion that results in patrons engaging in irresponsible, rapid, or excessive consumption of liquor”. Could this be targeting live music events? The definition of intoxication includes someone being “overly friendly” or “not understanding normal conversation” – a tad subjective. Shouldn’t the onus for addressing bad behaviour be on security to evict troublesome patrons, police to arrest anti-socials and our rehabilitation centres ironing out associated mental health issues? Why should the licensee bear responsibility for people who can’t handle their drink? This lopsided arrangement might hamper the licensee’s willingness to take on rowdier crowds associated with live music events. The result of this risk aversion from the pub licensee is a sterile community culture, in which the primary pastime to engage in of a night time at a pub is to play the pokies or have a smoke outside, or not go out at all, which contributes to social isolation. “13% of the NSW adult population has developed a new mental health issue since the start of the (Covid) pandemic” according to the Mental Health Coordinating Council. People will be unlikely to venture out to improve their mental health post Covid lockdown if there’s not much fun to be had.

Opening a nightclub of your own by leasing a commercial space is not easy. The average weekly rent for a medium-sized commercial property of 150 square metres in the lower Mountains hub of Springwood is $1500. I’ve found a commercial space in Springwood for a potential bar that is a third of that size for a third of the rent. Unfortunately the land owner refuses to give their contact details in order for me to process a Council-mandated Development Application. I’ll be following up on this in another video about landowners hiding behind real estate agents, so subscribe to my page here or visit my website’s mailing list to be notified of new uploads.


The development application process to establish a business could be far more efficient.

The Development Application itself apparently takes three months on average to process. It involves the submission of a littany of documents. There is a clear trend here that Council do not want to efficiently process anything. Why should an entrepreneur have to wait three months to be permitted to start renovating a space for a bar when Council could send out a staffer to inspect the property and make a judgement on the plan’s viability right then and there? There is also a Community consulting process involved – as far as I’m concerned, as long as a nightlife venue with a basic liquor license doesn’t breach Council’s noise regulation curfews and abides by all relevant laws, it would be an infringement upon liberty to deny the enterprise’s existence. We are burdened with bureaucratic red tape to the point where we have atleast ten commercial properties in Springwood vacant, where landlords and gatekeeping Council mire potential tenants in paperwork and apathy.

In 2020, during a Covid lockdown period, I tried to plan large-sized music festivals through Blue Mountains Council. I’d provide plans for various large grassy venues for such events with encouragement from Council, only to have those proposals knocked on the head, so I’d have to divert energy to another potential venue. This process repeated itself atleast four times, before I gave up. So no matter the scale, our local governing body is inefficient in its planning process.

The city of Austin in Texas has been “doubling in population every 25 years”, attracting big business and celebrities who want to escape the overarching bureaucracy of traditional wealthy hotpots like Los Angeles. It attracts people in part because of it’s reported status as “The Live Music Capital of the World”. It also relies heavily on property tax rather than income tax, meaning that the public coffers are swelled with contributions from land owners rather than workers, incentivizing land owners to be productive with their land rather than squander it. If such a policy was introduced to a jurisdiction such as the Blue Mountains, the number of vacant commercial spaces could reduce as landowners would not want to risk paying tax with no income because they charge prohibitively expensive rents. They might also campaign for a more efficient planning process.

The lack of fun and opportunities for a better life in the Blue Mountains leads to people moving away - physical distance creates emotional distance.

Young people tend to move away from the Blue Mountains once they realise that there are more exciting prospects elsewhere. I polled 20 of my fellow Class of 2013 high school alumni – 90% of them say they don’t live in the Blue Mountains anymore. This is a significant brain drain from the region, in which people who have grown up in the area move to University towns like Wollongong, Newcastle, Bathurst or Sydney in order to meet new people, have fun and improve their future. The downside of this is that they physically distance themselves from their original community, fracturing relationships. Western Sydney University, the closest university to the Mountains, is a less than ideal place to study – you have to catch two trains and a bus to get to its Kingswood campus, that is otherwise a 20 minute drive from Blaxland. It is also misleading in its marketing to students – I enrolled in journalism school at the university allured by their TV production studio, which promptly shut down the year I enrolled. It has a 2.7 rating out of five from 180 votes on UniversityReviews.com and is similar to other Australian universities in that it’s HECS debt on educational loans “indexes”, meaning the debt grows in value over time if unpaid, something that I do not recall being mentioned when I was enrolling. If you want to get an analysis of that issue, again consider subscribing to my page and website.

NSW Police have also shown a lack of interest in helping live music events happen in the Blue Mountains. Event management plans have been met with combativeness. Multiple police officers have been engaged to deal with a single event organizer. Contacting said individual police officers is made difficult due to phone lines being directed to police stations rather than the police officers themselves. Emails can take a long time to get responded to. I get the sense that there is a lack of punctuality and interest from our institutions to make our community a more enjoyable place to live.

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