In London it’s an office of 10; in Memphis it’s one guy’s home. Meet two unlikely outposts bringing Australian music overseas: British label Fire records and US distributor/microlabel Easter Bilby. Run by James Nicholls and Bruce Saltmarsh respectively, the two play a key role in making sure people in other continents can buy acclaimed records by relatively unknown bands like Brisbane’s Blank Realm and Melbourne’s Lower Plenty – and they’re in the middle of a serious boom in Aussie music.

Thanks in part to the rise of Melbourne garage group Eddy Current Suppression Ring last decade, DIY Australian bands are now an object of fascination and fandom all over the world. These aren’t your Grammy-level Tame Impalas or Gotyes, but bands that have enough fans overseas to make releasing albums and touring there worthwhile. Bands that play taste-making festivals like Gonerfest in Memphis and score glowing press on influential blogs like New York’s Raven Sings the Blues.

Bruce Saltmarsh, who runs US distributor/microlabel Easter Bilby. Photograph: PR Photograph: PR

Pushing those bands from obscurity into, well, semi-obscurity and beyond are Nicholls and Saltmarsh, who play similar roles on each side of the Atlantic. Nicholls restarted Fire records in 2000; the 14-year-old label had released records by Pulp and Spacemen 3 but had sat shuttered for a few years. Before it closed, the label had also released records by Australia’s Richard Davies and his cult 80s/90s band the Moles. Nicholls picked up that Aussie thread by re-signing Davies and signing fellow Australians like Blank Realm, Ned Collette, Scott & Charlene’s Wedding and Tom Morgan of Smudge and Lemonheads fame.

Meanwhile Easter Bilby takes its name from the push to replace the chocolate Easter Bunny with an animal native to Australia. Saltmarsh runs the label outside his full-time job driving forklift trucks in a warehouse, using the tiny side-project to stock record stores across the US with exclusively Australian releases that are predominately vinyl. One of Saltmarsh’s main clients is Memphis store/label Goner records, of the aforementioned Gonerfest, which ships records worldwide; meaning they go from Saltmarsh to Goner to all over the globe.

“It’s just meeting like minds. The world is often smaller than we think,” says Sydney musician and filmmaker Angela Garrick, whose many bands (Circle Pit, Ruined Fortune, Straight Arrows) have released records through cult US labels like Hozac, Hardly Art and Siltbreeze, and who put out a debut solo album as Angie through Easter Bilby last year. Garrick had met Saltmarsh at Gonerfest and kept in touch, and Turning became Easter Bilby’s third release as a label rather than distributor.

Although often mistaken for an expat, Saltmarsh is simply an intense fan of Australian music, starting with 70s punk bands like Radio Birdman and the Saints. Discovering Eddy Current Suppression Ring led him to start Easter Bilby in 2007, just to help the band.

Nicholls’s enthuasism began when he heard the Smudge single Don’t Want to be Grant McLennan, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the Go-Betweens’ co-frontman (who died in 2006) released in the UK in 1992. From there he got onto the Go-Betweens themselves, the Hummingbirds and Melbourne’s Au Go Go label. He was 14. “When you’re a teenager you want to be part of some club or gang,” he muses. “And I focused on that while all my peers were probably getting into Britpop.”

Saltmarsh and Nicholls aren’t the only people overseas obsessing about Australian music. Garrick recalls fielding questions from drunk “punks and rock‘n’roll fans” about Kitchen’s Floor and Royal Headache at a party in Greece. She met a guy in Brazil who’s fixated on Melbourne garage-punks the UV Race. “There is a certain darkness, a certain special energy about Australian music, that draws people in from all over,” she says.

The UV Race’s Al Montfort, who also plays in Lower Plenty, Dick Diver, Total Control and several other bands, chimes in: “People overseas will ask me about a band I see at a local bar with like 30 other people. I just think, ‘How on earth have you heard of them? How have you heard of us?’”

When Joe Alexander from the one-man Brisbane label Bedroom Suck went to Gonerfest two years in a row, Aussie bands playing included Slug Guts, Bits of Shit, Deaf Wish and the Native Cats. “Most of those bands didn’t have a label in the US,” he says. “It all just came about from people following the scene.”

“We were blown away by the amount of people obsessed with the current Australian scene,” says Blank Realm’s Daniel Spencer. “It’s just crazy the extent to which people half a world away know everything that goes on here.”

Besides Garrick’s album and a 7” single by Kitchen’s Floor, Saltmarsh’s only other label release was his first: Lower Plenty’s Hard Rubbish. That album, by a ragtag Melbourne band playing much more quietly than in their members’ other bands, has enjoyed several successive lives on different continents. First released on limited vinyl through tiny Melbourne label Special Award, it was issued by Saltmarsh in the US, where it did well enough to get a second vinyl pressing, and then by Fire in England. By last year, Lower Plenty were doing a split 7” with Dick Diver for the illustrious New York label Matador, home to Pavement and Cat Power.

If you indeed trace the latest boom back to Eddy Current Suppression Ring, it’s ironic that the band is hibernating at the moment. Yet their members remain visible elsewhere: singer Brendan Huntley co-fronts the Bedroom Suck band Boomgates, while guitarist Mikey Young plays in Lace Curtain, Total Control and Ooga Boogas and has produced, mixed and mastered dozens of Aussie records.

“If you had to point the finger at a starting point, it could easily be them,” says Billy Gardner, who plays in several Geelong bands and runs the label Anti Fade. Craig Dermody of Scott & Charlene’s Wedding, who release records on Bedroom Suck and Fire, adds: “Eddy Current opened up a lot of doors for all of us overseas. There have been bigger Australian bands, but none so influential in putting the spotlight on our underground bands and leaving a trail for overseas fans.”

An increasing number of US labels have been noticing and releasing Australian music at the underground level, including Underwater Peoples, Sacred Bones, Night People and Not Not Fun. But in the UK, Fire Records stands out as a major hub for Aussie DIY bands. It didn’t happen overnight: for all the rave reviews that Blank Realm’s January album Grassed Inn enjoyed, Fire helped set the table by first re-releasing the two prior albums because Nicholls wanted to “make the audience fall in love with the band the same way we did. You need that backstory.”



Having just announced a release-and-distribution deal with Bedroom Suck for the rest of the world, Fire is about to extend its claim to Aussie music, preparing releases by jangly and unpolished acts like Full Ugly, Bitch Prefect and Per Purpose. “We wanted to get someone in Australia to help us because we felt like everything we were hearing was so good,” says Nicholls. He’s already overjoyed with the results, enthusing that the escape-themed Bitch Prefect single Adelaide could apply to any town in the world.

Fire has a fair few New Zealand bands on the roster as well, including Opossom, Surf City and such Flying Nun records legends as the Chills and Bailterspace. It comes more from a long-running love of the music than some strategic lock on the southern hemisphere. “We have no monopoly over it,” says Nicholls. “We’re just doing it because we have that unique connection to it in the first place.”

Despite having a staff of ten, Nicholls says Fire is still a small, independent label – yet he’s been able to shepherd otherwise obscure bands from exposure on niche music blogs to the pages of the Sunday Times and NME. “It’s a balancing act,” he says, “to maintain what’s great about it without it becoming this promotional machine, which we need but don’t want it to be [solely] about.”

The challenge of touring Australian bands overseas is obvious – all that airfare just to get them there. “It’s a credit to those bands that we’re willing to do that,” says Nicholls. “We have to see past that initial five grand. We’re really investing in bands like Scott & Charlene’s Wedding.” That includes putting the band up in Nicholls’ house while a Fire employee did all their driving. And it worked out; not only did Scott & Charlene’s Wedding play the Glastonbury festival last year, but Dermody found it easier to draw crowds in Europe than in his adopted New York.

Again, it’s all about forward planning, and coming from a place of passion rather than sheer promotion. Alexander says, “A lot of the focus on Australia is really due to the enthusiastic fandom of people like Bruce Saltmarsh, not some PR bullshit.” It’s also due to bands who are happy to thrive in the underground rather than chase broader success. Garrick recalls seeing countless bland indie bands as a teenager and yearning “for a more strange, mysterious musical landscape.” She got to that landscape by helping make it herself, letting the desperation for something more interesting motivate her own music.

That same desperation to make interesting music heard is what drives Nicholls and Saltmarsh. “It’s really inspiring,” Nicholls says, “that you can just make a good record and it seems to travel the world quite easily. Our role is just a facilitator, hopefully taking it to the next level – whatever the next level is.”