Australia: Nick Cave Statue, Perth Arena Naming Rights; Paul McCartney, Ed Sheeran Lead Helpmann Awards Noms

Sheeran (Frontier Touring) and McCartney (Frontier Touring, MPL, Marshall Arts) are up for best international contemporary concert. Also included in the category are Cécile McLorin Salvant (Adelaide Festival) and Underworld (Sydney Opera House Presents).

Midnight Oil vie against Gang of  Youths  (Live Nation),  Armand  van  Helden for his Symphonica collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Frontier Touring) and Gotye for his tribute to  Jean-Jacques  Perrey at the Sydney Festival and Mona Foma festival for best Australian contemporary concert.

Finalists for best contemporary music festival are CMC Rocks Queensland 2018 (Chugg Entertainment &  Rob Potts Entertainment Edge), St. Jerome’s Laneway 2018 (Lunatic Entertainment & Laneway Presents), Mona Foma (MONA) and WOMADelaide (Womadelaide Foundation).

The Sydney-based awards also cover musicals, comedy, opera and classical music, theatre, ballet, dance and physical theatre, presentations for children, regional touring and cabaret. The live performance industry shifts 18.4 million tix a year, says Evelyn Richardson, chief executive of Live Performance Australia which stages the event.

This year the awards are divided into two nights.  Act 1, as it is called, on July 15 at Sydney Town Hall, is a sit-down cocktail event for creative, designer and supporting roles. Act 2 on July 16 at the Capitol Theatre, covers the major awards and staged on the set of Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical. “Two shorter shows enables us to better highlight the artistry and excellence in our dynamic live performance industry,” Richardson explains.

Six years after it opened, the 15,500-capacity Perth Arena is set for a name change to RAC Arena, reported The Sunday Times, which said the venue is about to announce a five-year deal $10 million deal with road safety association RAC WA.

The previous West Australian government, under whose watch the arena opened, had insisted that the venue retain the “Perth” in its name for tourism reasons. The Sunday Times says it paid arena operator AEG Ogden almost $8 million since 2012 as compensation for not being able to sell naming rights. That deal expires end of June.

Adelaide live music venue Fowler’s Live is tapping on the existing sister city relationship between its city and Austin, Texas, to work with a number of like-minded venues. Reps met with the Austin Music Venue Trust at South By Southwest in March. So far three venues are willing to participate in initiatives as musician exchanges, venue collaborations and live streaming of simultaneous gigs.

Fowler’s Live founder and managing director Peter Darwin says, “Part of our mission is to do things differently, and provide professional services that assist our industry to develop and grow. Technology ischanging the way we experience live performances, and we want to raise the bar in how we can impact the live music experience. It makes perfect sense to build on Adelaide’s sister city relationship with Austin for the benefit of (the state of) South Australia’s music.”

A crowd-funding campaign has begun to raise A$200,000 ($148,418) for a larger-than-life bronze statue of Nick Cave. It is being driven by the Warracknabeal Arts Council.  Warracknabeal is a tiny town in the wheatbelt region of the state of Victoria with a population of 2,754, and where the future Bad Seeds leader was born September 1957.

The idea of the statue started in the 1990s, more as an in-joke, by one-time Bad Seeds manager Rayner Jesson. Blueprints show the performer astride a rearing horse, wearing nothing more than a loincloth and holding up a flaming torch. 

Cave himself has described it as “a rather beautiful piece of homo-erotic art.” Warracknabeal thinks it’s time to get the statue up as more tourists visit regional Victoria.