‘Did they come here by mistake?’: Mildura’s Kings of Leon moment

A long way from anywhere else, Mildura is used to being overlooked. So when word broke in April that US rock band Kings of Leon would play in the desert city – six hours’ drive from Melbourne, 11 hours from Sydney, and a breezy 4½ from Adelaide – many of the locals had trouble believing it.

“Everyone was like, ‘This has got to be a joke, why would they come to somewhere like this?’,” says Alicia Wills, assistant manager of the border town’s Secret Garden bar and a dedicated fan of the band. “But then it turned out to be true.”

Last Saturday night, the band comprising the Followill brothers Caleb (guitar and lead vocals), Nathan (drums) and Jared (bass), their cousin Matthew (lead guitar), and a couple of touring musicians played on the brand new footy oval that just a week earlier had hosted its first AFLW match. But Wills wasn’t there; she was rostered on to work, and the chronic shortage of staff in town meant she wasn’t able to swap her shift.

She had to content herself with playing the band’s music all night long, and to hell with what her customers thought. Her daughter, though, was among the 10,000 or so who did see the band, supported by Australia’s The Temper Trap, on a cool night beneath a perfectly clear desert sky.

Kings of Leon - with Matthew Followill on lead guitar, Caleb Followill on vocals, Jared Followill on bass and Nathan Followill on drums - play live in Mildura on the first show of their 2022 Australian show.Credit: Vision House Photography

“I asked her to ring me when they played my favourite song, Closer,” Wills says. As her daughter held her phone high in the air, she excused herself and found a quiet spot in the bar.

“I had a bit of a teary moment,” she says. “That’s as close as I was able to get.”

Until now, the chance of getting anywhere near an act like this in a town like this was close to zero.

The population of Mildura, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, is about 33,000. Conventional wisdom says there just aren’t enough people here to support a touring act the size of Kings Of Leon.

Post-pandemic, though, conventional wisdom isn’t what it used to be.

“We had a lot of thinking time during COVID to think what else can we do that’s different,” says Paul Dainty, the veteran promoter behind the first international chart-topping act ever to play in the town.

“The problem with Australia is we don’t have enough cities,” he says. “You go to Europe, you go to America, you’ve got lots of markets to go to. We’ve got five major markets [the mainland state capitals], and a lot of B markets. So the more we can grow other markets, the more there’s an audience out there.”

It’s a process of educating people and working around the realities of those new markets. In a town like Mildura, for instance, where some in the crowd have travelled from Broken Hill, two hours north, and others from Adelaide (the band isn’t playing there on this tour, its first in a decade), a midweek show just wouldn’t work. But now it’s been done once, he says, convincing people it’s really happening – and convincing band management it’s viable – will be easier the next time.

“There’s 10,000 people out there tonight, maybe 12,000,” says Dainty, taking in the crowd on the oval carved out of vineyards (the grapes come to within a couple of metres of the boundary fence). “Fast forward two or three years, if we keep doing this, it might be 20,000.”

Alicia Wills is a mad keen fan but had to work in the bar she manages, Secret Garden.Credit: Karl Quinn

When the Kings of Leon tour was announced in April 2021, there was no regional date on its line-up of shows, originally slated for March and April 2022, but there was an Adelaide show. But when drummer Nathan Followill underwent surgery in November for a torn bicep, the whole tour had to be rescheduled, and a new date for Adelaide just couldn’t be found.

South Australia’s loss was Mildura’s gain.

That was when Dainty approached Brendan McClements of Visit Victoria with the idea of a regional show, on the condition the state government kick in a bit of financial support (precisely how much the government contributed is commercial-in-confidence).

The state was just emerging from its sixth and (hopefully) final lockdown, and with the tourist economy down around 70 per cent on pre-COVID levels, it needed a heart starter.

“From a Visit Victoria perspective, the job was to come out of the gates as quickly as we could to get things moving again,” says McClements. “And we know events of scale, live music particularly, are a great attractor of people.”

Before the pandemic, there was neither need nor opportunity for the government to get involved in the live music sector, McClements says. “Music had been quite efficient, the market looked after itself.”

But the pandemic hit the sector especially hard. “So we thought this year would be an opportunity to play more aggressively because the opportunity came to try things for the first time.”

The Mildura Sporting Precinct, a brand new $43 million facility surrounded by vineyards. 

Visit Vic’s remit is to attract tourist dollars from interstate and overseas. But it is also charged with getting Melburnians out of the city and into the regions, to spread the wealth and the jobs it supports.

Final figures aren’t yet in, but Martin Hawson, CEO of Mildura Rural City Council, estimates that about 60 per cent of Saturday’s concertgoers were local, with the rest coming from towns as far south as Bendigo and St Arnaud, and as far north as Broken Hill.

Kendall Jackman and Christy Harris travelled in a party of seven women in two cars from Broken Hill, arriving on Friday night and heading home on Sunday afternoon. They spent Friday in town – shopping, eating and getting matching tattoos of small cocktail glasses.

“We spent nearly $1000 just at one place getting cocktails on Friday night,” says Harris.

Jackman says: “We really enjoyed the show, it was fantastic ... half of Broken Hill is here.”

Would they do it again? “If there was a gig here every year, we’d make it an annual trip for sure,” says Harris.

That’s music to McClements’ ears. “We’ll have to see as we work through the outcomes and talk to Paul and others about future touring routes,” he says, “but it’s possible that the perceived weakness of Mildura – its remoteness – is actually a strength.”

A crowd of around 10,000 people turned up to see Kings of Leon play in Mildura on October 29, 2022.Credit: Vision House

The Betoota Advocate ran a story during the pandemic headlined “Premier Dan Andrews Apologises To Mildura After Learning They’re Actually Part Of Victoria”. It was satire but for some people in town, it read like the truth.

Traditionally a safe Nationals seat, Mildura is currently held by independent Ali Cupper. In the bar overlooking the oval and the temporary bandstand, she hits me with a passionate stump speech about how the town has suffered from its lack of strategic importance to Spring Street.

“This community was badly Jeffed in the 1990s,” she says. “And that was, I guess, the start of our official era of neglect.”

Cupper is wearing a black T-shirt with the words “I’m only here for the root” on the front, and the explanatory “Mallee root” on the back. If she were choosing the band tonight, she says, it would be Guns ‘n’ Roses or Midnight Oil. But this event is about much more than the music.

“It’s about our community, it’s about the buzz, it’s about the morale and it’s about the economic boost,” she says. “It’s not just a concert, it fits into a bigger picture of the government having some sense that the people of Mildura are Victorians too, and maybe we need to include them.”

On April 12, the citizens of Mildura (locals have a tendency to either drop the L, pronouncing it Middura, or to merge the L and D, as Mijra) had reason to feel forgotten yet again.

The regional centres that would host Victoria’s Commonwealth Games in 2026 were announced, and Mildura was not among them. Cupper says she rang Martin Pakula, then minister for regional development, and gave him an earful. Two weeks later, the Kings of Leon gig was announced.

Caleb Followill soaks up the love.

Were the events connected? Pakula declined to comment, and while Cupper says he has told her that getting Kings of Leon “was not related to trying to placate Mildura”, she feels “the timing was interesting”.

However it came to be, Mildura has now hosted its first international act. Its accommodation was stretched to the limit, but the free bus service moved people about relatively efficiently and the $89 cap on ticket prices made it affordable to a good chunk of a town where more than one-fifth of households live on less than $650 a week.

Walking the streets the morning after, it was impossible to find anyone who had a bad word to say about the show, whether they had been there or not.

They might have chosen to give away their ticket and go fishing instead, as did 22-year-old Maddison Wilson-Bird, or they might wish for a bit of support for lower-profile cultural activities, as did circus arts teacher Jack Peterson. But none of them begrudged Mildura having the opportunity to show it could mix it with the big boys.

“This might draw a few more people in now,” Alicia Wills says, speaking for many. “They can see we’re not such a dumb town in the middle of nowhere.”

The author attended the Kings of Leon show as a guest of Visit Victoria.

Email the author at [e-mail], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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