NICK FROM SEASON THREE
- Jul 22
- 11 min read
Writer: Joseph Maranta
Images: Katy Bedford/@katwattle & Joseph Maranta
An ongoing cost of living crisis and widespread venue closures have, among a slew of other contributing factors, considerably reduced the accessibility of live music within Meanjin for punters and musicians alike. The dire financial reality of operating live music seemingly becomes more stark with every passing quarter and the boundaries of where live music can sustainably exist are continually contracting.
When viewed from the outside, the forecast of the city’s music scene looks bleak, but for better or worse, the musical legacy of Meanjin is steeped in defiance. It’s been built by the resolve and commitment of those who view live music and its community as something larger than themselves and as a cause worthy of personal sacrifice.
During the darker days of recent within Meanjin, days which saw the closure of the beloved Bearded Lady and the demise of South Brisbane’s Can You Keep a Secret, the perseverance and selflessness of people like Nick Smethurst lit a beacon of hope for many regarding the future of music in this city.
Alongside James Eyre Walker, Smethurst founded Season Three, a pillar of culture and community within Meanjin which has blossomed from a struggling music shop into one of the city’s most important refuges of expression.
A wholly DIY project, the venue has fostered many of Meanjin’s most talented bands and artists, and has become truly foundational in building the city’s thriving music scene through its steadfast commitment to championing accessibility for those of all ages, creeds and identities.
It was a privilege to sit down with Nick ahead of his venue’s one-year anniversary at Echo and Bounce.
JOE: Thanks for catching up this arvo Nick! How have things been going for you and Season Three lately?
NICK: It’s been crazy, in the best possible way.
I’m an eminently reflective person unfortunately - not to my benefit - but in May of last year, we were done. This was finished. Season Three as a project had concluded, and its time was done. But in such a short space we rehomed, closed, moved and got things started again.
From the outset, and in this current iteration, there’s never been a long-term goal; it's just been about finding a need to serve, and being of utility. In continuing to try and do that day-to-day and month-to-month, this has grown beyond my most extraordinary expectations, to the point where we’ve booked out every Saturday until December (note - as at 20.07, all weekend dates for 2026 are booked). We’ve got international bands, touring bands, and bands who are playing their first show performing here.
When we first moved to Echo and Bounce, our remit was one day a week - which very quickly became two days a week, now it’s three days a week and it’s creeping into four, which is something I promised myself wouldn’t happen again.
The first time we were doing four shows a week at Season Three, the team was myself and James Walker, and that nearly killed us. But thankfully, and with enormous gratitude to the community, we have a really good team here at the moment - and if we do four shows a week I don’t have to be present for all of them.
That was a very long-winded answer. But “how’s it going”? It’s going well, and we’re very busy.
JOE: Season Three was involved as a stage for the Against the Grain festival, what were your takeaways from that day?
NICK: I think it’s a wonderful thing to see community engaged outside of the traditional entertainment precinct.
I’m a bit older than some of the people in our community here, so I remember when the government put the entertainment precinct in place and the reasons they cited for doing so, and I saw the corrosive harm it did by limiting creative output effectively to three square blocks.
So to see energy being put behind other areas of Brisbane for ‘precincts’ of entertainment, is tremendously valuable.
JOE: Do you mind telling me about yourself and your background in business?
NICK: Sure - but first and foremost, Season Three is by no means a business. It’s a bizarre hobby I have, there’s no remuneration here. Every show at Season Three has a flat fee for those who book the space, which goes primarily to the sound engineer, a little bit to the person on the door, and a very small amount to equipment upkeep. If I happen to work the door, I’ll take home the door fee, which is a grand total of 100 bucks.
So I hesitate to call it a business, as by any metric it would be a failing business. Fortunately, I don’t view it along those lines, so it isn’t a failure!
My own background though, I grew up in suburban Meanjin. I came of age in the era of file sharing, and through music piracy I got to experience a world far outside my fairly narrow suburban lifestyle. It sparked something in me that never went away.
I started going to local shows and community events as a sixteen-year-old, and I immediately caught the bug for live music. I started running a DIY venue in Meanjin when I was seventeen and began booking shows, but I didn’t have a clear idea of my own strengths and weaknesses, with one of my main weaknesses being an inability to ask for help. I tried to do everything on my own, and burned myself out very quickly, ending up in quite a lot of debt as well.
I went and got a corporate job out of University, trying to balance my own creative endeavours playing music while attempting to build and foster community in addition to working paid jobs, but it was obviously unsustainable.
JOE: What were some of your fondest places within the scene growing up?
NICK: There were some wonderful D.I.Y ventures during my first life in Meanjin. The Waiting Room that Cam Smith from Incremental Records ran, as well as The LoFly Hangar in Red Hill, those were true hubs of community.
The Lofly Hangar was great, I used to eat a lot of NoNo’s, great kofta kebabs.
Brisbane has a long history of these transient spaces. I benefited a lot from the community without having much in the tank to put back into it.
JOE: You said that was your first life in Meanjin, when did that life come to an end?
NICK: I finished my master’s degree and moved to Naarm in 2013.
I enjoyed a very-easy-to-live lifestyle down there; I played in bands and did all the things you did in the ‘culture city’, a term I take some umbrage with. Most of my work there was on my own creative pursuits while building my career in the music equipment industry.
I was the foundational international employee for reverb.com for close to five years. I was in charge of helping folks with buying and selling music equipment. Following that, I trudged around other jobs, and I’m working for MAS Distro, a musical equipment distribution company, which is my current day job and it's how I support this venue project too.
JOE: And your second life in Meanjin?
NICK: I moved back to Meanjin in 2022, and one of my major priorities in coming back here was to reintegrate with community and to find utility for it.
I find few things more frustrating than when people complain about what a place doesn’t have, while at the same time not putting themselves on the line to make a difference.
Regardless, I was back in Meanjin, living in the same city as my dear friend James Eyre Walker for the first time in a long time. They’d been doing a lot of stuff, both at the Bearded Lady and in support of community and D.I.Y pursuits. We then found a space in the Fortitude Valley together, initially as a rehearsal space for our bands and a place to store our music equipment. That space was also the genesis for my current creative project Plainer.
We first tried out the space as a music shop and that did not work, but James was very insistent on trying to book shows there, which was something I was very hesitant about because of the risk involved. But I was persuaded to give it a go, and it went pretty well at first. We held a show every six months - which then became every three months, and then every month, then every week, twice a week, four times a week, and before we knew it, a failed music store had become a successful hub of local community.
The Fortitude Valley iteration of Season Three could only hold 80 people, and it was a completely dry (alcohol-free) space without running water or a bathroom, so we were really making what we could with the resources we had there.
I always had the expectation that people I knew and my acquaintances would play in a space if James and I ran it, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would become integral to emergent communities - but that seems to be what happened. An amazing crop of new bands that seemed to be mainly coming out of QUT and the Conservatorium at Griffith really latched on to what we were building.
I think people are hesitant to talk about ego, as if it’s inherently a bad thing, and it is important to keep your ego in check, but by the same token part of why I do this is because it feels really good. I’ve done many things in my life, but nothing has felt as necessary as this - whether that’s accurate or delusional, I don’t mind. I know many people with expensive hobbies, but mine feels like it gives something back to a lot of people and I really like that.
And here we are now, James has stepped away from Season Three and now lives in Naarm, and I then had to figure out what the future of Season Three looked like. I’m hugely grateful that a number of incredible people stepped up to help make this better than anything I could’ve done on my own.
JOE: How did your experience of growing up in D.I.Y communities mould your current perspective on all-age gigs?
NICK: Art is for everybody.
When you look back at the 70s, when live music was taken from community venues and pushed into pubs, it served to exclude young people. The environment of pubs also served to exclude marginalised voices; people of colour, femme identifying people, queer people - it led to a masculinised archetype of the Australian musical voice. By no means am I hanging shit on popular Australian bands, but the sound we have on the international stage, which is changing, it should be said, leans largely into a bloke-y, Steve Irwin-esque archetype.
A quote I overuse when talking about my role here is that I’m not a curator, I’m a plumber. What I mean by that is, my job at Season Three is to make sure that the shit gets to where it needs to go. I don’t make critical judgement on the art at Season Three, but I think it’s important to have a diversity of voice.
A lot of people make their most earnest art before they are adults, and younger people are more open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. I’m so grateful I saw things outside my expectations when I was 15 or 16 - it defined the life I live now.
I’ve seen so much amazing art by young people in this space, and I think it’s a real shame when traditional live music environments serve to homogenise those voices. Community environments and participation have so much to teach young people about respect and selflessness too.
JOE: There’s a massive event on the Season Three Calendar coming up on August 1st, so what can you tell me about this venue’s Birthday Bash?
NICK: This is one of the rare shows I get a hand in curating.
It’s such an honour to comb through the bands that have played across the two iterations of Season Three, and put together a line up of bands I love, in a celebration of what we’ve all done. To share this with the wider community and say ‘Hey, let’s just all have a good time together’.
I’m guilty of not celebrating my wins, and reflecting too much on the things I could’ve done better, but this is an opportunity to say “no, this has been really cool”.
It sounds glib, but to do this with Season Three is the honour of a lifetime.
JOE: You’ve been a first hand witness to the demise of many beloved Meanjin live music venues, but in 2026 what’s your current outlook on the scene in Meanjin and do you think the city is recovering from the recent closures?
NICK: I’ll gently challenge the underlying question.
How have businesses been faring from a financial sustainability outlook? Yeah, it hasn’t been going great.
Meanjin without The Bearded Lady, without Can You Keep a Secret, it’s heartbreaking. This city deserves far more cultural institutions than it has currently. It deserves more than the onus of accessible culture resting on any one person’s shoulders, which is often how it ends up.
Part of my mission with Season Three is to ensure that it doesn’t just rest on my shoulders - I want to make myself irrelevant here, and bring in people who are better than this than I am, and who have more interesting ideas to push this forward. I don’t want to wash my hands of it - I want to instead foster something better.
But, in terms of the music itself, there’s more amazing bands in Meanjin than ever before. There’s more engaged people in the scene, be it through the lens of local bands selling out shows or the recent Against the Grain festival. I'm very heartened by what’s going on in the community here and I’m excited for the future of it.
JOE: For those who aren’t in the back offices of the music scene here, who are the unsung heroes of supporting live music and fostering creative arts?
NICK: I’ll quickly shout out the people here who do such a good job of making it grow.
Josie Bates, who also works at Bigsound and at the Princess Theatre, is an incredibly motivated young person who has recently come on board here and they’re hyper competent at what they do. The incredible team of sound engineers we have like Miki (Papasavas) who was the sound engineer at Stranded bar and The Bearded Lady is our lead sound engineer. Ben Gibson, Pearl Hart, Brendan Gawthorne - the technical personnel rarely get enough gratitude, and it should be known that all live music venues wouldn’t exist without the technical personnel involved.
There are groups of people doing amazing work outside of Season Three, especially at 4ZZZ. The current crop there is just filled with incredible people, be it the station head Nick Stephan, announcers such as Jordan Royal, Cassidy Burke, the Talkerspace crew, there’s just too many names to mention. There’s fewer than 5 paid employees at 4ZZZ, and it speaks to the calling beyond personal enrichment of those involved.
JOE: This initiative of yours would have no doubt caused you unimaginable stress, worry and sleepless nights. That being said, has Season Three been worth it?
NICK: Yes, of course it has, and of course I have to tell myself that too.
I’ve put time, money and stress into this, turning down other things in my life for this project, so I have to tell myself it’s worthwhile. Friday of last week, we had Chloe Parche playing a sold-out show and I’d been here from midday to 12:30AM. I walked to my girlfriend’s house, came back here on Saturday morning to set up for Against the Grain, and I didn’t leave until midnight. 26 of those 36 hours, I was here. It asks a lot to make it work - but when I was walking home after those 36 hours, I didn’t feel like I wanted to stop. I was exhausted, brain-muddled, but it still felt like what I wanted to do. Once this interview is done, I’m rebuilding the PA for tonight’s show. Be it delusion or mental illness, it feels worthwhile, and it’s what I want to keep doing.
JOE: Final question, what is the backstory of the dog pillow behind the stage?
NICK: I was driving in regional Victoria a decade ago and I saw it in a petrol station.
It’s been with me for the whole Season Three journey, and a benefit of running a venue is that you can do whatever dumb shit you want.
A slightly more intellectual answer though, is that it reminds people not to take this too seriously, and to enjoy yourself.
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