ALICIA S. COOK<\/p>\n
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A DISUSED take away shopfront on High Street, Eaglehawk has become a haven for counterculture. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were pretty lucky early days,\u201d Mr Derrick said. \u201cWe have some friends in the industry and they helped get the word out and get some bigger bands coming along.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 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,\u201d Mr Derrick said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThen we started to get some US and Japanese bands, I don\u2019t know how that word spread around and then we started getting a lot more.\u201d <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Formed in 2020, the three-piece experimental outfit plays a mix of Japanese and Indian traditional music, metal, and punk rock. <\/p>\n
Trash Cult sells drinks from local producers including Trash Beer, which was brewed especially for the venue by Cornella Brewery.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t have a really good business plan, we just went ahead and did it, didn\u2019t invest too much money into it and it just all seemed to work,\u201d said Mr Derrick. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s gotten far bigger than we ever thought it was capable of being.\u201d <\/p>\n
Coming up next at Trash Cult is Berlin-based Sugar, Australian singer-songwriter Jodi Phillis, and Gareth Skinner and Joel Silbersher.<\/p>\n
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