Colin Hay, the singer, songwriter and frontman of beloved Australian rock group Males At Work, and the late trailblazing tour promoter Colleen Ironside are this 12 months’s recipients of the Ted Albert Award for Excellent Companies to Australian Music.
The celebrated honor might be offered on the 2023 APRA Music Awards, to be held April 27 at ICC Sydney, on Gadigal land.
Hay might be readily available to obtain his round trophy, recognition for a stellar profession that launched within the early ‘80s with Males At Work’s hit debut album Enterprise As Normal, and its standout single “Down Underneath.”
It was a dream breakthrough, the sort few acts have carried out earlier than or since, as the only and its guardian topped concurrently topped the charts on each side of the Atlantic, and the group went on to win the Grammy Award for greatest new artist.
“Who Can It Be Now” logged a single week at No. 1 on the Billboard Scorching 100 in 1982, and “Down Underneath” would climb the summit later that 12 months, holding high spot for 4 weeks. At the moment, the latter track has handed multiple billion streams throughout all platforms, and is treasured as Australia’s unofficial anthem.
“Overkill” and “It’s a Mistake” each hit the highest 10 on the Scorching 100, “Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive” cracked the highest 40 (at No. 28). Followup LP Cargo peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. The band known as it quits in 1985, however the music lives on. Profession file gross sales high 30 million, in response to APRA.
This award is “for excellent companies to Australian Music,” notes Hay in an announcement. “I believe companies is the important thing phrase right here. It’s essential to understand sooner or later in your life that it’s a beneficial factor to be of service. To be of some use.”
Hay’s music can be launched to new generations via Scrubs and Backyard State, and he continues to tour, each as a solo artist and as a guitarist in Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band. “Down Underneath” has been revisited in recent times with successful drum ‘n’ bass reduce by DJ Luude, and by award-winning Yolŋu surf rockers King Stingray.
Talking to Billboard over Zoom from Sacramento, CA, Hay admits “Down Underneath” is “very expensive to me. After I wrote the track, I had lots of concern and trepidation about Australia changing into overdeveloped, like , Florida or one thing,” the Scottish-born artist notes, “and on the opposite facet of the coin, there was this lovely uniqueness and unimaginable — a type of awesomeness — of the nation which I assumed, ‘we don’t wish to lose that’. We’ve to nurture, it’s a valuable factor we’ve.”
Additionally on the APRAs, Ironside might be posthumously saluted for a profession throughout which she set the groundwork for a pan-Asian touring community and producing scores of excursions within the area.
Ironside, who died in 2022, is equally remembered for her force-of-nature persona.
The live shows large reduce her tooth as a reserving agent for the Harbour Premier Company in Sydney, Australia. She went out on her personal, establishing and working APA Reserving Company, which booked INXS, Ratcat, James Reyne, Jenny Morris, Wendy Matthews and Def FX for Australia, New Zealand and Asia.
In 1994, Frontier Touring recruited Ironside as head of its Asia division, the place she managed excursions by Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Tom Jones and others. In 1999, she established Reside Restricted and toured the Rolling Stones, Elton John, David Bowie, Sting and different titans of rock and pop music.
Later, in 2005, she started a five-year stint with Reside Nation as senior VP of bookings in Pan-Asia, earlier than reviving Reside Restricted, via which she promoted Janet Jackson in Hong Kong, Bruno Mars in Malaysia and Bob Dylan in Hong Kong and Vietnam.
“Colleen championed Australian songwriters and artists and created stay music pathways into Asia with a enterprise acumen that was years forward of her friends,” feedback Dean Ormston, CEO, APRA AMCOS.
And Hay “is a songwriter of the best stage and with the largest coronary heart, whose songs proceed to attach and hit No. 1 on the charts. We sit up for honoring them with the Ted Albert Award at this 12 months’s APRA Music Awards”.
The Ted Albert Award is without doubt one of the Australian music business’s highest accolades, and is set by the APRA board of author and writer administrators.
Earlier recipients embrace Paul Kelly, the late Mushroom Group founder Michael Gudinski, Slim Dusty, The Seekers and final 12 months’s recipient The Wiggles.
In different APRA Music Awards information, essentially the most carried out worldwide work has been awarded to world smash “As It Was” by Harry Types, with co-writers Thomas Hull and Tyler Johnson). Common Music Publishing and Harmony Music Publishing are publishers.
As beforehand reported, Grammy Award winners Flume and Rufus Du Sol are among the many artists and songwriters scoring a number of nominations for this 12 months’s ceremony.
Established in 1982, the Australasian Performing Proper Affiliation’s annual songwriters’ ceremony is without doubt one of the Australian music business’s favourite occasions, a worthy counterpart to Britain’s Ivor Novello Awards.
The particular moments within the APRAs program contains the efficiency of these track of the 12 months nominees, typically utterly reimagined by one other star from Australia’s music scene.
For extra data go to the APRA web site.