The rise of Hot Dub Time Machine: ‘No matter how good a DJ is, you're still pretending to be a musician'
'I think DJing is the professional wrestling of the music industry,' he says. 'Wrestling, in the end, no matter how good it is, it's still people pretending to fight. The DJ, no matter how good you are, you're still pretending to be a musician.'
He doesn't mean this as a bad thing, of course. Since 2011, Lowndes has performed under the persona of DJ Tom Loud, the ringmaster of Hot Dub Time Machine, a hugely popular music party that tours the world. Throughout the 2010s 'Hot Dub' built a cult following at the Adelaide and Edinburgh fringes, before riding the bubbles and crashes of Australia's 2010s festival landscape and playing big overseas slots from the desert of Coachella to a 15th-century Transylvanian castle.
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Like wrestling, the key to DJing is playing to the crowd, he says: 'I'm all about the connection. The whole time I'm playing, I'm looking at the crowd. My hands can kind of do the DJing on their own.'
The Hot Dub Time Machine concept is simple: over two hours, Lowndes takes his audience from 1954 to the present day, skipping across decades and genres with childlike glee. He typically begins with Bill Haley and the Comets' Rock Around The Clock, before leapfrogging from one track to another via shared musical DNA or lyrical themes. In the 1970s, Daddy Cool's Eagle Rock might turn into Boney M's Daddy Cool. By the 1980s, the horn blasts of Diana Ross's I'm Coming Out blend into Eye of the Tiger, which in turn becomes John Farnham's Pressure Down. In the 1990s, Yothu Yindi's Treaty blurs into TISM's Greg! The Stop Sign!!, before Tag Team's Whoomp! (There It Is!) unexpectedly turns into Nicki French's 1994 cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
'My process now is that I make a very, very carefully constructed set … and then I don't do it,' he says. '[I'll have] a really orchestrated, intricate, chronologically correct set. I put a huge amount of effort and thought into what songs will work, the energy and the pacing, all that stuff. And then I look at all their faces and go, 'No, they just want to hear [Earth, Wind & Fire's] September right now'.
'What I do is daggy – I'm a retro DJ,' he adds. 'But when you're playing George Michael and Fred Again within half an hour of each other, there's something about that that makes the George Michael cooler by association, and makes the Fred Again more fun.'
Lowndes' early music tastes were shaped by Triple J's request line and his parents' Stones and Beatles cassettes, followed by a heavy metal phase. A stint in London introduced him to ecstasy and rave culture, before returning to Australia to settle into his first career as a sound designer.
He spent a few years working on Channel Nine's Underbelly series, and added horse noises to nearly 200 episodes of McLeod's Daughters – he even supplied the crunching metallic noises when Claire's ute fatefully went over the cliff in season three. But he could 'feel the death knell of the Australian television drama', that he was going to need to find new work soon.
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'There's a real cliche of the bitter sound guy, and I could just feel myself turning into one of those,' he says. 'I just wanted to make my own thing.'
During another job, on the Channel Ten sketch comedy show The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, he befriended comedians like Heath Franklin, Felicity Ward and Dan Ilic. Lowndes had been dabbling with DJing in his bedroom when Ilic invited him to DJ at comedy shows.
It took a while to find his feet. Drawing from his TV background, he started incorporating video clips and pop culture references into his act, which he called Tom's Video Dance-a-Rama – 'which was also wildly unsuccessful,' Lowndes says.
With the help from some friends, including Ronnie Johns alumnus Jordan Raskopoulos, he landed on the time-travel gimmick, and a catchier name: Tom's Video Dance-a-Rama became Hot Dub Time Machine, a play on the largely forgotten comedy film Hot Tub Time Machine released the previous year.
The novel, crowd-pleasing format suddenly clicked. Lowndes' early success on the Fringe circuit landed him slots at music festivals like Splendour in the Grass and Falls festival. With his management, he soon expanded into the festival market in 2016 with Hot Dub Wine Machine, which saw Lowndes regularly play to between 8,000 to 15,000 punters at wineries around Australia.
'It was a whirlwind. Everything we touched was more successful, more exciting. We would throw more money and do all this stuff, more alcohol, more drugs,' he says. 'It's funny to hear these rock'n'roll cliches coming out of my mouth as a time-travelling DJ. But it did all happen, and then all of a sudden, you're like, 'Hang on, how the fuck did I get here? I don't want to be someone who owns a festival. I'm not a business person, I'm a DJ.'
Meeting Lowndes in Adelaide at the start of his latest Hot Dub tour, he's now left much of that behind. He parted ways with his former manager, sold his Wine Machine stake for a dollar during the pandemic, and cut out alcohol entirely.
'I've been sober for five years,' the father of three reflects. 'I used to just be drunk and continue the party. I think everybody in the music industry at some point reaches a point where they have to reckon with alcohol.
'It's really cool drinking and partying with 21-year-olds for a long time, but then all of a sudden it's not cool. You have got to decide – do you want to be the older guy in the industry who has his shit together that people can look up to? Or do you want to be that older guy in the industry who's a bit embarrassing?'
Later that night, as Lowndes bounces on to the stage like a gangly human pogo stick, beaming at the crowd over his moustache and triggering 2010s-era air horn effects, it seems his wrestling theory might be on to something. When he performs karate chops to conduct the crowd in a mass sing-along of Abba's Voulez Vous, there's no doubt.
'I know, it's a weird way to make a living!' he yells into the microphone – and the next banger plays.
Hot Dub Time Machine's show Can't Stop is touring Australia and New Zealand from 29 March–24 May; see here for all dates.
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The Guardian
2 days ago
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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
US singer-songwriter Tyler Ballgame: ‘It shocked me out of depression. I had this spiritual awakening'
Four years ago, Tyler Perry's stepfather offered him a job in the office of his dog-training company in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Perry had little else to fill his time: he was 29 and living in his mother's basement, uncertain what he should do with the rest of his life. In 2017, he had left Berklee College of Music, where he had ostensibly studied songwriting, but largely smoked weed and skipped class. The songs he wrote then were introspective and folk-driven, in the lineage of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith – artists he had been drawn to in his senior year of high school, who had spoken to him just as depression had first set in. 'I was depressed for, like, 10 years,' he says. In idle moments in the office, he would scour Craigslist, imagining a different life in New York or Nashville or LA. One day, on a whim, he applied for a recruitment job at a commercial real estate company in Los Angeles. He lied about his experience, and the fact he didn't have a degree. 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'I pinned my personality to a wall, and I got to see it for the first time,' he says. 'And it shocked me out of depression. I had this kind of spiritual awakening.' The problem was that this newly awakened Perry did not fit quite so well with his catalogue of melancholy folk songs. For years, when he played live, he had hidden behind his guitar, his voice flat and whispered. 'I was wanting to be 'cool' in that sense of 'mystical, can't grasp it …'' he says. 'But I don't think that's necessarily me.' In California, he lived out of a suitcase, worked for the property company in the day, and at night played open mics across the city. Mostly he would play a couple of his own folk songs, and then a cover of Roy Orbison's Crying. It was this last song that hit the sweet spot. 'People would freak out, and it would be like it was my birthday,' he says. 'Everybody in the place looking at me and clapping.' 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The classes were held in a theatre, and on the first day, Taylor invited each of his 40 students to stand on the stage. You had to go up and hold your palms out to the audience, and shift your weight from one foot to the other in time, and look everybody in the eye. It struck Perry as brilliant. In Los Angeles, Perry remembered the class, and it struck him as an act of radical presence; something Tyler Ballgame might do. He started to try it in his live shows. 'I'd reach out to the audience and look them in the eye. Like, we're both here to do something. I'm trying to connect, and we're going to live this experience together.' The songs came with an ease. Soulful, and sad sometimes, but also brimming with something hopeful and alive. They carried the richness and simplicity of the classics. Perry relocated to East Los Angeles, began collaborating with other neighbouring musicians, and playing live as much as he could. One day, the producer Jonathan Rado, famed for his work with Miley Cyrus and the Killers, happened to see an Instagram story of a Tyler Ballgame show and contacted him. The singer went over to Rado's studio shortly afterwards and over the next couple of weeks, the pair recorded more than an album's worth of material. Word of Tyler Ballgame soon spread, and by last autumn, record labels had begun making fevered bids to sign him. In the end, Perry went with the British independent Rough Trade, connecting with them over a shared love of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell. 'I had a lot of options and it was really flattering and really crazy,' he says, 'but I just kept coming back to Rough Trade, because of that kindred spirit of whatever music I make naturally, in my soul, they already love, because they've already put out all the music that I love.' Perry makes for easy company, and after an hour and a half of conversation I ask if there is anything else he might like to tell me. 'I don't know,' he says slowly, and hesitates. 'Maybe I'd like to mention my counsellor, Courtney, again,' he says. 'She had her life taken, really horrifically.' Huard was killed by her husband, who later killed himself. Perry learned of her death when a friend sent him a news article from his local newspaper back in Rhode Island. Perry saw the photograph and was stunned. At that precise moment he had been writing Help Me Out, a song largely inspired by Huard. 'She made me realise your value is not tied to the size of your body, or how people look at you – things which had kept me from even being on stage at all. 'There are so many people on the messageboards of her funeral posts and her obituary saying: 'She set me on the course of my life.' She was a really special person, and it just shows how precious life is. So I live for her.' It is a hot afternoon, but Perry takes to the stage at the UnBarred Brewery wearing a woollen jumper. He looks out to the crowd, gently spreads his palms, and begins to sing. It is a golden performance, the songs sounding almost as if they have always existed, and Perry entirely mesmerising. As he plays, I think of something he told me over lunch – about the freedom and fluidity of performance. 'I want to be totally in the flow state, like gone,' he said. 'Where nothing is canned or prepared or contrived.' Some shows, he told me, you get it, and the rest of the band get it, and the audience gets it, too. 'And then it's like real magic. It's a celebration of the joy of performance and the joy of music.' Today as Perry and the band play, the air is filled with a kind of joy – with something like real magic in the warmth of a Sussex afternoon. Tyler Ballgame's new single New Car is out now. He plays the End of the Road festival, nr Blandford Forum, 30 August, and The Lexington, London, 10 September.
Times
24-07-2025
- Times
Why men like me admire Sacha Baron Cohen's ‘midlife crisis' makeover
Sacha Baron Cohen's muscular body on the cover of the latest Men's Fitness requires a leap of faith. When a man who adopts comic personas poses looking heroic and ripped on the front of a magazine, you can be forgiven for thinking, 'This has to be a trap. This has to be AI, a new character, a clever body suit that will allow him to expose our vanities and hypocrisies once again.' But no, it appears that Baron Cohen's frankly amazing body is the product of hours of training, combined with careful eating and possibly even weight-loss drugs, although with Baron Cohen it's impossible to know how serious he was when he quipped on Instagram, 'Some celebs use Ozempic, some use private chefs, some use personal trainers. I did all three. This is not AI. I really am egotistical enough to do this.' This happens to more and more men in midlife. The recently divorced 53-year-old actor is starring as Mephisto in the Marvel movie Ironheart, so got in touch with Matthew McConaughey's trainer and started working with steely discipline. I come to his transformation as someone just under ten years older who works out every day and has found himself the focus of well-meaning mockery for (counts on fingers) the past 45 years. While football, rugby and tennis have always been dignified ways for a man to spend his time, lifting weights so you can have cool muscles is deemed somewhat ridiculous. I understand totally. When I stand in front of a full-length mirror to perform a biceps curl there is, even after all this time, just the faintest hint of Eye of the Tiger playing ironically somewhere in my head. But it works, it feels astonishingly good and it's a way of telling the world you are still very much alive. The phrase 'still got it' is fired at older people who have made some undignified attempt at sexy and found themselves with egg and fake tan on their face. But trying to hang on to 'it' is human, hard work and, I think, totally admirable. • Read our expert advice on healthy living, fitness and wellbeing With this in mind I'm seeing two kinds of middle-aged man emerging: the age-accepters and those who challenge decrepitude to come and find them among the machines and dumbbells of their local gym. What is clear is that when a man of a certain age decides to commit, there is no heart gadget, protein shaker or clingy vest that we will not at least think about buying. Cohen says his workout regime with the celebrity trainer Alfonso Moretti stops his mind spinning. 'Instead of lying in bed overthinking and staring at my phone, I get up, jump on FaceTime and train with Alfonso. It sets a positive tone for the whole day.' In our fifties, sixties and beyond, having a purpose and a constructive goal really helps. Knowing I'll be in the gym or on a run at some point every day gives me structure when otherwise, like Baron Cohen, I'd be an Olympic-standard overthinker. The midlife male makeover is obviously rich comedy material and Baron Cohen has declared his midlife crisis before others take aim. The question for later-life men is not 'am I having a crisis?', it's 'what kind of crisis do I want to have?' We all confront mortality, invisibility, loss of sexual appeal and having to use reading glasses in dark restaurants: the task is to work out the most constructive way to deal with all that. I say to all the men out there thinking they too might swap some of their pints for protein shakes, it's never too late and your body will respond to the work you put in. When you feel silly working out, remember that if the man who gave us Borat and Ali G managed to overcome his sense of the absurd, so can you.
