SMAC Awards winners
By Angus Fontaine
Sydney's culture vultures, arts mavens and great creative minds gathered on Sunday 7 December in the shadows of Australia's greatest entertainment icon, the Sydney Opera House, for the inaugural Sydney Music, Arts & Culture Awards.
Helmed by Sydney's two independent powerhouses, FBi radio & Time Out magazine, the SMACs were the fruit of 50,000-plus online votes for the city's favourite artists, musos, venues, promoters, gigs, creators & rabble-rousers.
A crowd of 350 saluted the following winners...
SMAC AWARDS WINNERS
SMAC Best Visual Artist – Kill Pixie
Local graffiti artist Kill Pixie is a big underground name – he illegally and anonymously spray paints Sydney's streets like a delinquent Arthur Stace, bless 'im – and last night he surfaced (well, almost), winning the SMAC for Best Visual Artist. Not that the highly-secretive Kill Pixie showed up on the night. "Does Batman exist without Bruce Wayne?" he told Time Out in explanation. Perhaps the reticence of Australia's answer to Banksy stems from his arrest for vandalism in Tokyo and a fine so huge he had to sell heaps of studio art to cover it. Or maybe it's because his flourishing mainstream career – kick-started from Sydney galleries like Monster Children – has now led to legitimate international success... and a SMAC!
SMAC Best Performing Artist – Brendan Cowell
Actor, playwright and renaissance ratbag of Sydney's TV, film and theatre scene, Brandan Cowell's huge year culminated in his SMAC as Best Performing Artist. Currently in Los Angeles with his squeeze, Sydney siren Rose Byrne, Cowell's stellar career shifted up a few gears in 2008. He picked up Best Actor at the Film Critics Circle of Australia awards for his stunning turn in Noise in February, wrote and staged the acclaimed autobiographical play Ruben Guthrie, took on his first directing gig for the Sydney Theatre Company, Rabbit and shepherded Ten Empty, the screenplay he co-wrote to the screen to rave reviews. Most notable of all, he took on the Dane playing Hamlet to universal acclaim in Marion Potts' production at the Sydney Opera House in May. Brava!
SMAC Best New Artist – Greedy Hen
The first time Time Out saw a Greedy Hen poster we ripped it off a public wall and put it up in our bedroom. We then found out that this artistic duo also do installation pieces, work on their own projects like the series of Greedy Hen Artist books and make record covers. Not tied to a specific medium and all the more glorious for it, Greedy Hen traipsed through 2008 as the image library of Sydney's brains, making detailed visual narratives both beautiful and kinda weird and thoroughly earning themselves the SMAC as Best New Artist.
SMAC Best Music Newcomer – Cloud Control
The psychedelic reverb rife sounds of Blue Mountains-cum-Sydney outfit Cloud Control won rave reviews all year (along with their fellow 'upper-Penrith' contemporaries The Saturns and Belles Will Ring), most notably from FBi music director Dan Zilbeer who heard a demo and became the first to spruik the quartet on radio and Time Out who showcased the band at their Sydney Songs launch in November 2007. Using the prize money from their victory at the University of Sydney band competition, they launched the EP that inspired their "Cicero-esque" acceptance speech last night for the SMAC Best Music Newcomer award.
SMAC In Your Face winner – Raise the Bar
Sydney's draconian liquor licensing laws bit the dust this year, ushering in a bold new wave of bars and a liberated nightlife scene becoming the envy of the nation. Crucial in campaigning minister Graham West and his government to change the laws were Raise the Bar, cage rattlers and rabble-rousers extraordinaire. Their vital campaign shook parliament and rallied the public to such an extent as to see people power prevail. Their legacy is one we can all raise a glass to say. Their prize? The SMAC In Your Face award!
SMAC Remix the City award – Biennale
In 2008 Biennale took over Cockatoo Island, the largest island in Sydney Harbour and a former prison and shipyard, and turned it into an art mecca. In their hands, its prison buildings and other convict sites played host to 35 artists and thousands of enlightened culture junkies, resurrecting an ancient venue now suddenly blossoming anew (it will host the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in January) and making Biennale worthy winners of the SMAC Remix the City award.
SMAC Record of the Year – The Presets
2008 was always going to be The Presets' year and so it has proved. The Sydney dance punk duo of Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes took out Best Dance Release, Best Group and the big one, Album of the Year, at the recent ARIAs award for their gangbusting opus Apocalypso. But the highlight of their year was recognition from the FBi–Time Out twin-prong confederacy that awarded them Record of the Year, a prize the pair took time out from their insanely busy international schedule to accept personally.
SMAC Music Performance of the Year – Dappled Cities
Live performance legends since forming a decade ago, Sydney quintet Dappled Cities toured the world in 2008 on the back of their stellar album Granddance. The band spent a big slab of that time writing and recording in New York (and sneaking Time Out into the studio: see http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/music/dappled-cities-dont-fly.aspx) before returning to Sydney for a blistering set of shows that wowed fans and critics and conjured them the greatest gong of their career, a SMAC for Music Performance of the Year accepted personally by the band.
SMAC Best Music Event – Spiegeltent
Enchanting and exotic, The Famous Spiegeltent was the centrepiece of the 2008 Sydney Festival. Within her gilded environs – its magic mirrors have reflected thousands of images of artists, audiences and exotic gatherings over the years and they say her ghosts are woven into her ballooning velvet canopies, circular teak dance floor and stained, cut-glass windows – Sydneysiders could enjoy a drink and a bite to eat under the stars while soaking up the Spiegeltent's 1920s atmosphere in the middle of Hyde Park. The summer's most magical late night venue won the SMAC for Best Music Event.
SMAC Best Arts Event – Underbelly
Forty projects, over 250 artists, 60 volunteers, 30 crew, pot plants and astro turf, dreadlocks, latex body parts, a heritage bus, nearly 50 projectors and an elephant in a room... Underbelly's second year ran a slightly longer shoestring than in 2007 but was ten times the success with the arts public at large, culminating in FBi and Time Out and the 50,000 voters dipping their lids to a job well done in the form of the SMAC for Best Arts Event.
SMAC of the Year winner – Fergus Linehan
Sydney's favourite Irishman and the man responsible for kick-staring the first cultural wave of the Sydney summer, Fergus Linehan capped off his three-year tenure as Sydney Festival director with SMAC of the Year last night. Paying tribute to FBi and Time Out and all they do for the city, Linehan cited his greatest legacy as unshackling art and culture from its often rarified spot in the city's schedule and giving the festival back to the people of Sydney via innovations such as the totally free Festival First Night. Time Out once asked him: 'What element of style does Sydney have that the rest of the world needs?' Fergus's reply? "An uncomplicated relationship with pleasure." It's the same gift Linehan has delivered unto Sydney these past three years, making him a natural winner of the FBi–Time Out SMAC of the Year prize.
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