Alice Fraser

From curating small gigs in Adelaide to working with some of Australia’s biggest artists and festivals, Alice Fraser has turned a love of music festivals into a globetrotting career.

“I’d always been a music lover,” Fraser says.

“My family used to take me to festivals when I was six years old.

My parents used to write me a note to get out of school to take me to the Big Day Out every year. Back then, outside of listening to the radio they were the moments of discovery, of going, ‘Oh my goodness, I am front row and here is Black Eyed Peas, System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine. This is so cool — they’re in Adelaide, they’re at the Showgrounds, oh my gosh.”

After finishing school, Fraser took the plunge and deferred her university studies to pursue her love of music.

“I spent two and a bit years just travelling around the country, volunteering at music festivals.[I] said to South Australian bands, ‘Hire me and my van and I’ll drive you round the country.’

I dabbled in a little bit of artist management for some local acts.”

Booking and promoting shows around Adelaide gave Alice an opportunity to curate the kinds of lineups and experiences she wanted to see.

“A big takeaway from my early days in music was, ‘Oh, okay, you can think global but act local.’

That was an ethos that I applied from the very beginning. I always [knew] I wanted to build a local following here first, because [of] what you can do in a small city; you have the capacity here, where there’s the resources, funding… You have the ability to do something and for that to be recognised, possibly a little bit quicker and a little bit easier than, say, a larger city with a more competitive market.”

After gaining more experience volunteering with St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, Alice cold called British promoter Communion Music — a group whose work she found inspiring.

Her enthusiasm opened the door and after relocating to the United Kingdom to undertake an internship she crossed paths with Laneway founder Danny Rogers at the office.

“He’s like, ‘Oh, are you Alice who volunteered on Adelaide’s Laneway?’,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I am.’ Random. And he’s like, ‘Oh, I think you’re the only person at an indie festival that’s ever written a volunteer report’.”

That ‘peak geek’ moment led her to a job as National Artist Liaison Manager for the festival, along with roles including Production Coordinator and Tour Manager for high profile Australian artists like Tame Impala, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and Tones and I.

And though spending more time backstage has shifted her perspective on festivals, it has done little to dampen her enthusiasm.

“I’m a music fan — there’s a huge percentage of me [that] just wants to be out the front, having a really good time,” she says.

“Now I work behind the scenes, my view of music festivals has actually turned 360. Even when I’m walking around festivals and events now, I can’t help but think of the whole sphere of what this means: the music that I’m listening to, the timetable scheduling, the pathways that I’m walking on, how I get from A to B, what I’m drinking, what I’m eating, who I’m going with. I actually think that it’s made me a much greater music fan; [I] understand now the gravity and the level of organisation and skill that goes into the operation and the planning and the development of it.”

Still, it isn’t without its challenges, even in a ‘festival city’ like Adelaide: “Adelaide’s a hard music market — a lot of bands don’t tour here.

How can we harness that? We can have two shows a year at Adelaide Oval [but] that’s not a festival city to me.

We need to be harnessing and locking on to so many of these tours that actually do come to Australia and New Zealand, and making Adelaide a viable stopover.”

But while the collapse of once-dominant festivals like Big Day Out saw some predict an end to the festival ‘bubble’, for Alice it isn’t necessarily the big players that define a festival experience.

“Music festivals have the ability to bring either a really dedicated audience, where it’s really streamlined perhaps for a genre; you [can] look at them on a national touring circuit and bring in large-form internationals; or you can look upon a music festival being a local community street festival where everyone has a BYO instrument — all of those are actually supremely powerful [in] the cultural ecology of what a music city should have.”

There’s one more thing a ‘festival city’ needs: true believers like Fraser whose hard work is matched only by her unwavering love of the festival experience.

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This article is part of the Festival City Stories series, a collection of reflections about Adelaide made by the people who make this a festival place. The project was funded through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts South Australia, Arts Recovery Fund, and delivered in partnership with the State Library of South Australia. 

Written by: Walter Marsh

Photography by: Sai Duff