Inaugurated in 2009, Vivid Sydney has become one of Australia’s most prestigious arts festivals – an annual bridging of high, pop and tech culture. Every year, it seems, the programme is ever more dizzying and kaleidoscopic. Standing out proudly in 2023’s line-up, though, is its showcase of nascent homegrown R&B talent, especially from Western Sydney – significant for the platform it’s providing female creatives in particular.
This feels in sync with the Vivid contemporary music programme’s growing association with international R&B and soul in later years – punctuated by global stars Solange and Sampa the Great’s culture-shifting spectaculars at the Sydney Opera House – and its affirmation of R&B’s cutting-edge pop appeal. Ben Marshall, Head Of Contemporary Music at the Opera House and Vivid LIVE’s curator, believes that Solange’s 2018 celebration of Black womanhood was “a huge lightning rod”.
Solange’s team, he says, were “constantly referencing” Bon Iver’s 2016 theatrical production. “I think she’d seen how [Justin Vernon had] actually properly used and transformed the room with a unique show and went, ‘I’m gonna top that’.” That same year, Vivid hosted H.E.R.’s Australia premiere. “Now she is probably bigger than Solange on the world stage.”
This year South London’s Ella Mai will return to Vivid, but Marshall also wanted to further “connect” with a “fertile” local community. “We thought it would be wrong to not put a spotlight on what’s going on in Sydney, and Western Sydney, and the country,” he says, “just to be able to go, ‘This is an amazingly creative part of the emerging Australian scene and it all joins up.'”
Australia has long had a dynamic R&B overground centred on multicultural suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne. Beginning in the ’90s, the hip-hop soul group Sound Unlimited and classic R&B acts Kulcha, CDB, Kaylan and Jade MacRae enjoyed chart success – some receiving ARIA nominations. Unfortunately, that history is erased from Anglo-Australian media narratives – and R&B’s ascent overshadowed by that of a macho hip-hop scene.
However, in the same way that Australia has generated a fresh wave of hip-hop, R&B and soul are (re)surging. Again, Western Sydney is a cultural hotspot (even a ‘brand’). But Melbourne’s comparatively diffuse, and cyclical, subculture has spawned the Mark Ronson neo-soul protégé Daniel Merriweather, Grammy nominees Hiatus Kaiyote and tastemaker fave Kaiit, plus buzzy major-label R&B names PANIA and Forest Claudette.
For Kamilaroi-Samoan singer/songwriter Becca Hatch, who takes to the Opera House’s Utzon Room this week, staging her first headline show at the institution is powerfully symbolic. “It is amazing to be able to take up spaces like this and to be able to play and share my music and my stories,” she says. Hatch, who dedicated her 2020 debut single ‘2560’ to her Campbelltown hometown, previously only ever visited the harbourside precinct on school excursions. “It’s not really places that you would see kids like me hanging out.”
A winner of triple j’s Unearthed High Indigenous Initiative, Hatch first brought her throwback ’90s R&B to Vivid via Briggs‘ 2019 Bad Apples House Party. “I think that was a very different experience, ’cause it was a lot more of a community thing – it was like bringing mob to the Opera House.” This Vivid, she’ll be both performer and punter, attending Devonté Hynes‘ evening with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
“It’s kind of scary not to feel like you belong in a genre, because I feel you’re less marketable that way… But it’s important to do what’s most authentic to you” – Ashli
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Opera House conceived the digital series Liminal, with both Sydney polymath BLESSED and his ‘TROUBLE’ collaborator Maina Doe filming iso concerts. Doe’s liberatory lockdown set reactivated the career she launched with 2019’s quiet storm ‘Delusion’. “The response I got from Liminal was really beautiful,” she recalls. The singer, who has Somali-Indonesian heritage, will now headline a show in what Marshall calls “an ongoing sort of evolutionary relationship.”
The rising star Ashli, too, will develop her relationship with the Opera House this year. Her debut EP ‘Only One’, out last November, is a coming-of-age chronicle. Next Friday she’ll present it at Vivid – years after she performed at the Opera House event Encore as a Year 12 student. “The programmer reached out and was like, ‘We’ve had our eye on Ashli – we’d love to have her in the Opera House.’ It was just very surreal.”
Despite her American roots – born in New Jersey, she arrived in Australia aged 11 – Ashli considers herself “a part of that new wave” emanating from Western Sydney, given her initial base of Penrith. “It’s not all that I am and all of my story,” she says. “But I’m very proud to be a part of a community that’s growing, that’s getting more recognition.”
In the ’90s the challenge for Australia’s R&B acts was to cultivate a distinct and authentic ethos – to win over listeners who favoured US imports. Domestic R&B didn’t always have consistent backing from the rock-oriented industry, either – labels struggled to market homegrown artists and support from radio (including triple j) and promoters alike was fickle. Today that cultural cringe has receded, the new gen diverse and individualistic.
Hatch, who’s signed to Hau Lātūkefu’s Sony-affiliated Forever Ever Records, holds that the movement is at a tipping point. “I definitely feel like in the last two years there’s been a lot more push and need for Australian R&B. [But] I don’t know how long it will take until it’s something that is actually really recognised by the Australian population.”
“The general rhetoric right now is, ‘Oh, Australian audiences don’t want to consume R&B and hip-hop.’ And that’s not necessarily true” – Maina Doe
Things have progressed since even 2020. “When I first started releasing music as Becca Hatch, it was a very different space. At the time, R&B was just something that people were like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ But hip-hop was really having its moment. Australian hip-hop artists like OneFour and the Western Sydney community were really just starting to get some recognition.
“I think, off the back of that, it’s been a lot easier to be an R&B artist, an artist of colour [and] an artist from places like Western Sydney, once hip-hop helped open those kinda doors. Not that they made it easier, but it’s definitely started some sort of discussion and conversation about R&B.”
Maina Doe, too, sees “a huge shift happening”, and credits new radio stations like CADA and online media that spotlight young R&B and hip-hop talent – as well as brands who endorse artists in those genres. It’s a “renaissance”, she says – but a “disparity” remains between consumers and the wider industry in terms of validation. (The criticism of the 2022 ARIA Awards for its under-acknowledgement of R&B acts, subtly called out by the rapper Illy at the ceremony through a shirt he wore onstage, comes to mind.)
“The general rhetoric right now is, ‘Oh, Australian audiences don’t want to consume R&B and hip-hop.’ And that’s not necessarily true – because an international artist who is a rapper or an R&B singer can come here and sell out stadiums,” Maina Doe argues. “Why can’t we nurture our local acts so that they can get into that space as well?”
For Ashli, Vivid bookings of Sampa the Great and Tkay Maidza have demonstrated the music’s potential reach – visibility being key to any takeover. “Growing up in Australia, I never really saw people like that on line-ups,” she says. “It’s amazing now that kids growing up get to see this and get to see that it’s possible.”
“It is amazing to be able to take up spaces like this and to be able to play and share my music and my stories” – Becca Hatch
Auteurs such as Solange have experimented with the R&B idiom as self-curators, not only developing ambitious multimedia concepts, but also crossing over into indie, electronica and avant-garde – defying cultural marginalisation and external categorisation. Post-Liminal, Maina Doe believes she is perceived “as more than just an R&B artist.” Hatch, who’ll have a band at Vivid, is embracing dance grooves, recording with Tentendo and Lucianblomkamp in Melbourne; she has an upcoming single ‘Ride For Me’ produced by Sydney DJ Club Angel.
Ashli, too, is expanding her sound. “I love R&B music, but it’s not all that I love and all that inspires me.” Indeed, the singer’s influences transcend genre, with her playlisting Bruce Springsteen and Alicia Keys. “A lot of artists move fluidly throughout genres in their albums or EPs or mixtapes,” she says. “It’s kind of scary not to feel like you belong in a genre, because I feel you’re less marketable that way. People are like, ‘What actually are you?’ But it’s important to do what’s most authentic to you.”
Vivid Live 2023 runs from May 26 to June 17. Becca Hatch performs May 26, Ashli June 2 and Maina Doe June 3, all at the Utzon Room. Find the full Vivid Live programme here