Speaker Series: Live Music in the Inner West

The Night is Ours! Live music has long been a vital component of the cultural fabric of the Inner West, providing a platform for creative expression and community connection.

Celebrate Australian Music month with Youth Group band leader Toby Martin as he discusses his experiences as a musician performing and living in the Inner West with writer and academic Sheila Ngoc Pham.

Toby Martin is the lead singer and songwriter for the ARIA award winning band Youth Group, with whom he has released 5 albums. Toby has released three albums as a solo artist. Toby’s song-writing is often a response to place: 2017’s Songs From Northam Avenue was about Bankstown, and 2021’s I Felt the Valley Lifting was about northern England. Toby is also a historian of popular music in Australia. His research has looked at the social and cultural history of country music in Australia, Aboriginal country music, music and drill music.

Sheila Ngoc Pham is a writer, editor and radio producer. She writes for a wide range of literary publications and media outlets, and was a finalist for the 2021 Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. In her earlier life, Sheila spent a lot of her spare time interviewing indie musicians, which eventually evolved into a more specific interest in Vietnamese rock music history. Her full-length feature, Saigon's Wartime Beat, aired on Radio National in 2012. More recently she covered the rediscovery of Phuong Tam, one of Vietnam's first rock'n'roll singers, for The Guardian UK in a world-first exclusive. Sheila lives on Dharug land with her husband and two children.

Toby Martin image by Cameron Emerson-Elliott

Sheila Ngoc Pham image by Jacquie Manning