It’s a well-known fact that the pandemic has had a negative effect on many people’s mental health. In an effort to shed light on the situation, Support Act’s released a second series of Tune Ups, an intimate and hard-hitting video series on mental health, featuring some of the brightest names in Australian music.
The series spanned seven episodes which took place over seven weeks and featured The Teskey Brothers’ Brendon Love; country star Fanny Lumsden; multi-instrumentalist GFlip; hip-hop artists Ziggy Ramo and Barkaa; live music veteran Sahara Herald, Tour Director of Frontier Touring; and longtime roadie and CrewCare co-founder Howard “Weird” Freeman.
Each episode explored the subject’s personal mental health journeys and, in some cases, how the isolation of the pandemic has affected their situation. “Rock bottom teaches you things mountaintops never will,” shared Barkaa in her episode.
“I always had to ignore my headspace to a point because I was looking after other people; that was my job, was to keep the team together that I built,” Howard Freeman shared. “It just became part of your nature to absorb the bullets you took. You never went to have them removed, so people never asked for help.
The series began on March 4 and is now completed. It took place with support from the Australian Government through the Office for the Arts, Brag Media, and YouTube.
Clive Miller, the CEO of Support Act, said the ‘Tune Ups’ series was not intended “to sensationalise, but to show people they are not alone and that there is support available”.
“Now more than ever we need to ensure that conversations around mental health happen publicly and regularly – especially in the music industry, which sees alarming rates of mental illness persisting.”
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Support Act is “working with both individuals and the industry to remove stigma and put in place strategies to increase support and resilience,” Miller continues. “Including delivering mental health first aid training, increasing capacity of our Wellbeing Helpline, and developing a new online mental health portal with critical music industry specific resources.
These programs, he explains, “are potentially life-saving.”
Below you can read indepth feature’s which we’ve written for each of the seven episodes.
Watch each episode at supportact.org.au/tune-ups.
For more on this topic, head to The Industry Observer:
Watch ‘You & I’ by G Flip:
