EXCLUSIVE: Why Stereosonic Boss Richie McNeill Quit The Business

Earlier this year Richie McNeill, a legend of the Australian dance music scene and part of the team that sold the massive Stereosonic festival to an American giant, decided he’d had enough for now.

Having to never have to work again following the mammoth $75 million sale of the Totem Onelove Group to SFX Entertainment, McNeill resigned in April.

“I was on holidays with the wife and kids in Hawaii and I was sitting on a beach,” he says. “I’d finally come to rest, I had no work in my head, I tried not to call the office and stayed offline and basically it got to a point where I just needed a break. I’d get home from work at 5.30 or 6pm and start at 7.30am and I’d be at the dinner table and my son, who’s six, would ask me a couple of questions and they wouldn’t register. “My wife would kick me under the table and say ‘Answer him Dad?’ and I was like ‘What?’ I kind of felt, disconnected, but I wanted to reconnect with the family and be mentally engaged more.”

"I don’t have to work again, really."

His resignation came as SFX were encouraging him to take on one of their global roles within the company, which have since been filled, specifically coordinating the EDM and live side of the business after their aggressive spending spree. SFX owns Beatport and has interests in Tomorrowland, Sensation, Mysteryland, Q-Dance, Electric Zoo, Nature One and MayDay amongst others. It has recently acquired the Dutch techno outfit Awakenings and also Dutch group ALDA Events, responsible for Armin Only, Electric Family and State of Trance etc.

“My family had looked to move there [New York] at the end of 2014, but with our 3rd kid due in February and the timing of the SFX float late October, things just didn’t come through. They wanted me to take on a more global role out of New York. Dror [Erez, a fellow partner in Totem Onelove] and I went to New York in January just to talk about the performance of Stereosonic 2013 and wrap up the year [American financial run from January to December] and go through the year’s budget for 2014 – and it was minus 22.

"Do I really want to fucking move here with my family and have them going to school in January when it’s this cold?"

By the end of summer McNeill may certainly have projects on the go, but his resignation from the scene brings a close to one of the most influential careers in the Australian scene. “When I went there in May I’m sure in their hearts they wanted to convince me to stay but it was good closure for me to just actually show them that I still love the company and I think what they’re doing is great, but I'm just burnt out… I spent a lot of time with [SFX Chairman] Bob Sillerman over the two days and said when I’m back ready to work, he’ll be the first person I call. I'm certainly not holding out for 12 months [due to the non-compete clause] and then take the best offer. I’m not sure that I'll work in this industry again, it’s just too early and too tender at this moment.”

He adds, “I don’t have to work again, really. Who knows? Its early days and I am reconnecting with the music I love and family, and I am enjoying it”.

McNeill’s beginnings in the industry started modestly in Melbourne. Whilst in year ten he was going to pubs in the city, hearing music like Run DMC, New Order and Dead Or Alive. In year 11 and 12 acid house was on the menu, with artists like Black Box and Baby Ford providing McNeill’s soundtrack to 1988 and ’89. From there he and school mates graduated to a club on Commercial Road called Checkpoint Charlie, where Steve Robbins would DJ McNeill through his 18th birthday party.

It led to what McNeill described “one of the most important venues of the time” – Razor in The Light Car Club on Queens Road. A bizarre location for one of Melbourne’s defining clubs, it was a melting pot of industry and punters, and rock musos and house heads. Molly Meldrum, Michael Hutchence, Kylie Minogue, Ollie Olsen, staff from the Mushroom Group all partied with one another. Gavin Campbell, the part owner of the night before it shut in 1992, is one of those early-day influences that left a mark on McNeill.

"I got booked by the council for putting up posters."

“He was a real inspiration for me,” McNeill says. “There were certain people that influenced my career and time. Grant Harrison was one from Chasers – I was bussing there and they had five successful nights. You name me one club in Australia in the past 20 years that’s had five successful nights. None right?”

Not content with bussing, McNeill harboured ambitions to be behind the decks. He soon met Will E Tell – who was also bussing – and the duo would take notes of tracks they liked throughout the night and then would hang around together waiting for Central Station Records to open to place their orders. Before long McNeill realised that to get a break, he’d probably have to run his own night. He did that at Star Bar.

“I got booked by the council for putting up posters,” he admits. “I literally plastered South Yarra station three-high by 20 wide because I was innocent and didn’t know what I was doing. I had this roller and glue and glued up these horrible purple posters, the night was called Illusion, with fluro green and white it was a disgusting looking poster. But it got the attention. I was into fluros back then, pioneering fluro posters basically.”

Unfortunately for the entrepreneurial McNeill, he didn’t realise that putting up posters at 11.30pm and 1am in the middle of the night was illegal. Having just pulled up at the front of the station, a street sweeper had taken his car’s rego.

“So these guys came to my house, I was still living with my parents at this time, I was only 18, but they came to the house in suits. They asked my mum for me, so I got in trouble and went to court but I got off. The owner of the venue took responsibility because he told me that it was all legal and he was going to take care of it. So that was all good and that was the first night and it was really successful – we were getting five/six hundred people on a Wednesday night.”

Apart from the one he gave himself, Mark James (real name Mark Condron, would go on to be one of the Directors of the Future Music Festival) gave McNeill’s his first real residency. He began playing at James’ Friday night ‘Pure’ at The Palace, where James, Steve Robbins, Will E Tell and McNeill were the four residents.

“That was the club at The Palace that really lasted for about two or three years. It really took it from a small 500-600 people at Biology to getting 1,000 to 1,500 people through the doors a week, and we’d play the hardest, most up-front rave music – that was the explosion of the rave scene. It really took it from small random parties… to a mainstream weekly thing.

"They just thought I was this crazy, young DJ partying too hard and thought I’d be loose and useless."

“Dave Carbone and I also setup a shop in his friend’s house front in Hawthorn. Near Coles Myer’s head office. Everyone would come and buy records there, from John Course and Andy Van to Steve Robbins to Mark. Everyone. We had the most upfront stuff. We were building something here.”

McNeill expanded his circuit to run Hardware parties and even underage alcohol free fundraising nights for the Try Youth & Community Services charity (now TRY Australia), which his father was CEO of.

Pure at The Palace would have a more profound impact on McNeill’s life than even he would have anticipated. Colin Daniels and Scott Murphy of Mushroom would come down to The Palace for afterwork drinks on a Friday night at the invitation of James, who had signed with Murphy.

“Mark would invite them down and I got to know Col and asked them for a job,” McNeill says. “They just thought I was this crazy, young DJ partying too hard and thought I’d be loose and useless, so the first job I got with them was packing boxes in the warehouse [laughs]. But after a couple of months I’d set a record and because I was DJing I was going to different venues around Australia, like in Adelaide or Perth at raves, and I was going to the local record stores.

“You always went to the local record shop because they’d always have music that your city didn’t have, there was always a bit of a local flavour in Australian because it’s such a big country. I was sort of getting quasi-orders and writing them down on tissue paper and the back of business cars and saying, ‘Colin, I’ve played this track for Adelaide Central and we’ve gotta order 50 of these.

“So I started doing this shadow ordering behind the scenes and began to shift units of good stuff for MDS. A little while later Colin went to the New Music Seminar in New York and left me to run the office for two weeks. I thought, ‘This is my opportunity, this is great’. So one night I stayed there all night, slept on the couch and was doing orders on the phone and broke a few records in sales and that sort of thing. So Colin said, ‘Do you want to come full time and be my assistant and run the sales and assist with that department?’ After about a year Mushroom set up a UK office and Colin went to run that so I took his role for a couple more years.”

Eventually McNeill sent up a joint venture with Mushroom in the form of a label and publishing company, signing acts like Sonic Animation, Wasabe, Dimension, Steve Law and Viridian.

“I was finding stuff in Melbourne, and even Stormboy (Murry Antill) from Brisbane, finding stuff from around the country and releasing it on my own label. I was A&Ring and had my own label, so I guess I had my finger on the pulse a bit.”

McNeill then pushed dance music into the Mushroom Exports side of the business, using his connections with labels he was distributing around Australia to begin opening international avenues. He’d positioned himself as one of the burgeoning dance music industry’s pioneers exporting Juice Records, Dirty House, Azwan, Vicious Vinyl, PSY Harmonics amongst others to the US, Europe and Asia. These exports lead to labels like PSY Harmonics picking up licensing deals from Germany and Belgium. Australian tracks and artists were beginning to pop up in Muzik, DJ Mag and Mixmag.

“We were beginning to get noticed as a country producing great stuff. [Adelaide DJ] HMC was becoming a global phenomenon in techno. It was awesome to be a part of that doing it for Australia.”