A new exhibition takes audiences to the intersection of Australia’s music and television history, moments thought lost. Image: National Film and Sound Archive.
A new exhibition is pressing play on a world before music algorithms – one that can seem gone forever.
Sarah Little, curator of the Tune in, freak out collection alongside Tara Marynowsky and Simon Smith, says the exhibition traces five decades of Australia’s music television.
She says the material, sourced from the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) collection, gives a second life (or verse) to iconic and lost moments from Australian music history.
The curators worked for several months to sort a setlist of the “big names” and “hidden gems” of Aussie music television, going back through the NFSA’s collection and digitising some material for the first time.
On the list is a September 1976 episode of Countdown thought lost, until a chance find when the NFSA was digitising a student documentary.
“There’s so much in the collection. It’s so vast that quite often we’ll have these serendipitous discoveries where we’re looking for one thing and something else pops up,” Sarah says.
“This is often where the best material is, and that’s where this rare Countdown footage actually came from.”
In the new collection, audiences can relive live performances from Ted Mulry Gang and John Paul Young from an era before listeners could skip songs with the press of a button or have algorithms curate their playlists on their phones.
As well as rediscovered Countdown, there’s a performance by Roy Orbison in one of the few surviving moments from the early days of Sing Sing Sing, a clip from the first episode of Songlines and a 1986 appearance of Kylie and Dannii Minogue on Young Talent Time.
Sarah says the collection brings a “cloud of nostalgia” as the NFSA looks back to a world when artists had to put in more legwork to find their next tune.
“We take for granted how important music television shows have been in terms of shaping culture in Australia – and also internationally,” she says.
“I think [the collection] reconnects people with that thrill of the chase, in terms of finding new music and not having it served up to you on a platter because of an algorithm on an app.”
For the curators, Sarah says the exhibition reveals more than the chart-toppers.
“In the 1960s, you’ll have the opening sequence with lots of singing and dancing, and then it seamlessly segues into the first performance,” she says.
“It’s almost like you’re watching musical theatre [in contrast to] shows in the 1990s where it’s an interview in the back of a cab with Daniel Johns from Silverchair.
“We’re trying to chart all the different styles in terms of presenters and television show concepts. You can see quite a distinct break between the decades when someone is like ‘Okay, this is the old way. It’s daggy and we’re not doing it anymore’.”
While digitising and sorting old records is “really delicate, methodical work”, it’s a rewarding process for Sarah.
“We’re always discovering new things because we have so much in the collection [including what] we haven’t digitised yet or that we haven’t looked at,” she says.
“You never actually know what you’re going to get on a tape or film.”
The Tune in, freak out collection is available on the NFSA’s website. It contains names, images or voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
