Patrick Balfe works in the Australian indie music scene, booking live houses and music festivals, managing local bands and helping musicians tour. Patrick recently moved to Tokyo from Brisbane, Australia. Since moving, Patrick has continued his work with Australian music but hopes to find new opportunities in Tokyo as well - an endeavour he started when he helped orchestrate Brisbane band Babaganouj's first tour of Japan in October 2017.

This is a short reflection by Patrick on what he loves about working in music and the music scene in Brisbane...

Brisbane is a fairly small city compared to Sydney and Melbourne and as a result has a small but very interconnected and supportive music community. Many Brisbane musicians play in more than one band, film and direct each other’s video clips, design each other’s posters and produce each other’s music. A popular Brisbane musician, Jeremy Neale, recently said about the Brisbane indie music scene: "Being involved in music is one of the ways I relate to community and community is such an important thing to me. A lot of things can be fickle in the biz but the friendships are the real deal and are the foundations of a great society. I feel really lucky to be able to create and share in this very community. What a time to be alive!"

Brisbane indie music is known for its unique sense of humour, many local musicians write and perform music in a way that is ironic and tongue in cheek as a creative method to address sensitive and important issues such as mental health, love and relationships. One of my favourite Brisbane musicians performs 80s pop music as his alter-ego “Simi Lacroix”. His name comes from the word simulacrum which means “an unsatisfactory image or substitute”. I think this is a great example of the sense of humour that many Brisbane musicians have.

To give you an idea of how new music flourishes in Brisbane, when I first moved to Brisbane some of my friends were organising back yard parties where bands would perform. Hundreds of people used to come to these parties and climb onto the roof and watch their friends play. I watched a band called The Belligerents play one of their first ever shows at one of my friends’ parties in 2010 and now The Belligerents are selling out shows all over Australia. These parties were a great way for me to discover new bands and meet people who were passionate about the Brisbane indie music scene.

In early 2015 I started running The Foundry live house in the Brisbane entertainment district - a job that Jeremy Neale kindly referred me for and I was happy to get. On our opening night, the crowd was dancing so hard that the floor nearly collapsed and we had to cancel the headline band half way through their set to evacuate the building! After that it took several months to replace the floor and I was worried that the venue would never open again. Thankfully we reopened the venue in late 2015 and since then I’ve seen many of my favourite indie bands perform there. We have also been lucky to host several national and international musicians as they pass through Brisbane. Above the live house, the Foundry has 15 office spaces, which are leased to local bands, music and arts-based companies. I think that having these companies all together in one building has helped to strengthen the music and arts community in Brisbane, as many people are able to collaborate and support each other on the projects that they’re working on. I’m very grateful to be in a position where I’m able to support young, emerging artists to continue to develop the Brisbane indie music community into the future. I think that Brisbane has a lot to offer in terms of unique, artistic talent and I’m looking forward to seeing what the future has to offer.

Patrick Balfe

Links:

Jeremy Neale:
https://www.facebook.com/jnealemusic/

Simi Lacroix:
https://www.facebook.com/similacroix/

The Belligerents
https://www.facebook.com/thebelligerents/

The Foundry
https://thefoundry.net.au/

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