Issue 500

Celebrating 500 editions When it comes to the numbers alone, they can be bald and unrevealing, because dB Magazine posts its 500th issue, which really is a mighty achievement on a number of levels. For nearly twenty years the dB Magazine office e has been located upstairs on the west end of Hindley Street, an ideal location to see and comment upon that which keeps the city ticking. When dB Magazine began publishing, few things in the West End were as they are now, and though progress is slow it is wonderful to see change and growth being embraced by the locale which is all too often written off as nothing more than the 'entertainment precinct'. In the 1990s there was no UniSA campus, the Fringe occupied the site of the old Fowlers buildings; there was no Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in the wonderful Grainger Studios; there was no ArtsSA in the magnificently refurbished Wests Coffee Palace; and there seemed to be little life outside of that Hindley Street strip. In 2010 the immediate surrounds to our original and incidental office (we considered moving several times) host an array of arts and entertainment and educational institutions in addition to those previously mentioned. The Jam Factory, The MRC, Fowlers Live, AIT Arts, TAFE's Light Square campus... and dB Magazine has seen and been part of much of this renaissance, being a proud sponsor of events such as the West End Music Festival, Coopers Alive, Arts West, the Helpmann Academy Jazz Awards and many more. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was the only person who had been implicitly involved - for better or worse - for every one of those 500 issues, firstly as a writer, then as Music Editor (and writer), and then as Editor. For the very first issue I flew back into Adelaide on a Sunday evening, having been in Melbourne with local band Aunty Raelene competing in the Campus Battle Of The Bands Competition. We didn't win, but the article I wrote at about 2am on the Monday morning prior to a Wednesday publication remains one of my favourite pieces. It seemed then to have a real grit-in-the-seat-of-the-pants feel about being 'on the road' which was popular, but also authentic in its appeal when most music and entertaining writing seemed, to my mind, to be of the 'it's a great album - go out and but it immediately' school. A few years later when the magazine was really hitting its straps I organised and cajoled Peter Strelan into accepting an invitation to tour Kangaroo Island with Things Of Stone & Wood for a weekend, a feat which he accomplished only through manfully attempting to drink the bands entire rider, but one which he bookended by heading off to Thebarton Theatre on the Sunday night to see Midnight Oil perform. Massive hangover notwithstanding, both articles made it into the following edition of dB Magazine, a feat (on his part) in which I most fondly recall playing my part. Other memories are not nearly so enjoyable: I recall crashing my bike one Saturday morning and spending three hours in casualty at the RAH before coming into the office and writing 3000 words for various articles, then being in the office on Monday to edit the magazine before sending it to our printers. Speaking of the printing side of things, it's nice to be able to pay tribute to the Rural Press group, who, from their chilly and now state-of-the-art location at Murray Bridge, have printed each and every edition of the magazine, working with us through the learning curves which have characterized the printing industry over the last twenty years. In 1991 desktop publishing was in its infancy; laser printers had just become commonly available (at a magnificent price!!!), computers were slow, expensive, small, and most of them had greyscale screens. We knew we had technology licked when we acquired our first dedicated layout machine with a colour monitor and a massive 20MB of RAM. PDFs did not exist and the magazine was painstakingly put together by hand, using laser printed proofs upon which images and advertisements were glued. Yes, glued. Mastery of the cutting mat and Stanley knife was an essential skill. When colour proofs and digital seperations became the norm the magazine industry was able to exploit colour printing technology to the full, even though the magazine was still being couriered to Murray Bridge. These days, digital files are transmitted in minutes via an ADSL line. Other things changed, of course. Email rules the business world and fewer people seem to converse. And then there was the Internet, writ large across the world of communications, entertainment, leisure time, and commerce. dB Magazine worked with the visionary John Ruciak in launching our first website sometime in about 1996, then closed it down after six months as an idea far ahead of its time. When we launched www.dbmagazine.com.au it was to be a simple site which reflected the nature of the print edition of the magazine... appealingly easy layout and navigation featuring the strength of the writing and the passion of the writers for their task. Record companies - by and large - have lost their battle with technology and resigned themselves to a world of downloading, peer to peer sharing and internet radio and real time streaming. At the heart of the matter - to my mind - the issue of music and entertainment is still one of relevance, and by relevance I mean live performance. It's the arena where the only real way to do it is to turn up at a venue, ticket in hand, and experience the performance as it was intended in the first place. A good live performance (and I'm thinking of contemporary dance or theatre as much as music) is a visceral and sometimes life-changing experience. That, I suspect, may wax and wane in its importance when there are so many other forms of entertainment to be tried and tested, but it will never go away. The point, to come to it, is that for 500 editions, dB Magazine has tried to talk about, and write about, and reflect a review the very best in entertainment. In music we made no real distinction between the most hideous death metal band and the most sublime of string quartets. It's horses for courses, right? What we wanted to do - and have done so successfully - is to promote the best of performing arts whatever it might be, and to open the lines of communication (which means, in a real sense) draw together the performer and their audience, decreasing the divide which sometimes exists between them. In pursuing such a lofty ideal it was always about attempting to show the human side of our interviewees. Rock stars will always happily babble about their latest album, and why it's the best yet, but all of them have much more to tell about their life, their loves and their motivation, if they're prepared to do so, and are given the opportunity. I recall - most fondly - interviewing the admittedly obscure American songwriter Andy Prieboy, and delighting in spending half an hour discussing Napoleonic warfare when we should have been doing the promo circuit thing and talking up his claim to fame as the writer of Concrete Blonde's minor hit, Tomorrow Wendy. Moving away from the nostalgia, a milestone such as the 500th issue should be about the people who have made it happen. We - Publisher Arna Eyers-White and I - would like to thank everyone that has been involved with dB Magazine over the years. Their names - one and all, except the very few we may have forgotten, to whom we humbly apologise - are printed on the front cover of this magazine, in gratitude to the effort each and every one has put into making dB Magazine a publication of which we should all be very proud. We're about the last independent street press left in the country, and without the support of many other independently minded people (and particularly our advertisers), it could never have happened. Alex Wheaton (Editor) Arna Eyers-White (Publishing Editor)