Alice Springs has a population of 34,000 and exactly one dedicated live music space: a heavy metal venue called the Black Wreath. It has hosted hundreds of bands from around the country over the past decade – despite being 1,500km from the nearest city. For musicians in central Australia, the Black Wreath is a one-of-a-kind resource.
So when its operators were informed last year of the owners’ plans to sell, they negotiated a stay of execution and began devising a fundraiser that could save the desert venue. A month-long crowdfunding campaign, which called for donations that would let the team behind the Black Wreath buy the venue and place it in a trust, hit its $1m target on Friday. The Black Wreath’s founder and creative director, a lip-pierced and leather-clad man known mononymously as Pirate, says it feels surreal to have raised so much money for what is a DIY, volunteer-run venue far off the beaten touring track.
The grand vision is to use the money to keep the Black Wreath alive to give musicians from central Australia a space to perform, “and for Alice to be a touring destination for other artists year-round”. But the work is not done yet. Pirate says the successful Pozible campaign is just “step one” towards securing the Black Wreath’s future and that “there’s multiple ways that could unfold”.
He still has to negotiate with owners, who have an asking price of $1.23m on the venue – a sum higher than the amount the fundraiser collected. Pirate wants to secure additional funding through philanthropy and by “reaching out to some of the biggest bands in the world”. The Black Wreath is still gratefully accepting donations, and has set a new fundraising target of $1,111,111 – a nod to the date of the Black Wreath’s inception: 11 November 2011.
The fundraising campaign comes two years after the Tote, some 2,300km away in Melbourne, crowd-sourced $3m to keep itself open. The Black Wreath was born out of the desire “to put Alice Springs on the map” and “create something that is available as a resource for the entire town”, Pirate says. There weren’t any studios, venues or rehearsal rooms.” A collective of three bands founded The Black Wreath as a record label and a series of backyard studios, before later leasing what was then a run-down industrial building and turning it into a creative hub complete with a recording studio, rehearsal spaces and stage.
The collective expanded and now operates a national heavy music festival, Blacken Open Air, which takes place in April and May one hour outside Alice Springs. Pirate believes the reason the town has such an affinity for heavy metal stems from “the isolation of the place – small-town frustration”. And young people, when you discover that, it makes you feel part of something bigger … [especially if] you already feel like you’re disconnected from the world”.
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