‘They Just Did Not Get It’: Paul Mac On Controversial ‘F*ck You’ To Industry During ARIAs Speech

It was the ARIA Awards speech that no one saw coming. When Paul Mac and Andy Rantzen took to the stage at the 1995 ceremony to accept the Best Dance Release award for Itch-E & Scratch-E’s Sweetness And Light, Mac included a shout out to Australia’s ecstasy dealers in a list of thank yous that also included public radio stations and ravers. 

In the new episode of podcast A Journey Through Aussie Pop, Mac discussed the moment that was so controversial that his words are still bleeped out in the video on ARIA’s YouTube channel.

“I just felt that the music industry here did not understand what you needed to do to nurture dance music to make it reach a wider amount of people,” he said. “They just did not get it, so that speech was a bit of a fuck you to them because it was like, ‘Come on!’ This is amazing that there’s this whole flourishing subculture… and it just needed a helping hand to get there.”

As well as reflecting on the challenges facing Australian dance music in the 1990s, Mac discussed his period of pop stardom in the 2000s, both thanks to solo albums 3000 Feet High and Panic Room, and as half of The Dissociatives alongside Daniel Johns.

“I’m quite a shy person – I don’t like being at the front of the project. And I found even that really, really low level of fame quite full-on and I wasn’t sort of ready for it,” he said in the podcast.

Mac described his working relationship with the Silverchair singer as a “fun experiment”.

“We found this way of working together where we had this common language,” he said. “Someone would play four notes and the other person would just finish the line.”

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