Tom Lowndes needs to inform me a principle.
“I feel DJing is the skilled wrestling of the music trade,” he says. “Wrestling, in the long run, regardless of how good it’s, it’s nonetheless individuals pretending to battle. The DJ, regardless of how good you might be, you’re nonetheless pretending to be a musician.”
He doesn’t imply this as a nasty factor, in fact. Since 2011, Lowndes has carried out underneath the persona of DJ Tom Loud, the ringmaster of Sizzling Dub Time Machine, a vastly standard music occasion that excursions the world. All through the 2010s “Sizzling Dub” constructed a cult following on the Adelaide and Edinburgh fringes, earlier than driving the bubbles and crashes of Australia’s 2010s pageant panorama and enjoying massive abroad slots from the desert of Coachella to a Fifteenth-century Transylvanian citadel.
Like wrestling, the important thing to DJing is enjoying to the group, he says: “I’m all concerning the connection. The entire time I’m enjoying, I’m trying on the crowd. My fingers can sort of do the DJing on their very own.”
The Sizzling Dub Time Machine idea is easy: over two hours, Lowndes takes his viewers from 1954 to the current day, skipping throughout a long time and genres with childlike glee. He sometimes begins with Invoice Haley and the Comets’ Rock Round The Clock, earlier than leapfrogging from one monitor to a different by way of shared musical DNA or lyrical themes. Within the Seventies, Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock would possibly flip into Boney M’s Daddy Cool. By the Nineteen Eighties, the horn blasts of Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out mix into Eye of the Tiger, which in flip turns into John Farnham’s Stress Down. Within the Nineteen Nineties, Yothu Yindi’s Treaty blurs into TISM’s Greg! The Cease Signal!!, earlier than Tag Workforce’s Whoomp! (There It Is!) unexpectedly turns into Nicki French’s 1994 cowl of Whole Eclipse of the Coronary heart.
“My course of now could be that I make a really, very fastidiously constructed set … after which I don’t do it,” he says. “[I’ll have] a very orchestrated, intricate, chronologically appropriate set. I put an enormous quantity of effort and thought into what songs will work, the vitality and the pacing, all that stuff. After which I take a look at all their faces and go, ‘No, they only need to hear [Earth, Wind & Fire’s] September proper now’.
“What I do is daggy – I’m a retro DJ,” he provides. “However once you’re enjoying George Michael and Fred Once more inside half an hour of one another, there’s one thing about that that makes the George Michael cooler by affiliation, and makes the Fred Once more extra enjoyable.”
Lowndes’ early music tastes have been formed by Triple J’s request line and his mother and father’ Stones and Beatles cassettes, adopted by a heavy steel section. A stint in London launched him to ecstasy and rave tradition, earlier than returning to Australia to settle into his first profession as a sound designer.
He spent a number of years engaged on Channel 9’s Underbelly collection, and added horse noises to almost 200 episodes of McLeod’s Daughters – he even equipped the crunching metallic noises when Claire’s ute fatefully went over the cliff in season three. However he might “really feel the demise knell of the Australian tv drama”, that he was going to wish to seek out new work quickly.
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“There’s an actual cliche of the bitter sound man, and I might simply really feel myself turning into a kind of,” he says. “I simply wished to make my very own factor.”
Throughout one other job, on the Channel Ten sketch comedy present The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, he befriended comedians like Heath Franklin, Felicity Ward and Dan Ilic. Lowndes had been dabbling with DJing in his bed room when Ilic invited him to DJ at comedy reveals.
It took some time to seek out his ft. Drawing from his TV background, he began incorporating video clips and popular culture references into his act, which he referred to as Tom’s Video Dance-a-Rama – “which was additionally wildly unsuccessful,” Lowndes says.
With the assistance from some pals, together with Ronnie Johns alumnus Jordan Raskopoulos, he landed on the time-travel gimmick, and a catchier title: Tom’s Video Dance-a-Rama grew to become Sizzling Dub Time Machine, a play on the largely forgotten comedy movie Sizzling Tub Time Machine launched the earlier 12 months.
The novel, crowd-pleasing format immediately clicked. Lowndes’ early success on the Fringe circuit landed him slots at music festivals like Splendour within the Grass and Falls pageant. Along with his administration, he quickly expanded into the pageant market in 2016 with Sizzling Dub Wine Machine, which noticed Lowndes recurrently play to between 8,000 to fifteen,000 punters at wineries round Australia.
“It was a whirlwind. Every thing we touched was extra profitable, extra thrilling. We’d throw extra money and do all these things, extra alcohol, extra medication,” he says. “It’s humorous to listen to these rock’n’roll cliches popping out of my mouth as a time-travelling DJ. But it surely did all occur, after which impulsively, you’re like, ‘Grasp on, how the fuck did I get right here? I don’t need to be somebody who owns a pageant. I’m not a enterprise individual, I’m a DJ.”
Assembly Lowndes in Adelaide firstly of his newest Sizzling Dub tour, he’s now left a lot of that behind. He parted methods along with his former supervisor, offered his Wine Machine stake for a greenback in the course of the pandemic, and lower out alcohol totally.
“I’ve been sober for 5 years,” the daddy of three displays. “I used to simply be drunk and proceed the occasion. I feel everyone within the music trade sooner or later reaches a degree the place they should reckon with alcohol.
“It’s actually cool ingesting and partying with 21-year-olds for a very long time, however then impulsively it’s not cool. You’ve got to determine – do you need to be the older man within the trade who has his shit collectively that individuals can look as much as? Or do you need to be that older man within the trade who’s a bit embarrassing?”
Later that night time, as Lowndes bounces on to the stage like a gangly human pogo stick, beaming on the crowd over his moustache and triggering 2010s-era air horn results, it appears his wrestling principle may be on to one thing. When he performs karate chops to conduct the group in a mass sing-along of Abba’s Voulez Vous, there’s little question.
“I do know, it’s a bizarre technique to make a residing!” he yells into the microphone – and the subsequent banger performs.
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