ORIGINS: Narellan, NSW
GENRE: Alternative, Punk
YEARS ACTIVE: 1990s-2010s
SUMMARY: Josh Kiff first became involved in the Sydney music scene through his local music promotions project I Love Me Productions, which he co-founded with Craig New (Meaneither). This later led to the release of some compilation CDs. Kiff went on to write the punk/hardcore/ska column Skunk for the street press paper Revolver (later called The Brag). After this, Kiff worked as a promoter for the Cambridge Hotel and helped to build the company Moshtix into the powerhouse it is today.
ORAL HISTORY - provided by Josh Kiff in conversation with Noise Levels, 2024
Background
I was just a kid who loved music and compilation CDs. My cousin is 4 years older than me. In 1988 she gave me a tape copy of 1927's ...Ish and told me to learn every word. With her being an older cousin and all, I did as any 10 year-old would do, I became obsessed with 1927. It was a good introduction to music. Gary Frost from 1927 was also in Moving Pictures and he wrote the song 'What About Me?' so I learned about musical connections. I still love 1927 - wish the original lineup would get back together! This all led to other Aussie bands such as Boom Crash Opera, INXS, etc.
Then the '90s rolled around and I got into Nirvana and then punk bands,
hardcore bands, local bands, etc. The usual trajectory. I'd go to
Phantom Records all the time. My friends were in bands (EG. Meaneither) so I wanted to do a comp.
Shows
I got together with some friends and we put on local shows in Campbelltown with bands like Peabody, Quadbox, etc. People kept mentioning Meaneither and their bassist Craig New. I saw them, loved them. They were funk rock - a band around seven years ahead of their time. I went to see if I could get Meaneither to play a show and met Craig - we became inseparable at shows for the next 5 years. Craig was well-connected and I'm sure he also loved having someone he could share his knowledge with. The shows we put on had the name 'I Love Me Productions'. Stupid name, but we knew this guy who loved himself to death, so we did it to have an inside joke.
It wasn't challenging to put on local shows - kids wanted to see bands then. We rented a Youth Centre and we looked after it, so they let us do more shows. 100 people would show up, then 150, etc. I ended doing a boat cruise before they were a thing, with another friend, and the bands were Game Over, Crettins Puddle, Quadbox. It was a success. Security wasn't really needed back in the mid-'90s for these sorts of shows - we did security ourselves. Kids had nothing to do in those days as the internet was very new and most could barely afford it. The only mobiles were Nokia 5110s with 20c or 50c SMS messages. It was expensive.
Ben, who was also part of I Love Me Productions, was the guitarist of this band who started off sounding like Superchunk but soon turned into hardcore punk - they were called Irrelevant and they got signed to Resist Records.
Compilation CDs
It was the late '90s and Adrian
Bull had Blind Records and worked at Phantom Records. I was in Phantom Records three times a week. I became friends with Adrian and I told him I
wanted to do a compilation with some friends' bands. He said if I added some of his bands to
it we'd do it together; he offered to release it. The comp was called Move Along... Nothing to See Here. A guy named Brett Fusedale did the artwork - he'd done some local bands' artwork and we knew each other through mIRC. He agreed to do it and it came out different to anything else out there and I liked the idea of that.
When we released it I was amazed people bought it. It was in shops, people in bands bigger than the bands I knew liked it. It sold pretty well and we did a few
pressings. I felt a bit more connected to the scene even though I was not on the musician/playing side of things.
As the 2000s rolled around I wanted to do another comp. I had been friends with Below Par Records and I was friends with more punk bands by this point. I asked Jay from Frenzal Rhomb if I could have a track and he gave me 'Bucket Bong' before it was released on the album San Souci. I quickly put together a comp with all my favourite punk bands, got Revolver to let me use their logo and promote it in the paper, and Below Par then filled out the rest of the comp with their roster of bands. This comp was called Skunk, after the Revolver punk/hardcore column.
The comp and the putting on shows led to me writing the punk/hardcore column in Revolver/The Brag for almost a decade (pretty much all of my 20s), which also led to me running a venue (the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle), which later led me to join a new company my friend started in his bedroom called Moshtix. We grew Moshtix from nothing to being sold to News Ltd. And it all started with the comp.
Promoting and Writing
So, backtracking - Mandy was doing the weekly Skunk column in Revolver but she was based in Melbourne, I think. Someone said it wasn't working and Craig New worked at Revolver so I said I'd give it a shot. He made me write a bunch of columns unpublished so he could make sure I'd do it week-in, week-out. I never wanted to let Craig down - by that time there were people who thought I was Craig's younger brother because we were at so many gigs together. We'd do two to three gigs a night if we could. We had to see everyone. Anyway, I wrote hundreds of those columns for Revolver.
When my fiance and I moved to Nelson Bay my life got a bit up-ended. Her parents owned a holiday park and I started working there - I had free time and soon the only real venue in Newcastle called me in for a meeting. This was The Cambridge Hotel, which had been an iconic venue in the '80s and early '90s. I think it was Silverchair's first pub venue but it had gone into decline. By the early 2000s a lot of bands avoided Newcastle. A new licensee came in, hired me, and asked me to make The Cambridge Hotel popular again.
So I did.
Everyone laughed at me - all the promoters in the Sydney. I got told it would fail, Newcastle was a dump, they'd book shows with me, etc., etc. Local promoters threatened me because they thought they owned the scene. It was pretty comical. I just ignored everyone and figured if big acts wouldn't play then I'd just build up the local scene instead. Back then in Newie, bands played only with their mates. So I started mixing up the line-ups. Bands hated it but wanted to play shows.
Then the oddest thing happened. People started seeing new bands on diverse lineups. These bands started growing their fanbases locally. We'd do Uni-Wednesdays - cheap drinks and all that. Three bands, free entry. Pretty soon 200+ people a week were coming to see local bands. The Silverchair guys would show up and I was amazed. The Cambridge started doing really well. We'd have local bands doing well, audiences grew. The agencies who laughed at me now wanted their bands on the bills. I didn't need and there were threats, like "If you won't put this band on, we'll take a bigger band away from you." Certain booking agents used to love intimidation. They are still around today, so it works. It's just not my thing though. It's the thing I grew tired of over time.
Others were amazing - Graham from Resist would put me through every tour. I'd go out of my way to pump those shows, especially for the promoters who got behind me early. We had lots of sold out shows. We had a very young Parkway Drive play one of their early (if not the first) shows. They'd play over and over with us. Frenzal would play regularly, the Butterfly Effect as well. All these bands could have played bigger rooms in town like the Uni or the Workers' Club but I think they liked the Cambridge as a venue. Most would play two shows with us - an All Ages and then an 18+. The fact that these bands would do Newcastle on a weekend date (which was usually reserved for major city shows) was great!
I made friends with the guys behind a new festival - Groovin' the Moo. We sponsored stuff, did parties for them. It was great times. I ended needing to sell tickets pre-sale even for local shows. It was time consuming to get tickets printed. One day this guy, Hamish, turned up from a new company called Moshtix. They had The Basement in Sydney using them, a few EDM shows, and that was about it. He'd heard we were selling a lot of tickets. Electronic tickets sounded easy so I told him I'd get the venue and all the record shops onboard. It was easy. Suddenly Moshtix had five or six outlets in the region and promoters were asking me to do shows between Sydney and Byron. So I'd do a handful of shows on tours across the Central Coast, Newcastle, etc. Hamish quipped if I ever moved back to Sydney that he'd hire me. A year or so later I did, and he did hire me. Moshtix had grown and even back then the major ticketing companies and News Ltd were circling.
Moving On
I loved that job. I signed up every venue, festival, and promoter that I could find in Australia and New Zealand. My dad had told me music could make me poor but it bought me a house.
I had a wife and kids coming along though and the travel was a killer. I had to be at most of the festivals and at that time a festival would draw 20 to 30 000 a day (or more). Think Good Vibrations, Groovin' the Moo, etc. My wife was pregnant with our third child and she was tears when I'd have to leave. It was time to grow up.
The industry was changing, I could feel the cycle of venues and festivals starting to die. I knew it would take 10 to 15 years to swing back around (history always repeats - venues died in the early to mid-'80s but then came back in the '90s). Around this time I got asked to co-found a taxi booking company called Ingogo. It was Hamish, myself, and two others who were part of the Moshtix group. Ten years I lasted there - up until COVID happened. I then transition to UpGuard where I am now International VP of Sales.
Lucky for me the UpGuard team love music and many of us travel around seeing bands. I also grab the wife and we head to the States often for gigs. The kids love music, so life is good!
RELEASES:
- Move Along... Nothing to See Here (1999) - compilation co-released with Blind Records.
- Skunk (2003) - compilation co-released with Revolver magazine and Below Par Records.
SHOWS ORGANISED OR CO-ORGANISED:
- To be updated.
