Alicia
S.Cook
journalist
The beer is trash
and the music bites.
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 bands 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 neat record store stocked with tapes, CD’s, 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 played two sold-out shows earlier this month at the Eaglehawk venue in their second Australian tour to date. The three-piece experimental outfit plays a mix of Japanese and Indian traditional music, metal and punk rock and formed in 2020. Their music incorporates metal and punk sounds, offset by Mistu’s Buddhist throat singing, which he projects out from the basket he wears on his head. When asked why he wears the basket, Seikoro, Bhuddadatta’s bassist, just laughed and walked away to prepare for the evening’s performance.
Trash Cult sells drinks from local producers including Trash Beer, which was brewed especially for them by Cornella brewery.
“Like I said 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.”