'You’re Wrecking The Aus Music Scene': Andy Van On The Flak Madison Avenue Received

They topped charts around the world and won four ARIA Awards for their brand of disco-tinged dance music, but in the new episode of podcast A Journey Through Aussie Pop, DJ and producer Andy Van revealed that Madison Avenue received a lot of negativity from the Australian music industry in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

The duo he formed with singer-songwriter Cheyne Coates reached #2 in Australia with debut single Don’t Call Me Baby, topped the ARIA chart with follow-up Who The Hell Are You and released two more Top 10 singles in their time together. But respect was hard to come by from some quarters.

“I won’t mention who it is, but it was a very, very, very big force in the Australian music industry who basically came up to me and said, ‘You’re wrecking the Australian music scene with your dance music.’” Van told the podcast. “Unfortunately, people believe that a guy sitting in a studio in front of a computer making music [is] somehow making a lesser version of music.”

Such an attitude seems like a relic from the ’70s or ’80s, but Van said that many people were resistant to the rise of dance music 20 to 25 years ago.

“At the time there was very much a view that what I was doing and what DJs and producers were doing was wrecking the music scene, so yes, I got a lot of flak,” he said. “But that’s ignorance. People were unaware of what computers were. Computers have not made music worse, they’ve made it better in my opinion.”

Van went on to explain that “every single song you hear on the radio right now, I would almost guarantee is made in some way with a computer”.

“If you’re holding a guitar and playing a guitar with your fingers, you’re experimenting with different sounds and different notes. Same on a keyboard. That’s the identical thing you do a computer,” he said. “It’s just in a computer, you can have 10,000 sounds at your beck and call. But you’re still doing exactly the same thing – you’re putting things together to try and make a song.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Van talked about Madison Avenue’s notorious performance at the 2000 ARIA Awards, how co-writer Coates hadn’t intended to be the singer on Don’t Call Me Baby and why the duo were unable to continue working together after the success of their debut album.

Listen to A Journey Through Aussie Pop on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and all major podcast platforms or at chartbeats.com.au/aussie