104. Living in the Music City: This Must be The Place’s best-of / re-Runs on music and places

“Living in the Music City: If You’ve got a Spare Half A Million” was held at Melbourne’s Toff in Town on September 2nd as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. The idea of the event is to look at how live music and the night-time economy are shaped by the cost and availability of housing. The first half of the title, the Music City, derives from a three-year research project “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The second half of the title – “If you’ve got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston’. The song’s lyrics refer not only to the spatial dynamics of the cost of housing in Melbourne, but to migration and change in the city generally. (Note: this episode of This Must Be The Place was put together before the Festival of Urbanism event in September 2019). The event will look at housing and music through a combination of academic panel discussion, and live song performances. It includes both panel discussion and music partly because it’s more fun, and partly because it’s always strange to talk about music without including music, as in a 1979 quote best attributable to comedian Martin Mull, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (but – why not?), or an older quote, from a 1918 New Republic article, that “writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics”. There might be a bit of the latter, “singing about economics”, because both now and in 1918, singing about economics does happen, and you don’t have to look far for songs with words like “money”, “dollar” or “rent” in them. For this episode I’ve looked back over 2 years of This Must Be The Place podcasts to find some episodes where we’ve talked about aspects of live music and its relationships to place. The episode comprises 7 relevant clips from previous episodes – these are compiled here kind of as re-runs. Or a nicer wording might be that they’re ‘curated’ selections, a ‘best of’ or ‘hits out’ collection, of This Must Be The Place talking music and place. Including: • Interview with Seamus O’Hanlon, Author of “City Life – the new urban Australia” • Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting • Revisiting “Melbourne on Foot” (1980 book): St Kilda walking tour with Prof Graham Davison (also Richmond walking tour) • Dogs in Space to Olives in Toolleen: Small bands, small farms with Charles (‘Chuck’ Meo) and Ceilidh • Visit to Clunes Booktown Festival: Incl. David’s Talk on “Dig: Australian Rock & Pop Music, 1960-85” • Lachlan from the Ocean Party on why hotel hell is actually pretty swell