Independent Queensland music and culture

I started YELO in 2023 because I missed the way local culture used to feel.

I grew up with 90s street press: the free music magazines you’d grab at the pub with a beer on a Sunday. They were wrapped in colour front and back, with black-and-white pages inside. A little bit party out front, business everywhere else. Very gritty, a lotta bit grunge, and easy to fold in half and tuck under your arm on the way home. They were the go-to for finding out what gigs were coming to town, filled with artist features, live reviews and interviews written by local, die-hard music scene punters. There were photo galleries from the latest shows, and you’d circle the gigs you wanted to see with a nearby Keno pencil. Gigging made a place feel alive. It also gave me a creative outlet that mainstream journalism couldn’t. Going to gigs, and especially writing creatively about them, connected me with wonderful people, places and new music, while giving my ADHD-addled brain somewhere to let loose and just be me. Gigs gave me an identity, a purpose and a sense of where I belonged.

I worked my way through the ranks of community newspapers, from cadet journalist to editor, while moonlighting as a street press reviewer in my mid-20s, covering the grungiest pockets of Brisbane’s live music scene. I still remember reviewing Clare Bowditch at The Zoo all on my lonesome, swaying to “Lips Like Oranges” a couple of punters deep, with my own red-stained wine lips, thinking I’d truly made it. The Darkness at The Arena is still one of my all-time favourite gigs. Then there was a memorable after-work Butterfingers show at the same industrial-style venue, where I ended up crowd-surfing in high heels while clutching my handbag (surprisingly, everything survived!). By day, I was learning how to find the story. At night, I was interviewing artists like Xavier Rudd, Donovan Frankenreiter and Ben Lee, while reviewing gigs from Michael Bublé at the Lyric Theatre to The Butterfly Effect at The Tivoli.

I found street press far more exhilarating than the dry traditional newsroom. In magazines like RAVE, I had room for big words, imagery, humour and whatever wild and wondrous wordsmith moments I could come up with. I could be freer and more creative than I ever was.

How the YELO Beast Hatched

I’d been looking for a way to work from home so I could spend more time with my kids. I’d toyed with creating a website for ages, trying everything from MLMs to selling detangling hairbrushes on Amazon. Nothing quite stuck.

Then, during one champagne-fuelled rehearsal with my local folk trio, I blurted out, “I should turn our bookings into a what’s-on calendar for the Sunshine Coast!” The trio didn’t last, but the idea did.

I originally imagined an actual paper magazine called Yellow Magazine, a nod to the Sunshine Coast, with the indie-punk street press feel I loved in the ’90s. Then my mate Marty, a software designer who ultimately helped me set it up, convinced me that digital was the way of the future, and it became YELO.