Australian music industry bands together for ‘vax the nation’ campaign
Named Vax the Nation, the campaign includes a TV commercial paired with an iconic Australian rock song to striking effect | WATCH
A coalition of the Australian entertainment industry’s biggest stars and businesses have banded together to launch a campaign supporting the vaccine rollout.
The Vax the Nation initiative includes a striking television commercial that aims to remind all Australians of the life-affirming pleasure of shared live events.
Singer Marcia Hines is among those to have lent her voice to the campaign, having already rolled up her arm twice in recent months.
“I move around a lot for a living, and I would like to get back to what it is I do: on a good day, if I’m a good girl, I get to sing,” Hines said.
“There’s such a lack of joy in the world at the moment, and that’s one of the things that people in my industry bring to people: we bring joy. And it’s not just one-sided: we get incredible joy from it, too.”
Among those lending their names to the #VaxTheNation campaign are many of Australia’s leading tour promoters, music festivals and venues, as well as more than 220 artists including Jimmy Barnes, Paul Kelly, Amy Shark, Archie Roach and Midnight Oil.
The commercial is soundtracked by Powderfinger’s 2000 hit My Happiness, which the band donated for the 60-second spot.
Cleverly, the track is cut off before reaching its memorable chorus – a creative decision that frustrates the ear while also highlighting the need to end the interruptions the sector has experienced across the past 18 months.
“It’s a fantastic choice to capture people’s attention, and I think the lyrics and the feeling of the song connects well with the message we’re trying to get out there,” said Matt Gudinski, chief executive of Mushroom Group. “The only way out of this for the live sector is vaccination.
“We all felt the need to do our bit to getting our nation to the other side of this. We’re not far from being back to going to gigs, socialising and using music in the powerful way we all do, to live our lives.”
In Gudinski’s estimation, 2021 has been far worse for the live business than last year, due to the end of JobKeeper.
“Without that, everyone from our industry is now fending for themselves,” he said of the federal wage subsidy that ended in March. “It’s definitely very dark times for a lot of our industry. There’s a whole greater level of uncertainty and unknown.”
In 2019, the industry’s pre-pandemic economic output was estimated at $36.4bn, according to research the Live Entertainment Industry Forum.
Since July, though, thousands of workers in the nation’s live entertainment sector have been unable to do their jobs with any sense of security due to travel and gathering restrictions stemming from Covid outbreaks.
All of which brings the industry-wide #VaxTheNation campaign into sharper focus: until a large proportion of the population has received both doses, many of our music venues will remain dark, empty and silent.
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