By Walter Marsh

Just as we’ve groggily shaken off the last vestiges of the O’Week with its many revelries now a hazy blur of bright lights, milk vomit and the AUES megaphone, we are again set upon again by the biggest party of them all, the AUU O’Ball. O’Ball is a jewel of the Semester 1 calendar, with education and rock n’ roll forming an ungodly alliance as ascendant and established acts alike from around the country gather to lay waste to our humble cloisters. What’s not to love about Yves Klein Blue thrusting and strutting on the very same floorspace where you usually struggle through another batch of Mayo Wedges?
Walter Marsh spoke to 2010 O’Ball Director and all-round nice guy Jonathan Brown about this year’s event.
How do you go about selecting the lineup? Is it a challenge appealing to a pretty diverse range of musical tastes within the student population as well as getting bigger name bands to come down to Adelaide?
There’s a lot of factors that come into it, I mean a lot of bands we wanted were busy with SXSW. It’s such a pain in the arse. We were considering Bertie Blackmanas as well, but things got in the way of that as well. But yeah, we had a few bands on the cards but ultimately budget and timing are two of the hardest things to play out.
How about managing the mix of local and interstate bands that feature on the bill?
It’s a tricky balance. We considered having more locals on the lineup, but I think at the end of the day one of the reasons we picked The Waterslides was they seemed well suited to a festival atmosphere. There are bands who are great live performers that we didn’t book just on the basis of trying to suit that festival feel, the slightly bigger stage, the outdoors, and the big party vibe. That’s not saying there aren’t local bands that would, but we had that opportunity to squeeze that bit more out of our budget and expand our horizons and bring in some acts that people don’t to see in Adelaide that often. I think part of putting together a good festival is giving people a taste of a whole bunch of artists they wouldn’t normally get the opportunity to see.
For me, Radio Adelaide’s been a fantastic way to find out whether bands are any good live. There’s nothing like an on air radio performance with nothing but that pure live feed to let you know if a band is any good. We had Cloud Control strip down and give us a live performance and they sounded amazing, but were still really humble.
What are some of the challenges the directors encounter in putting on O’Ball each year?
I’d say the biggest thing for O’Ball is that VSU cut a lot of money out of it. Where they used to have up in the range of nearly $100k just to book artists we’re looking at much much less than that budget wise. It’s really tricky in that sense. It’s putting on a festival that we think is the same calibre for less than half the cost of what they used to get. But for us we’ve just taken it as an opportunity to book some slightly more emerging artists who we think are really fantastic live performers and we think their live reputations will really carry the festival, not just their names. I guess the biggest thing is keeping up the festival’s reputation with a lot less money after VSU.
What is your best past O’Ball moment?
I really loved Children Collide back in 2009. They were a good example of a band being booked for O’Ball that hadn’t quite hit their stride and made it at that point they were booked, but then when it got closer to the date their album really started getting attention. They just completely blew up and a lot of people came wanting to see them. It’s always fun having Peter Combe as well, they have been fun years. I think everyone enjoys that but we’d kill the novelty if we had him every year.
Do you find it’s difficult marketing to a whole bunch of different demographics within the student population, as well as outsiders to Adelaide Uni?
I think in marketing it the fact that it’s called ‘O’Ball’ really confuses people. There seems to be this perception that it’s actually a ball with gowns and suits. Even though it’s been running for years and years a lot of people come to it fresh faced having no idea, and get confused simply by the title. We definitely want it to have a broader audience; it is partly about celebrating the start of the new year for students and giving new students an opportunity to get a bit of a taste for campus culture. All ages music events… we’re actually really lucky to have as many as we do in SA and we shouldn’t take it for granted, so I think O’Ball’s one of the really great all ages ones out there. I guess for one there are actually quite a few students out there who start uni at 17 and turn 18 during their first year and I think for high school students O’Ball would be a great introduction to live music. We’d love to be one of their first introductions to listening to good Australian music. We’d love to be one of those first points of call, and I don’t think we’ve really capitalised on it enough in the past. It would be really great for the O’Ball  to promote live Australian music and be one of the things that encourages young people to go out and see it cause it’d be great to see our venues fill up more.