Death by ARIA! (The Naked City)

‘Death by ARIA!‘ is the latest column (November 25, 2024) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.

The ARIAS – the Australian Music Industry’s night of nights and before we pose the question ‘why do they still bother?”, I would like to know has anybody ever been impaled on the actual physical award?

We have all seen that murderous looking gong, a kind of elongated pyramid tapering to a terrifying ice pick pinnacle. I’m not the only one interested and the ABC’s Zan Rowe was similarly intrigued when she posted on X in 2018, ‘Every time I see a musician holding an ARIA I think “HOW HAS NO ONE EVER INJURED THEMSELVES WITH AN ARIA?’.

Every time I see a musician holding an ARIA I think “HOW HAS NO ONE EVER INJURED THEMSELVES WITH AN ARIA?”

Related: has anyone ever injured themselves with an @ARIA_Official Award?

— Zan Rowe (@zanrowe) November 3, 2018

Whilst Zan received no definitive reply the chances of some drunken, coked out musician or burly industry exec accidentally sitting on one at an ARIA after party is a distinct possibility, but who is going to admit to that? That’s a real shame as rupturing your bowel or puncturing your prostate on the nasty pointy end would surely guarantee immediate entry to the ‘ARIA Hall Of Pain’.

And painful it was for TV viewers who sat through Nine’s horribly predictable, drawn out coverage of the event last Wednesday from Sydney’s ‘iconic’ Hordern Pavilion. The broadcast got off to a bad start with lots of technical hitches at a tacky red carpet and from then on was the usual visual hodge podge of giant LED screens, theatrical smoke and punishing strobe lighting.

These days the TV ‘awards ceremony’ is a very much a formula production, drawn largely from the American model and as such holds very few surprises. Even the acceptance speeches could have been written by AI, injecting just the right amount of humility so we all warm to the winners.

The most dynamic, creative, interesting and productive days of the Australian music industry were in the 80s and 90s, when musicians and bands learned their craft playing countless gigs in pubs, clubs and festivals. These days with all the tricks of the internet it’s easy to generate stardom overnight and that seemed to be typical of many of the artists who hit the stage last Wednesday. It’s unlikely any of them will be back in twenty years’ time to receive a heritage ‘Hall Of Fame’ award as Missy Higgins collected on the night.

On a lighter note, it’s worth recalling an incident that began at the 1994 ARIAS when The Cruel Sea won a host of the treasured gongs. After some supposed drunken argy bargy at a raucous after party one of their five awards went missing, closely followed by a number of bizarre but decidedly tongue in cheek extortion attempts for its return.

Some twenty seven years later the stolen ARIA suddenly appeared on Facebook Marketplace and after a series of negotiations it was returned to the band in exchange for a mere carton of VB. The group’s front man Tex Perkins expressed his astonishment at the time, wondering just where the hell it had been.

“What’s been its journey? How did it end up in the bin? Where’s it been? Has it been on a shelf somewhere? Has it been in multiple hands? Has it travelled overseas? Has it been buried?”

Exactly what happened to that ARIA during those years in the wilderness remains to be explained but surely it needs investigation, either in the shape of a tell all documentary or Netflix style bio pic. Who knows, it could well have fallen into the hands of Sydney’s seedy underworld and used to murder or intimidate. ‘Pay up you bastard or you will be wearing a bloody great spike through your forehead!’. Then again it could simply have been used as a door stopper, obviously a real letdown, so let the imagination run wild!

Whilst there is no actual record of ‘death by ARIA’, the menacing appearance of the award is surely symptomatic of the moribund state of the Australian music industry – a single thrust away from severing the jugular!

Maybe it’s time to opt for something more rounded and tactile, something you would even be comfortable taking to bed with you. The future of music, over produced, banal and increasingly generated via AI is not particularly promising.  At least the prized awards for the best mediocrity could be designed with ocular safety in mind or not to figure as the mysterious murder weapon in some gruesome homicide investigation.