The Mushroom Group recently celebrated its 40 years of contributing to the music industry with a complete visual rebrand and “repositioning” of its more than 20 subsidies, including Executive Chairman Michael Gudinski promoting his son Matt to the role of Executive Director during an invite-only industry launch featuring live performances from Mushroom’s best and brightest.
Under a swish new logo, the 40th birthday celebrations also extended to a one-off live show dubbed the Mushroom Free For All, a free event featuring live performances from Mushroom associates Adalita, Bleeding Knees Club, DZ Deathrays, Stonefield, SURES and World’s End Press, all taking to the stage at Melbourne’s Thousand £ Bend earlier in the month.
Now some interesting information has turned up that suggests part of the new-look Mushroom’s rebranding and future plans could include the launch of a new music festival.
Something called the Smokescreen Music Festival is listed as a creative trademark of Mushroom Marketing PTY LTD in the listings from Intellectual Property In Australia’s official website, which was lodged at the tail-end of 2012, on the 25th November.
The domain name, smokescreenmusicfestival.com.au has also been registered to a subsidiary of Mushroom Group, and currently displays a “coming soon” message.
Additionally, some deeper digging reveals that Mushroom has earned a Federal Government grant from the Department of Health & Aging, with a grants report from the department listing funds of $236,500 towards Mushroom Marketing PTY LTD for “sponsorship of Smokescreen Music Festival National Tobacco Campaign.”
The $236,500 contract started on the 11th January and is set to conclude at the end of August, with the grant funding location listed as “Various” and listed as a national grant.
The Smokescreen Music Festival is listed as a creative trademark of Mushroom Marketing PTY LTDIts speculation at this point with such information, but the signs seem to point towards a new music festival designed to promote awareness over tobacco with the backing of a government grant under the name Smokescreen.
Mushroom certainly has the roster and connections to pull off such an event, with the industry launch for their February rebranding featuring sets from popular acts The Rubens, British India, Snakadaktal, Club Feet, Owl Eyes, newer signees to the Mushroom family such as City Calm Down and Vance Joy; as well as enough pulling power to nab a closing slot from UK band-of-the-moment, Alt-J.
It wouldn’t mark the first time that Mushroom and Michael Gudinski have entered the music festival market either. Gudinski was a key figure in putting together the 2009 Sound Relief charity concerts.
Held simultaneously at the Melbourne and Sydney Cricket Grounds, Sound Relief managed to raise more than $10 million in relief for victims of the Black Saturday bushfires and Queensland floods with an all-star lineup that included Midnight Oil, Split Enz, Icehouse, Silverchair, You Am I, and international stars Coldplay and Kings of Leon.
The Mushroom moguls’ previous festival venture however, working with fellow Aussie promoters Michael Coppell and Michael Chugg, was less successful; the ill-fated Alternative Nation touring festival.
Conceived as an alternative to the Big Day Out, the one-day festival was to take place over the long weekend of April, 1995 in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, but the festivals suffered when headline acts Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple Pilots both withdrew from the event, resulting in slow ticket sales despite replacement Lou Reed.
The lineup was impressive, including Faith No More, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Violent Femmes, Ice-T, The Flaming Lips, The Prodigy, and more international acts rubbing shoulders with locals like Regurgitator, Powderfinger, Spiderbait, Def Fx (and a host of other lost-to-time alt-rock acts), but all three legs were marred by restrictive alcohol problems and torrential rains, with Sydney’s Eastern Creek Raceway turned into a mud-pit.
Some deeper digging reveals that Mushroom has earned a Federal Government grant from the Department of Health & Aging…Nearly two decades on, Mushroom has certainly learned from the mistakes of its initial festival venture, as proven by the storming success of the Sound Relief concerts, and has proven far more savvy by remaining out of the festival market thus far – but perhaps the clues of Smokescreen Music Festival means thats set to change.
Fellow Aussie music industry icon Michael Coppel, head of Live Nation Australia, was equally reticent to enter the competitive festival market, recently saying, “there’s so many festivals now, the only way you get a lineup is to pay more money than the other guy. I just don’t think that’s a basis of doing a festival.”
“The festivals that have strength are the ones that kept a connection with the key idea, whether it’s Stereosonic with dance music, or Soundwave with hard rock and heavy metal. And regional festivals like Splendour or Falls, they have a bedrock idea that they’ve kept faith with.”
But Coppel and Live Nation obviously found their niche, announcing the hip hop themed festival, Movement, with a lineup curated by the iconic Nas for its inaugural launch and securing him for the role until 2015.
Despite Australia’s patchy history with hip hop tours and festivals – such as Heatwave festival disintegrating before people’s eyes and Supafest getting in hot water with their creditors with debts of $2 million – Live Nation’s considerable finances, pulling power, and experience are looking far more certain to succeed where other attempts to capitalise on the hip hop market have (dismally) failed.
Could Mushroom be looking to tap their own ‘niche’ with the Smokescreen Music Festival by using it as a platform for a National Health Campaign? More details when they surface.
