TO SEE ALL THE PHOTOS FROM OUR BRISBANE/SYDNEY TRIP, CLICK HERE!
It's been nearly a week since we've returned to the States, and everyone wants to know: How was Australia? In a word: Fantastic! Summertime Down Under ... such a great time! We are both so excited to have helped launch another Bootie party on another continent! Especially when our new Aussie partners are as awesome as Adam and Guy...
Flying halfway around the world just so you can meet up and launch a Bootie party with people you've
never actually met can be a little ... daunting. It's kind of a leap of faith that it's all going to work out -- tempered by a healthy amount of emailed questions, a couple phone conversations, and a bit of sussing each other out. But ultimately in the end, we couldn't have found two better guys to run our first Bootie party in Oz. We got on with them
instantly!
This is first photo we took after getting to Australia, with Adam hiding behind several bottles of Pure Blonde ... nothing takes care of jet-lag like some low-carb Aussie beer!
Adam
completely picked our brains about Bootie, soaking up everything like a sponge. He first heard about us and our parties through his friend Matt Bland, a mashup producer/DJ from the UK (where Adam is originally from).
So we had to take this picture, with us saying "cheers" to Matt Bland, who unwittingly help put this all together!
That first day we just kind of hung out in Brisbane, drinking beers all day with Adam. He lives in Fortitude Valley, ground zero for Brisbane's nightlife, with tons of bars and clubs all within a three block radius. Brisbane is known in Australia as a big music town, and is proud of all the bands that have come out of there -- like one of Adrian's college favorites, The Go-Betweens, who have a plaque on Brunswick Street (along with The Bee Gees and Powderfinger, the best Australian band you've never heard of).
Later, we met up with Guy for even
more drinks, as you can tell by this photo. That's the lovely Story Bridge in the background.
The next day we went to check out the venue and do a sound check. The Beetle Bar is a great space -- it's attached to a backpackers hotel, but their whole ideology is to bring locals and international travelers together in a club, which we thought was perfect for Bootie.
Beetle Bar is relatively new, and they're hungry to build an audience and reputation. They really seemed to "get" the concept of mashed-up Bootie, and they tried to promote it really well. Although, on their posters and ads, they said that we were "direct from Los Angeles!" Hey, whatever gets people to the party!
Later that evening, we all went to
VJ Brewski's house in the suburbs for a traditional Aussie barbeque! Here he is, "throwin' another shrimp on the barbie!" We've known Brewski for many years through
GYBO, the bootleg/mashup message board, but of course, we'd never actually met before. He's even made a couple mashup videos for
A Plus D tracks, so it was so nice to finally be able to thank him in person!
Brewski's barbeque was pretty much a meet-and-greet, and it was really fantastic to finally meet
Hickory Dickory Doc, aka DJ HDD, who was one of the first people we "met" (online) in the bootleg scene. He spun an old-school bootleg set at Brewski's that had us going, "OMG, I remember THAT one! I used to play that all the time at The Cinch!" (The little neighborhood bar we used to DJ at back in 2003.)
Here's the whole gang: Vicki, Guy, Adam, Hickey, Adrian, D, and Alex -- aka DJ BootOX, the resident DJ of
Bootie Munich, who is backpacking around the world, and who was crashing at Brewski's house.
Found this in Adam's apartment, and just HAD to take a picture. Yes, it's not just a cliché -- they really DO eat Vegemite in Australia!
The police cars look like Hot Wheels race cars! Cool. It was the little differences like this (and the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road) that made Australia seem like an alternate universe version of the United States. For the most part though, the U.S. and Australia are
shockingly similar. After all, both countries started out as British colonies, and were ultimately settled by "outsiders" -- tax evaders in the U.S. and convicts in Australia. Plus, both countries have so much SPACE -- room to move and grow -- and everything feels so "new world" compared to Europe.
It's the United Nations of Bootie! Representatives from each continent that Bootie is on: Brewski (Australia), BootOX (Europe), and Adrian (North America) -- all wearing their "Bootie corporate attire!"
There is definitely a budding mashup scene already happening in Brisbane. Here's
Viper Pilot, a mashup producer who got in touch with us after reading about the party on
Mashuptown.com!
And here's
DJ Cutloose, who we emailed back-and-forth with last year when he was visiting LA . He was supposed to come out to Bootie there, but never made it. We're glad we finally got to meet him at
Bootie Brisbane, even though he had to leave early to go DJ across town!
They sure love their surfing in Australia ... here's D, hanging 10 at the Beetle Bar, beer in hand.
Hey, it's A Plus G ! :-) Adam (LolaDJs) and Guy Davy on the decks at the top of the night. They kicked off the Bootie party with a Jimi Hendrix mashup!
DJ BootOX followed them with a kick-ass set that got the dance floor going.
We did the live Midnight Mashup Show pretty much right on time. Although, it might have been a little TOO early -- we like to do the shows right at the peak point in the night. But it really helped make a connection with the crowd, and bring everyone in the room together, which was a really great way to kick off our two-hour set.
So many hands in the air on the dance floor!
Yup, they're getting the bootleg pirate thing already!
Um, did we mention ...
... hands in the air?
Mysterious D surveys the action on the dance floor. Hands in the air? Check. Booties shaking? Check. Big smiles? Check. Alright, our work here is done.
After all the things everyone warned us about Brisbane crowds -- "they want electro," "they want traditional dance music," "they're kinda provincial," "the crowds in Brisbane can react like villagers when you bring out a musical Frankenstein they're unfamiliar with," well ... it was all completely WRONG! Give them clever, mashed-up party music, and people can't help but smile and dance and sing at the top of the their lungs and have an unpretentiously good time!
DJ BootOX pretty much sums up how we felt about the party!
It was hot in Brisbane! See how sweaty we all were at the end of the night? That's Mysterious D, DJ HDD, and Cloudface Von Ruckus, a mashup fan from Brisbane we met on Facebook.
Aw, the Mysterious D all tuckered out after a night at Bootie Brisbane!
TO SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM BOOTIE BRISBANE, CLICK HERE!
We were so pumped up from adrenaline from the Bootie party the night before that somehow, despite our hangovers, we got our asses out of bed the next day in order to do the one "touristy" thing we wanted to do in Brisbane -- go to the
Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. After all, we're in Australia, dammit! Thank you, Brewski, for taking us to see some koalas and kangaroos!
If we asked this kangaroo what he was doing, he'd probably say he was "chillaxin'" or something.
But we know better.
Aw, Adrian feeds da wittle joey!
After getting our fill of native Australian wildlife, Brewski took us to the top of
Mount Coot-Tha for a pretty view of Brisbane.
Seems like every town has a Chinatown, and that's where we had dinner with BootOX and Brewski, talking shop and hanging out. We're gonna see BootOX several times this month, as he and DJ Schmolli are doing a Bootie tour in the States. And Brewski is now a resident DJ of Bootie Brisbane!
The next day, after a meeting over brekkies (that's Aussie slang for breakfast) with Adam and Guy, we flew off to Sydney. No Bootie party there, just a little vacay ... and of course, quite a bit of scouting around. Because, you know... it's not like we wouldn't WANT to have a Bootie party in Sydney (especially since it's SO SIMILAR to San Francisco!)
Bootie's very first international guest DJ was
Dsico, a former mashup producer from Sydney, Australia. Luke was one of the first people involved in the bootleg scene way back in 2002-2003, but by the time he played at Bootie in February '04, he was already over it, declaring "bootlegs are dead" ... pretty much before the scene even began! We always loved his dry, cynical sense of humor! Unfortunately, he moved to London a couple years ago, but he sent us a list of all the places to hit up while Sydney. Our first evening there, we had a Coopers Pale Ale in honor of him -- it's his favorite beer!
OMG, we're in Sydney!
Adrian is a bit of an academic when it comes to modern architecture, so of course, one of our first stops HAD to be the
Sydney Opera House. Pictures barely do this building justice -- it's gorgeous from every angle.
Everyone told us that we had to take a boat out on the harbour ... so D decided to do
this one, which is a jet boat that does 270 degree spin-outs on the water...
Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
Kinda hard to get a steady shot of Sydney when you're skipping over waves at 50 mph (80 kph), but here's one.
Went to the
Museum of Contemporary Art, which was doing an exhibition by kooky, OCD-suffering, Japanese artist
Yayoi Kusama. This is a mirrored room installation filled with, um ... lots of soft plushy things.
After the social intensity of being in Brisbane, it was kinda nice to be on our own for a few days. But we were definitely looking forward to having dinner and drinks with
Wax Audio, one of our favorite mashup producers. We met Tom last year in New York, and it was so nice to catch up with him in his own backyard, chatting all about mashups and GYBO and traveling and the current drought situation in Australia. Just a lovely night out!
Anyone who knows Adrian knows that he has a tower fetish (goes with the modern architecture thing) so of course we had to go up to the top of the Sydney Tower. But it was all getting to be a little too touristy, so after two days, we heeded the advice of Dsico and HDD, and headed to Newtown, blundering around the shops and pubs on King Street (kinda the Sydney version of Haight Street in SF).
As soon as we got off the train at Newtown, we were both like, "Ah, now THIS is where we should be hanging out!" And because it's a little off the map in our tourist books, we never would have made it had Dsico and HDD not told us to go. Not far from King Street is the Imperial Hotel, made famous from one of the opening scenes of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert! Unfortunately, it was closed.
Seeing as that we were in Sydney from Monday through Wednesday, our nightlife options were unfortunately a bit limited. However, we managed to make it to the
Sly Fox for "Queer Central" on Wednesday, a long-running drag (king and queen) night. Ah, a little taste of
Trannyshack Down Under!
It was so nice to see drag kings in Sydney ... at least we got a little local culture in for our last night. And then, just for contrast, we went to "Paradise City," a poorly-attended-but-fun old-school rock 'n' roll night at Q-Bar on Oxford Street. Not exactly a representative sampling of all the nightlife options in Sydney, but hey, we took what we could get on a Wednesday night!
Heading back home, nine days later ... but we got one of those days back, since we crossed the international date line! We were a little jet-lagged for Bootie SF two days later, but whatever ... Australia was completely worth it!
TO SEE ALL THE PHOTOS FROM OUR BRISBANE/SYDNEY TRIP, CLICK HERE!Labels: tour
