Tash Sultana: From The Streets Of Melbourne To Stages Around The World

Dara Munnis – Tash Sultana
Inhabited by music

Charlotte Gaurichon, director of French promoter and booking agency Caramba, can quickly sum up what a lot of people have expressed after seeing Tash Sultana perform live: “This young artist is just amazing. She is inhabited by music in a way you have rarely seen.” 

Tash Sultana is a 23-year-old multi-instrumentalist and singer from Melbourne, Australia, who started playing the guitar aged 3.  She’s since taught herself to play more than 15 different instruments, including the trumpet, bass, drums, keys, as well as the Arabian oud. Questioned about instruments she couldn’t play but would love to be able to, she replied: “Many. And many.”

She fuses all of it live on stage with the help of a loop station and her remarkable voice, which ranges between earthy chant and clean war cry. Sultana started out playing open-mic nights on a fake ID and busking on the streets of Melbourne. Pat Pierce of Melbourne-based band the Pierce Brothers heard her play and was raving about her to his manager Regan Lethbridge, co-founder of Lemon Tree Music.

– A strong team
From left: Regan Lethbridge, Jaddan Comerford and Tash Sultana

“I first started booking Tash as an agent in early 2014,” Lethbridge remembers. “We built a really solid trust and it evolved into management in early 2016 under Lemon Tree Music. Tash was booked on some Pierce Brothers supports and it all started there. I still remember the first meeting very well and remind myself daily where it all started and never to take anything for granted.

“I love working with former buskers as their work ethic is like nothing I’ve seen and they live and breathe music. I loved Tash’s unique vision and the challenge of bringing that to life with a truly great global team.”

A team that includes co-manager in the U.S. Jaddan Comerford, CEO and founder of Unified Music Group, who saw Sultana for the first time at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. He said, “Regan had called me so excited about Tash so I went along to the show to meet Tash and see the show for myself. It was a mid-week show and my wife Rachael had to leave early as she had an early morning flight the next day. She told me not to come home until we were working with Tash.”

He added, “Because Tash comes from a busking background there is that rawness in each performance and you can tell that Tash is loving every second of being on the stage and the audience are right there with her.”

“Live is real,” Sultana said. “If you kill it, it’s real. If you fuck it up, it’s real. In the studio, you get a million takes to make it feel perfect, I try to capture the live feeling but it takes months sometimes. Other times, it’s one take.”

Paradigm Talent Agency joined Sultana’s global team in 2016, represented by Jackie Nalpant, Rob Zifarelli and Aaron Pinkus, prior to seeing any live performances. The videos of Sultana playing on the streets of Melbourne were enough to convince them. 

They first saw Tash Sultana on stage in early 2017, when she debuted in North America playing a run of 300-capacity sold-out shows. “Jackie, [Aaron] Pinkus and I first saw Tash in NYC at the Mercury Lounge along with 250 fans. It was an absolutely electric night. I think I speak for everyone who saw these early shows that we all knew that Tash was an extremely special talent; a dynamo,” Zifarelli said.

Then came Toronto in September 2017, which Zifarelli remembers well: “Two decades into my agent career I have never been in a situation where we had booked an artist into one of the usual first-play venues in Toronto, the 500-capacity Legendary Horseshoe Tavern. It’s one of those ‘rite of passage’ type venues and we thought it was a good first play, albeit a little big.

“But immediately after the onsale, it became obvious that we were going to have to upgrade the room, which we did quickly and moved to the Opera House at 900 capacity. Remarkably, the show continued to sell very well and much to everyone’s pleasant surprise, sold out shortly after moving and we had to move the show again, this time to the Danforth Music Hall. Tash sold that out too, settling on 1,450 sold out tickets.”

Toronto is also where Sultana has played one of her biggest headline shows to date, Aug. 7. “6000 people at Echo Beach. The show got rained out in one of the worst storms they’d had in history. The entire stage collapsed. We ruined thousands of dollars of equipment and camera gear. But the crowd stayed literally until everything fell apart and we all had to evacuate,” Tash said.

This year’s Coachella show was another “big moment,” according to Comerford. “To see Tash own the stage and pull a big crowd was a huge moment in the lead up to the album release.”

Dara Munnis – A one person band
Tash Sultana pulls out all the stops at live shows

Sultana’s debut Flow State dropped Aug. 31, reaching No. 2 in Australia, just behind Eminem’s surprise album Kamikaze. It the U.S., it went to No. 4 on Billboard’s alternative album chart and No. 5 on the rock album charts.

“The album is tracking well across all streaming services. Because the music doesn’t sit under one specific genre it’s very accessible for most playlists, anything from ‘Chill’ lists over to the more ‘Rock’ focused lists,” Comerford said.

The streaming figures also help Sultana’s team discover new markets. “Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand & Turkey have all surprised us with their numbers. The U.S. has always been number one, plus Australia and Europe are strong as well,” said Lethbridge.

In the Bay Area, Tash Sultana went from 350 tickets at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco at the beginning of last year to a sold-out Fillmore eight months later. This November, as part of her latest U.S. run, she sold out two nights at the Fox Theatre in Oakland with a combined 5,600 tickets sold.

Sultana’s last show in the States this year was at The Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles, Dec. 1, before she returns to Australia, where she’ll be touring through March, with a few New Zealand dates in between. 

Venue capacities range from 3,000 to 5,000 and more. The plan for next year is to tour the Western Hemisphere in three blocks, one in spring and two in fall, Nalpant explained. Dates at Shaky Knees Festival 2019, and several European festivals and venues in June/July have already been set, including iconic places such as London’s Alexandra Palace or Munich’s Zenith. Another priority is to return to South America in order to follow up on successful Lollapalooza appearances this year.

Zifarelli said, festival shows were “an opportunity to play outside of the core audience. It’s a chance to convert what we hope is the convertible. Tash playing in these settings, just one person on stage with no backing track, producing each song in layers through looping and reminding everyone what real multi-instrumental talent looks like. Thus far, all of these amazing opportunities have been wins.”

Lethbridge added, “We are looking well ahead to Nov. 2020 [in terms of] touring globally, and Tash has starting writing album number two. That will be ready when it’s ready but it’s an incredibly exciting time.

So far, all that exists of the new album is “a bunch of acoustic songs,” according to Sultana, who won’t let all the praise from her team and fans get to her head. “I don’t reckon I’m anywhere near as good as I want to be. I’m far off, so I reckon I probably need to practice more.”