The biggest night of the year for Australian music, this year’s ARIA Awards 2023 are streaming on Stan. David Michael Brown explains just why you should be tuning in.
The Australian music industry’s nights of nights is upon us. Where else can you watch the country’s finest musicians perform their biggest hits, get drunk, swear, expose themselves, stumble on their words and hopefully win a prestigious ARIA award? And then there’s the international guests. From Elton John and Robbie Williams to Bono and Katy Perry. Even Taylor Swift has walked the ARIA red carpet. All have turned up to win, present an award or sing. And this year it will all be happening on Stan.
The 37th annual ARIA Awards will be held at Sydney’s iconic Hordern Pavilion—a venue steeped in rock ‘n’ roll history—hosted by comedian and radio host Tommy Little and Today news and entertainment presenter Brooke Boney. This year’s ceremony promises an evening of glitz, glamour and some good old-fashioned hard-rocking debauchery as a wealth of talented nominees from every musical genre will hopefully be stepping onto the hallowed Horden stage to perform as well as accept an ARIA award.
And the nominees this year are an eclectic esoteric group of musicians who perfectly encapsulate where the Australian music industry finds itself at present. Mixing Prince-style falsetto funk with crunching post-punk guitars, the Ghanaian-born Australian Genesis Owusu’s Struggler, his follow-up to his 2021 debut Smiling with No Teeth, garnered the most nominations with seven.
Dom Dolla, G Flip and Troye Sivan are next in line with six nominations apiece. Then Budjerah and DMA’S have five nominations while psychedelic indie groovers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and The Teskey Brothers have bagged four. ARIA Hall of Famer Kylie Minogue will be hoping to add to her 17 ARIA awards with four nominations. Finally. Amy Shark, Brad Cox, Cub Sport, Dan Sultan, Matt Corby and Peach PRC all received three nods each.
The big question is always who will turn up and what will they do. If nothing else the ARIAs are always unpredictable. No one would have expected outré crooner Kirin J. Callinan or Axle Whitehead to reveal as much of themselves as they did. Or that DJ Paul Mac would thank, “all of Sydney’s ecstasy dealers, without whom this award would not be possible.” In 2000, pop duo Madison Avenue had their career derailed when they were upstaged by a meme-inspiring glass of water when the band performed a high-energy medley of their hits Everything You Need and Who the Hell Are You. And in 2016, the Veronicas wore not much more than red body paint to belt out In My Blood. The ARIAs can be a glorious cavalcade of chaos but so much more.
No other event catalogues the musical history of Australia like the ARIAs. Just look at the line-up of best album winners since the awards began in 1987 at the Sheraton Wentworth Hotel in Sydney, hosted by Sir Elton. From John Farnham’s Whispering Jack through to last year’s winner Gela by Baker Boy, some of the nation’s finest artists including Silverchair, Gotye, Powderfinger, Flume, The Presets, You am I and Regurgitator have all won.
This year’s ARIAs will also see Jet join an illustrious list of predecessors in the ARIA Hall of Fame, a hallowed group of musicians and behind-the-scenes legends who have been stalwarts of the industry for over 20 years. Previous inductees include AC/DC, The Bee Gees, INXS, Men at Work, Olivia Newton-John, Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, Kylie Minogue and The Wiggles. In 2020, Archie Roach was inducted and performed an emotion-drenched version of his politically charged protest song, Took the Children Away.
And it’s live performances like those, especially when it comes to one-off collaborations, that is where the ARIAs come alive. In 1995, Silverchair’s drummer Ben Gillies knocked himself out during an intense post-song instrument destruction after the cacophonic conclusion of their incendiary cover of Radio Birdman’s New Race with You Am I frontman Tim Rogers. Silverchair also played The Greatest View with Paul Mac in 2002 and covered the Oils’ I Don’t Wanna Be the One in 2006. 2011 saw the Gurrumul sing Warwu with Missy Higgins. In 2012, Yothu Yindi performed Treaty with Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garrett, Paul Kelly, Jessica Mauboy and Dan Sultan.
Coming after COVID, the 2022 ceremony was a bittersweet affair as the Australian Recording Industry Association paid tribute to their fallen comrades. The Seekers singer Judith Durham and industry legend Glenn Wheatley were both remembered while Thelma Plum, Jessica Mauboy and Budjerah sang a moving eulogy to Archie Roach and Natalie Imbruglia, Tones and I, Peking Duk and Kye belted out a medley of Olivia Newton-John’s biggest hits in a spirited tribute to the Physical singer.
Last year also saw Melbourne pub punk rockers Amyl and the Sniffers blow the roof off the Horden with an aggressively muscular version of Guided by Angels. The screaming assault on mainstream musical tastes is a perfect example of what makes the ARIAs so thrilling. By thrusting this kind of music into unsuspecting living rooms, the ceremony is a trojan horse for alternative musical tastes. Just watch Frenzal Rhomb’s visceral performance of Never Had So Much Fun which saw lead singer Jason “Jay” Whalley and the band in hospital scrubs spraying fake plasma all over the stage and those lucky enough to be in the front row.
Whatever your musical proclivity, whoever you sing along to in the shower, the ARIAs promise a musical act for everyone. Every toe-tapping genre is catered for. From screaming guitars and relentless dance beats to perky K-pop and the aggression of sub-genres like drill and trap. All you need to do is tune in to find out who will be gracing the ARIAs stage. If only half of the talented nominees perform, we’ll be in for one hell of a show.
