Tom Lowndes wants to tell me a theory.
“I think DJing is the professional wrestling of the music industry,” he says. “Wrestling, in the end, no matter how good it is, it’s still people pretending to fight. The DJ, no matter how good you are, you’re still pretending to be a musician.”
He doesn’t mean this as a bad thing, of course. Since 2011, Lowndes has performed under the persona of DJ Tom Loud, the ringmaster of Hot Dub Time Machine, a hugely popular music party that tours the world. Throughout the 2010s “Hot Dub” built a cult following at the Adelaide and Edinburgh fringes, before riding the bubbles and crashes of Australia’s 2010s festival landscape and playing big overseas slots from the desert of Coachella to a 15th-century Transylvanian castle.
Like wrestling, the key to DJing is playing to the crowd, he says: “I’m all about the connection. The whole time I’m playing, I’m looking at the crowd. My hands can kind of do the DJing on their own.”
The Hot Dub Time Machine concept is simple: over two hours, Lowndes takes his audience from 1954 to the present day, skipping across decades and genres with childlike glee. He typically begins with Bill Haley and the Comets’ Rock Around The Clock, before leapfrogging from one track to another via shared musical DNA or lyrical themes. In the 1970s, Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock might turn into Boney M’s Daddy Cool. By the 1980s, the horn blasts of Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out blend into Eye of the Tiger, which in turn becomes John Farnham’s Pressure Down. In the 1990s, Yothu Yindi’s Treaty blurs into TISM’s Greg! The Stop Sign!!, before Tag Team’s Whoomp! (There It Is!) unexpectedly turns into Nicki French’s 1994 cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
“My process now is that I make a very, very carefully constructed set … and then I don’t do it,” he says. “[I’ll have] a really orchestrated, intricate, chronologically correct set. I put a huge amount of effort and thought into what songs will work, the energy and the pacing, all that stuff. And then I look at all their faces and go, ‘No, they just want to hear [Earth, Wind & Fire’s] September right now’.
“What I do is daggy – I’m a retro DJ,” he adds. “But when you’re playing George Michael and Fred Again within half an hour of each other, there’s something about that that makes the George Michael cooler by association, and makes the Fred Again more fun.”
Lowndes’ early music tastes were shaped by Triple J’s request line and his parents’ Stones and Beatles cassettes, followed by a heavy metal phase. A stint in London introduced him to ecstasy and rave culture, before returning to Australia to settle into his first career as a sound designer.
He spent a few years working on Channel Nine’s Underbelly series, and added horse noises to nearly 200 episodes of McLeod’s Daughters – he even supplied the crunching metallic noises when Claire’s ute fatefully went over the cliff in season three. But he could “feel the death knell of the Australian television drama”, that he was going to need to find new work soon.
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“There’s a real cliche of the bitter sound guy, and I could just feel myself turning into one of those,” he says. “I just wanted to make my own thing.”
During another job, on the Channel Ten sketch comedy show The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, he befriended comedians like Heath Franklin, Felicity Ward and Dan Ilic. Lowndes had been dabbling with DJing in his bedroom when Ilic invited him to DJ at comedy shows.
It took a while to find his feet. Drawing from his TV background, he started incorporating video clips and pop culture references into his act, which he called Tom’s Video Dance-a-Rama – “which was also wildly unsuccessful,” Lowndes says.
With the help from some friends, including Ronnie Johns alumnus Jordan Raskopoulos, he landed on the time-travel gimmick, and a catchier name: Tom’s Video Dance-a-Rama became Hot Dub Time Machine, a play on the largely forgotten comedy film Hot Tub Time Machine released the previous year.
The novel, crowd-pleasing format suddenly clicked. Lowndes’ early success on the Fringe circuit landed him slots at music festivals like Splendour in the Grass and Falls festival. With his management, he soon expanded into the festival market in 2016 with Hot Dub Wine Machine, which saw Lowndes regularly play to between 8,000 to 15,000 punters at wineries around Australia.
“It was a whirlwind. Everything we touched was more successful, more exciting. We would throw more money and do all this stuff, more alcohol, more drugs,” he says. “It’s funny to hear these rock’n’roll cliches coming out of my mouth as a time-travelling DJ. But it did all happen, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Hang on, how the fuck did I get here? I don’t want to be someone who owns a festival. I’m not a business person, I’m a DJ.”
Meeting Lowndes in Adelaide at the start of his latest Hot Dub tour, he’s now left much of that behind. He parted ways with his former manager, sold his Wine Machine stake for a dollar during the pandemic, and cut out alcohol entirely.
“I’ve been sober for five years,” the father of three reflects. “I used to just be drunk and continue the party. I think everybody in the music industry at some point reaches a point where they have to reckon with alcohol.
“It’s really cool drinking and partying with 21-year-olds for a long time, but then all of a sudden it’s not cool. You have got to decide – do you want to be the older guy in the industry who has his shit together that people can look up to? Or do you want to be that older guy in the industry who’s a bit embarrassing?”
Later that night, as Lowndes bounces on to the stage like a gangly human pogo stick, beaming at the crowd over his moustache and triggering 2010s-era air horn effects, it seems his wrestling theory might be on to something. When he performs karate chops to conduct the crowd in a mass sing-along of Abba’s Voulez Vous, there’s no doubt.
“I know, it’s a weird way to make a living!” he yells into the microphone – and the next banger plays.
