The beer is trash and the music bites

ALICIA S. COOK

A DISUSED take away shopfront on High Street, Eaglehawk has become a haven for counterculture.

Trash Cult started as a record store founded by Mick Derrick and Lorelle Hickson in 2020 and now hosts live music including acts from the US, Japan, Germany, and New Zealand.

“We were pretty lucky early days,” Mr Derrick said. “We have some friends in the industry and they helped get the word out and get some bigger bands coming along.”

The band room is a tight squeeze accessed via the neatly ordered record store stocked with tapes, CDs, and vinyls of obscure music from around the world.

With only 40 tickets sold per show, many of the regular patrons have become known to the owners by name and are handed their beers with a friendly check-in over biting waves of punk-rock.

“When we started having bands, we had a lot of punk bands, a lot of hard-core metal bands, and a lot of experimental and obscure underground bands ask us to play,” Mr Derrick said.

“Then we started to get some US and Japanese bands, I don’t know how that word spread around and then we started getting a lot more.”

Bhuddadata, a punk-metal band from Osaka in Japan played two sold-out shows earlier this month at the Eaglehawk venue as part of their second Australian tour.

Formed in 2020, the three-piece experimental outfit plays a mix of Japanese and Indian traditional music, metal, and punk rock.

Trash Cult sells drinks from local producers including Trash Beer, which was brewed especially for the venue by Cornella Brewery.

“We didn’t have a really good business plan, we just went ahead and did it, didn’t invest too much money into it and it just all seemed to work,” said Mr Derrick.

“It’s gotten far bigger than we ever thought it was capable of being.”

Coming up next at Trash Cult is Berlin-based Sugar, Australian singer-songwriter Jodi Phillis, and Gareth Skinner and Joel Silbersher.

Check out the Trash Cult website for more info.