User:Eastmain/Bruce Milne

Bruce Milne (born 1957) is an Australian music icon, one of the godfathers of the Melbourne music scene and Australian independent music generally, who after starting out in the punk movement in the late 70s has done practically everything you could to help make Melbourne one of the world's prime music cities it is today, like a sort-of anti-matter Michael Gudinksi or Molly Meldrum. He started out making fanzines and working in public radio - he has been involved with 3RRR since 1977, and still does a show today - then worked for Missing Link Records and then formed his own label-cum-shop Au-Go-Go, which defined a whole Melbourne sound and ethos in the 1980s.

In the early 80s, Milne also ran the legendary pioneering cassette-zine Fast Forward. After its demise and the demise of Au-Go-Go, he has never wavered in his commitment to the grassroots music community in Melbourne, whether in running his own record label/s (three others: Giant Claw, Reliant and In-Fidelity) or as a DJ, broadcaster, journalist, live music promoter or record retailer.

After working for a while in the late 90s/early 2000s in major label ventures and running the bar the International, Milne took over the license on the Collingwood pub the Tote, whose enforced closure in 2010 became the rallying point to keep live music alive in Melbourne. Today, he is a partner in Greville Records, and presents the wild and crazy Where Yo Is show on 3RRR.

A child of Melbourne bohemia (his mother, a child psychiatrist, wrote the Play School song), the teenage Milne attend the famous Swinburne alternative school, breeding ground for other such illustrious alumni as musician and friend Rowland S. Howard, film-maker Richard Lowenstein and comedian Jane Kennedy. In 1977, Milne started as a volunteer announcer at 3CR, put out Australia's first punk fanzine Plastered Press, put on the first-ever gig by the Boys Next Door, and helped put on the 'Punk Gunk' gig on the street in Carlton on New Year's Eve. In 1978, he joined forces with Clinton Walker now in Melbourne from Brisbane and together they put out the Pulp fanzine and presented the 3RRR show Know Your Product. He and Walker then got involved with the inception of Roadrunner magazine in Adelaide, but after after moving to Adelaide, Milne was left high and dry when Stuart Coupe, one of the magazine's founders, jumped ship to take up a job offer with RAM in Sydney, and so Milne returned to Melbourne. Back in his hometown, he formed the label Au-Go-Go Records to release a single by the band he then managed, seminal Melbourne post-punk outfit the Young Charlatans, but the band broke up before he could do so (its members Ollie Olsen going on to form Whirlywirld, the late Rowland S. Howard to join the Boys Next Door-cum-Birthday Party, Jeffrey Wegener to join the Laughing Clowns and the late Janine Hall to join Chris Bailey's Saints), and so the label's first release became an EP by Two Way Garden called Overnight.

Milne then went to work for Keith Glass on his Missing Link Records shop and label. Missing Link was a hotbed in Melbourne in the early 80s, with bands on its label like the Birthday Party, the Laughing Clowns, Whirlywirld and the Go Betweens, and with Milne working behind the counter and in the backroom running his own label Au-Go-Go and trying to pull together a distribution network for independent post-punk music that was the first such effort of its type, and set a precedent for a much more coherent scene to follow. Milne also worked closely, if uncredited, on other labels, like Innocent Records, the brainchild of polymath Philip Brophy and musician David Chesworth. Brophy and Chesworth were driving forces behind the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, the sort of anti-matter version of Melbourne's 'little bands' scene that was portrayed in Richard Lowenstein's 1986 feature film Dogs in Space, although when Lowenstein followed on in 2009 with the accompanying documentary We're Livin' on Dog Food, Milne was a prominent talking head in it, as was Phil Brophy. Brophy, who designed the original Au-Go-Go logo, would go on as a long-standing collaborator with Milne. And although Clinton Walker had already moved to Sydney by the time he published his chronicle of the era Inner City Sound, the book was very much a Melbourne phenomena, with its cover art by Brophy, inestimable assistance from Bruce Milne and its pro-Saints/anti-Radio Birdman bias, not to mention its great number of pictures by Milne's noted photographer brother Peter Milne. (Brophy, Milne and Walker had previously collaborated on the award-winning Velvet Underground etc album in 1980.)

Around this same time Milne also got involved with Andrew Maine on the post-punk cassettezine Fast Forward that had a world-wide impact and even inspired the launch of Sub-Pop in Seattle. When Keith Glass sold the Missing Link shop to concentrate, ill-fatedly, on its label iteration, Bruce Milne opened his own shop iteration of Au-Go-Go. With a new partner Greta Moon, he stepped up the label's profile, signing such seminal bands as The Scientists and The Moodists, and putting out seminal compilation albums like Asleep at the Wheel. In the same way that Keith Glass was something of a mentor to Milne, Milne himself fostered new young operatives at Au-Go-Go, like Dave Laing for example, who ran his own labels Dog Meat Records and Grown Up Wrong out of the shop, and went on to work for Shock and Warners. When Andrew Maine wanted to take Fast Forward in a more Face-like club culture/dance music direction, the partnership and the venture folded. Maine went on to produce only a couple of issues of the magazine Crowd before fading, while Milne went on deeper into his obsession with the raw, the esoteric and outrageous.

While still running Au-Go-Go as it put out more records by bands like Little Murders, Harem Scarem, the Zimmermen and many others, Milne went back to 3RRR with Phil Brophy to launch, in 1985, the long-running, cult pop culture program Eeek! Au-Go-Go expanded in the mid-80s to start locally releasing recordings by emerging international acts like Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Tav Falco's Panther Burns and Big Black, and then also tapped into a whole new wave of local underground bands like the Meanies, Spiderbait and Magic Dirt before a split between Milne and Moon precipitated the label's demise. If Bruce Milne never did anything else, Au-Go-Go released one of the greatest rock'n'roll singles Australia has ever produced, God's "My Pal." But still it didn't go within miles of a hit, and it remains the only real blot on Bruce Milne's career copybook, never to have scored that elusive big breakthrough.

In the late 80s, Milne went into partnership with another old friend Peter Lawrance to open the Kill City crime bookshop. Kill City was itself another important cultural phenomenon, not only as a retail outlet but again, like Missing Link and Au-Go-Go, as a fulcrum to which fans and writers from all round the world beat a path, and as a venue for events, with a Sydney store eventually coming under the management of Clinton Walker. Kill City was an important feed into the establishment of the Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing in the late 90s, and the shop also spawned David Honeybee's fanzine Crime Factory.

Milne compiled the series of albums Born Bad that ran to eight volumes celebrating the roots and the aesthetic of Milne's all-time favourite band the Cramps. He pioneeringly forged links between Australia and the Japanese music underground, releasing recordings by bands like the 5.6.7.8s and compilation albums like Tokyo Trashville, and heading up the trans-national label Giant Claw, that actually released singles by American as well as Japanese and Australian bands.

In the late 90s when Roger Grierson moved from PolyGram to Festival Records, the Australian major label owned by Rupert Murdoch, he offered Milne a label deal, and thus Reliant Records was born. Reliant signed bands like the Underground Lovers and Gerling, and in 1999 released the classic debut solo album by Milne's old schoolmate Rowland S. Howard, Teenage Snuff Film. Reliant folded when Milne moved to EMI to take up an A&R position, and when that fizzled out, in 2002, he went into partnership with Steve Stavrakis, who'd previously headed Waterfront Records in Sydney, and the pair launched In-Fidelity Records. In-Fidelity was an important label in the early 2000s, signing such acts as the Datsuns, Dan Kelly, the Drones, the Dirtbombs, Japan's Guitar Wolf and many others.

After gaining experience running the venue the International Bar, Milne went into an initially-silent partnership with Richie Ramone, who'd started out working at Au-Go-Go, to take over the Tote Hotel, which was by then already a favourite watering-hole on the Melbourne live circuit. But with the wowsers trying to stamp out rowdy behaviour in Melbourne, the Tote was made a scapegoat, and Liquor Licensing Victoria forced it to shut down. The closure of the Tote in 2010 became a cause celebre and not just in Melbourne but throughout the country, forcing state governments to re-think the worth of a vibrant music culture and night-time economy. "The Tote can't be saved," Milne said to the crowd outside the pub at a massive rally on its last night, "but live music in Melbourne can." He was right and he was wrong. Live music in Melbourne, now with such bodies as Music Victoria and SLAM (Save Live Australian Music) supporting it, went forward in leaps and bounds, and even the Tote itself was eventually resurrected too. But for Bruce Milne, he became the martyr to the cause and lost his shirt on the whole affray. The significance of the Tote and of live music culture generally, and the martyrdom of Bruce Milne, was captured in graphic detail in the 2011 documentary film Persecution Blues.

Milne has subsequently bounced back, however, and has returned to Greville St in Prahran, where he'd previously had Kill City, to go into the Greville Records store there, and he has returned, again, to 3RRR, to present the Sunday night show Where Yo Is.

Milne is married and lives in Melbourne, and has also recently reunited with Phil Brophy to work on a groundbreaking documentary about queer black American R&B performers called Tent Show Queens.

Category:Australian businesspeople Category:Living people Category:Businesspeople from Melbourne Category:1957 births