Dan Condon: Sick Tunes, Five Unexpected Musical Moments Of 2013

Look, I'm freaking out about my end of year list. It's due tomorrow afternoon and I'm still trying to sort out my top, well, everything. On top of that, Shane Warne tweeted a photo of him playing golf with Kid Rock earlier this week, which has made it very difficult indeed to get anything else done but think about that meeting of the minds.

But I got to thinking the other day, while reflecting on the year that has been, that there has been a whole heap of amazing things happen in music this year – some of them great, some of them just kinda funny – that I never would have predicted 12 months ago. Here are five of the best.

I Saw This Guy At The Cairns Casino

Watch the video here

I was lucky enough to head to Cairns with Q Music in August to work with some great indigenous artists up there and it really opened my mind in a couple of ways. Firstly, there is some staggeringly good talent up there; great musicians are writing great songs and it seems like the small scene – much of which is facilitated by the excellent UMI Arts organisation – is really thriving. Watching footage of bands like Djun Djun Jarra and The Coldwater Band showed that they have a really great knack for writing real catchy songs and they're just so damn talented as musicians.

I didn't meet Danny Bani as he was apparently not interested in taking part in the program I was a part of. I'm not sure whether or not he is keen on furthering his musical career beyond the stack of local shows he gets (and no doubt gets paid handsomely for). If he's not then it's a shame, I genuinely believe he could be a superstar. Not just a middling, semi-popular singer-songwriter – I'm talking a bona fide chart-topping, household name. His stage presence is amazing and his voice is just ridiculously affecting. I literally had chills running down my spine while watching a video of him performing.

I did get to go and see him play a set of covers at the local casino though and I felt privileged to be able to witness him and his hotshot band run through the usual classics, far better than any cover band I've seen do anywhere else in the world. Will we hear more from him in the future? I sure hope so.

T-Dub Got On The Cover Of The Courier Mail

If you're not across T-Dub, he's a bit of a cult hero in certain sectors of the Brisbane music scene. Hailing from the town of Gympie (Helltown), a couple of hours north of Brisbane, he released a VCD a few years back called Now Or Neva that has apparently gone on to sell a whole stack of copies.

He's a bit of an enigma - he barely ever plays shows anywhere - so it was a bit of a shock to see him on the front page of Queensland's major newspaper The Courier Mail last week. It was a bit of a non-story (they so often are) about how some judge was really lenient on T-Dub after he threatened to kill some dude.

To see this guy on the front page of a major mainstream paper was mind blowing and T-Dub has cashed in on this by releasing a brand new clip that he describes as “big budget .. .... Lots of cji fx.. Pro as it gets..”

I Went And Saw A Band In Vladivostok

There's this band called Mumiy Troll who are apparently the only popular band to ever come out of the Russian city of Vladivostok. Naturally they have their own 24 hour bar in their home territory and when I was there earlier this year some locals took me out there for a couple of bottles of vodka and some live music, southern Russian style.

We made it through the face control and the insane dress code rules thanks to some help from a friend who actually spoke Russian (no one speaks any English over there) and set up at the bar with a bottle of vodka as we waited for the band to play. I have no idea what they were called, but they played with the kind of precision you'd only expect from the absolute highest quality covers bands over here in Australia.

They played about half-an-hour of originals and finished up with a few covers, which got the locals dancing up a storm. I was too far gone to capture their stirring rendition of 4 Non Blondes' What's Up? (vodka really creeps up on you), but I did manage to record 40 seconds of the band doing a Russian language version of Adele's Rolling In The Deep.

This said, Vladivostok certainly isn't the first place I'd recommend going if you're interested in a musical vacation. Beautiful place though.

Obie Trice Went To Alice Springs

And he made this video about it:

Firstly, props to both Obie and whoever his promoters were that hooked up the show. It's been really nice seeing more shows go to the Northern Territory this year (yes, NT readers, I'm aware that you still basically don't get any at all) and it'd be great if it could be considered a legitmate destination for more touring artists.

As for Obie, well I'm just impressed that it was one of the hip hop tours that actually went ahead. It's no secret that Australian promoters have been having some serious trouble getting their hip hop tours to actually happen, and it isn't just the small companies who've had trouble as the cancellation of the Live Nation backed Movement Festival showed. I didn't go and see Obie and I'm kinda glad of this fact because there was an almighty brawl at the show I had contemplated attending. But I'm glad we'll always have this video of him chilling by the pool in Alice Springs.

Dario Western Hits The Big Time (Featuring Violent Soho)

The memories have been flooding back as I write this and it's really hard to settle on just one final strange musical moment for 2013, but I just can't go past the brilliant film clip for Violent Soho's In The Aisle.

Another cult figure in certain Brisbane circles is Dario Western, a self-professed Christian Naturist who has been on the local scene for years and caused a lot of people a lot of grief by being a little too forceful with some of his social ideals. I know he will probably refute this fact, but there are more than a few people who have been taken aback by the way he goes about expressing himself, for better or worse.

Anyway, Soho asked Dario if he'd like to be in their film clip and he agreed, a pretty brave move given they basically wanted him to walk and ride a bike around the city of Brisbane completely naked. Director Tristan Houghton captured people's reactions to a naked man riding a bike around the city brilliantly and it serves as a pretty powerful story.

Bravo to Dario for standing up and baring all when push came to shove, I think he has proven a lot of doubters wrong, and bravo to Violent Soho for giving him his 15 minutes of fame.