Okay, enough reminiscing! Now is the only God and the only time is now! It's exactly one week until You Are Here begins, my first as a fully-blown producer. There are 110 events with six producers divvying up supervision between them, stretching across visual art, music, dance, theatre and decidedly more esoteric zones of endeavour. You can check out the full program at www.youareherecanberra.com.au, but in the meantime I'll zero in on the few events that are specifically 'Nick's Baby'.

Well, one, to take my obsession with short sets and micro-gigs to it's logical conclusion. That's a whole post in itself. But primarily, it's just another way to prove that cream of the ACT band crop can cut it no matter what crazy restrictions you put then under. This is going to be 8 stellar performances of 8 excellent songs. Any random foot-traffic punter will be giving it up for the talent on display, and that's a fact.

And that's really what's going on here. There are still thousands of Canberrans walking around oblivious to the pop music renaissance happening under their nose, and I'll try any hare-brained scheme to bring it to their attention. (the above photos feature Waterford, Julia Johnson, Fun Machine, The Ellis Collective and Crash The Curb)

Remember when I said in my last post that the success of You Are Here had emboldened me to push my artistic practice further than ever before? Well, the above photo demonstrates the ridiculous consequences that have since been unleashed.

I've covered my bodypaint exploits in detail in a previous post, but it's worth noting that the above job was the result of about 90 minutes of tireless effort by You Are Here visual-artist-in-residence George Edwards and our operations manager Karmin Cooper. The paint job was my cockamamie way of contributing to The Beach, a day festival in which we made over the rather scum-tacular Tocumwal Lane into a fully-blown faux beach party.

After basically sandbagging my way into the first You Are Here, I was fortunate enough to be invited back as a festival co-ordinator for the second one. Reuniting with my fellow co-ordinators (such as the inimitable Sarah Kaur, pictured above) felt a lot like returning to some kind of awesome summer camp, or a new school term at Hogwarts.

Apart from all the runny-roundy supervisory duties, I was again tapped for a bunch of performance and writing roles. These included: The You Are Here Music Quiz, in which I insulted the hard-core quiz night culture of the Phoenix bar with such concepts as The Iron Man Challenge (in which different musicians competed to see who could teach a drunken punter the riff to Black Sabbath's Iron Man the quickest).

The B-Ball Band Bash, in which four of Canberra's most semi-athletic bands competed in round robin four-a-side basketball to decide the running order of their gig (I acted as one half of the commentary team alongside Naomi 'Mad Milthorpe' Milthorpe).





Easily my most ridiculous/greatest achievement was the Ghost EncounTour, in which I took a small group through the spectral hotbed of the Centerpoint building and performed a short exorcism. The EncounTour wasn't even part of the program, it literally grew out a jokey conversation between David and I on day 2 of the festival and escalated almost as a creative game of Chicken that I don't think Dave realised we were playing. The whole thing was heavily improvised in the moment but seemed to make a heady impression on several of the attendees (I'll see if I can work out how to imbed the video in this post ).



Of course, focusing on my events undersells the ever-increasing scope of the festival, which took in an even bigger range of visual art, theatre and dance than the previous year. Our crowd numbers increased steadily across the ten days and before we'd finished You Are Here 2012 we were already deep in brainstorm mode for this year. Scant moments after I had wistfully put my lanyard in the drawer, the guy approached me about graduating my role for 2013 from co-ordinator to producer. I like to think I kept an inscrutable poker face as I said yes, but the truth is that this festival is the most worthwhile creative project I've ever been involved in, so the more I can do to push it on and up the better. Which leads to my current, comically over-committed state! Next post: You Are Here 2013!

Happy New Year Everybody! I was sure to have a slothful festive season, as this year is shaping up to be the busiest of my entire life, both professionally and creatively. First off the rank was five days in the studio with Cracked Actor, tracking our new full-length record.

Cracked Actor is the only band I play in where I don't contribute songs. My beautiful friend Seb is the song-writer and frontman, and his pensive art rock is a bracing contrast to the red-meat-indie-pop I usually trade in.

Seb brings a meticulous sonic vision to the band, and the quality of his song writing has turned me into a faithful solider. Seeing him construct his tracks from a latticework of guitar and vocal overdubs left me somewhat intimidated by the knowledge that he'd been carrying the whole picture around in his head for months.



We'd originally done 5 days of pre-production and arrangement work in July (the grandparents of our guitarist, Jordan, let us use their house in Ulla Dulla. Shout outs!) and I realise know how much time it saves you in the studio. It's an approach I'll definitely rip off for my other bands in the future.

The most exciting part is that we were first cab off the rank at Sam King's brand new studio, I Am Merloc. So new, in fact, that it isn't even finished! Sam, if you're reading this I'm sorry for showing the place in it's bare condition. Suffice to say that it already has the most exciting room sound in the city limits. Here's to 2013, the year of new recordings!

This year's Corinbank festival was postponed by almost seven months due to Apocalyptic weather conditions, so there was a greater-than-average sense of anticipation leading up to the first weekend of December. Corin offers an amazing, family-friendly setting in the forest and a host of awesome local and touring acts.



This was a bittersweet show for us, however. After almost five years of exemplary service, this was Nick 'Nick Peddle' Peddle's last gig with Big Score. The rest of the scene has finally caught on to the fact that he's one of the best drummers in the world, and he played with no less than six (!) different bands over the course of the festival. He's now forced to strip his operation back to the bands that have the most career momentum, and a sketched-out jam act like Big Score definitely doesn't fit the bill.

Nick, we set you loose into the greater world beyond, your wings still wet from the womb, your four eyes blinking from the glare of your own bright future. All the best, you Magnificent Son Of A Bitch! Photos by A-Thom The Wonder Bomb!