BACK in 2016 when Matt Field was working on Sydney's Balcony TV live-stream music show as an assistant producer and host, he regularly met Newcastle artists.
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The common refrain he heard was, "Newcastle is a fantastic city and there's a lot of talent, but there's not a lot of venues where young players can actually play."
Fast forward a year and Field and his wife made the decision to relocate to Newcastle with their two young children for lifestyle reasons. Once in Newcastle, Field wanted to tap into and present the city's under-appreciated talent to the national audience it deserved.
Field utilised his background and knowledge in music television production and decided to write a live music show in the style of the long-running BBC program Later... with Jools Holland.
The idea was to place four diverse musical acts inside the one space in front of a live audience, but until there was financial backing it remained a pipe dream.
It enables our Newcastle musicians to have an audience outside Newcastle, and fingers crossed, it'll put Newcastle back on the map.
- Matt Field
"We have an incredible range of talent in Newcastle, there's just amazing musicians here, there's a great variety of genres as well," Field says.
"The only problem is unfortunately our local musicians can't really be heard outside of Newcastle because there's no national platform that is playing this music outside of triple j. Eighteen months ago I decided I needed to change this because there needs to be more on offer because we're a growing country and there's a pool of great musicians who aren't given enough of a platform nationally.
"Given I live in Newcastle and know the Newcastle musicians well, I thought let's start something here. It enables our Newcastle musicians to have an audience outside Newcastle, and fingers crossed, it'll put Newcastle back on the map."
Finally last month after four proposals, Field's media production company Field Frequency received funding under the City of Newcastle's $500,000 Industry Response Program Grants for industries heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The other recipients were Hunter Writers Centre, University of Newcastle, Olive Tree Markets and the Business Centre.
Arguably no industry has been more affected by coronavirus than music. It has effectively shutdown live performance, except for small 100-capacity shows, at a time when downloads and streaming have already decimated the profitability of recorded music.
With the grant Field will produce 12 episodes for his fortnightly music series, beginning on September 15. The name for the program is yet to be finalised.
As part of the grant allocation, the music show needed to present a collaborative element that would benefit multiple parts of the community.
So Field pitched to council what he describes as "broadcast collaboration". That involves live-streaming the show through the social media platforms of partner organisations.
"I said we're gonna film a show that looks like Later...with Jools, but instead of using traditional free-to-air channels we're gonna use broadcast collaboration," he says.
"We're gonna get amazing social media accounts from around Australia to put up their hand to say, 'We absolutely need to support musicians'."
The Newcastle Herald is expected to be one of the music show's broadcast partners.
The first four episodes will be streamed live from Sawtooth Studios in Tighes Hill with each of the four music acts performing in separate rooms.
However, Field has council approval to film the final eight episodes, beginning in November, at the Civic Theatre with a live audience, pending COVID-19 restrictions at the time.
"We're still going live, bouncing around band to band, but the bands themselves aren't mingling with each other and we don't have a studio audience," Field says.
Diversity is central to Field's plans. He says the show will cater for "everyone from teenagers to 50 and 70-year-olds who grew up on jazz. To make that happen, it couldn't be me booking all the bands."
Therefore a team of music directors have been recruited to curate the artists. They include Continuous Music boss Ben Steer, who has had a long career working in publicity and management with record labels EMI, Sony and Warner, Ben Campbell from the Newcastle Music Collective and Karen Eivers, who runs Facebook page Daily Dose Of Musical Medicine.
The fourth music director is yet to be confirmed, but is expected to be a female Indigenous artist.
