Warrnambool's Aus Music Festival to return as concert series, starting with Back To The Bay

Warrnambool Standard 13th June 2017 - ©Copyright Warrnambool Standard  2017 - by Matt Neal

WARRNAMBOOL’S Aus Music Festival is returning in a new format.

The Motorvators

Organisers are shifting their focus to small one-off events with the aim of raising a war chest to fund a bigger festival in a year or two’s time. Festival director Russ Goodear said the first in “a series of financially and logistically manageable events in a range of local venues” will be a Back To The Bay concert on July 29 at the Lady Bay Resort.It will feature an acoustic concert headlined by Blue Heat’s Marco Goldsmith, a top Australian songs countdown by locally connected former 3UZ DJ John Vertigan, and a local music awards ceremony. As with the Back To The Bay concert that ran as part of the Aus Music Festival in 2015, the event aims to be a party celebrating south-west music and in particular the era of the old Lady Bay Hotel. The event will also serve as a fundraiser for the Aus Music Festival, Goodear said. “There were some really good things we learnt from the first festival (in 2015) and one of the things we learnt was that they’re very expensive and high risk,” he said. “To reduce that risk you need funding, so we thought a (way to do that) would be to run a series of fundraising concerts.” Goodear said the concert series would “build on the model we already have, but instead of doing all of them on one day, we would do them over a period of time”. The Back To The Bay concert was one of the great successes of the inaugural Aus Music Festival in 2015, and featured performances by The Monaros, Tex Perkins, and reunited rockers The Motorvators. Goodear said parts of the 2015 festival were a hit but others weren’t, and the organisers now viewed it as something of a practice run. “We put it out there (in 2015) and tried a lot of things and some things worked and some things didn’t work,” Goodear said. “We learnt from our experiences. We’ll learn from doing these one-off concerts too and what we learn will help us build towards our festival. “We’ve gone back to our motto of ‘better before bigger’.” He said there was a long list of possible themed concerts that could be run to help build the funding pool for a larger festival. They would celebrate women in music, local musicians and venues, or be centred on genres and musical themes, Goodear said.