‘He’d hate it, so I’m doing it’: Telling the Michael Gudinski story

There’s a hilarious moment in Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story in which the subject of the film slugs straight from a bottle of red wine in the middle of a Zoom meeting. “Michael, best behaviour please,” a voice cautions from the other side of the screen, and the music industry maestro sheepishly puts the cork back in the bottle and hides it beneath his desk.

Director Paul Goldman, who had known Gudinski since his days as a student filmmaker and had squared off against him in court more than once over contract disputes, wasn’t sure at first whether he should use that footage or not. But ultimately, it was the voice of Gudinski that made the call for him.

“People said, ‘There’s a lot of shots in the documentary of Michael drinking’. Well, the fact is, he f---ing loved drinking, even when he was told not to,” Goldman says. “He liked his recreational activities, say no more. And I thought, should we take this out, or should we just hang on to it? And I thought, ‘Hang on to it because I think he’d want that’. And then there were other times when I thought, ‘He’d hate me doing that, so f--- it, I’m gonna do it.’”

The idea of telling the story of the founder of the Mushroom label and Frontier Touring and a host of other related companies was first floated around 2017, with an eye on being ready in time for the 50th anniversary of the group this year. At first, it was supposed to be a four-part series. But then along came COVID, which knocked the music industry, and those plans, sideways. More fundamentally, along came Gudinski’s death, at the age of 68, in March 2021.

And after that, says Goldman with admirable understatement, “it was complicated”.

From the outset, he’d been reluctant to take on the project because of his complicated history with Gudinski. “I was outraged by him, just his arrogance,” he says. “And I always enjoyed his company”.

He wanted it to be a celebration of a man who had done so much to build the profile of Australian music, at home and internationally, a reminder of the odds he’d faced in doing so, especially in those early days. But he didn’t want it to be a hagiography. It was a project commissioned by Mushroom Studios, the film and television division of Gudinski’s sprawling entertainment group, but if it were to have any value it needed to be independent of the company as much as possible.

“I wanted it to be rude and loud and kind of irreverent, a bit obnoxious, like he was,” says Goldman. And he felt it could only be that if Gudinski agreed to sit down and talk candidly about everything, and if some of the many people with whom he had clashed were willing to dish the dirt, too.

Gudinski agreed to a week of interviews. “He saw it as an opportunity to set the record straight, right some wrongs and have a final say,” says Goldman. “And I was sure I would provoke him and he would say some outrageous things. And then he died.”

Some of the people who had promised to talk declined, out of a sense of shock or respect. “Others who had promised to take a full swing at Michael didn’t do so when they sat in front of the camera.” The old adage that you don’t speak ill of the dead, it seems, was in full force.

If that makes Ego a marginally less rounded picture than it might have been, it is still a rollicking ride. Gudinski narrates much of the journey himself, in interviews recorded over many decades, his voice becoming ever more gruff as he ages. His love of Australian music, and his penchant for self-mythologising, though, never dimmed.

When Gudinski died, there was a ready-made successor in his son Matt. Though a much quieter figure than his old man, with little of the ebullient salesmanship that characterised Michael, Matt knew the business inside and out.

The day after he finished his last high school exam, aged 17, Matt took a seat in the office and began learning the ropes. The company was a very different beast in 2002 than it is under his leadership now, or had been under his father in its 1980s heyday.

“The heart and soul of the business had been removed with the sale of Mushroom Records [to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp],” Matt reflects. “We were re-establishing who we were and what we were doing. Looking back at that time, the business could have been like so many great music companies that don’t make it to 50 years.”

But rather than fold, they launched a new label, Liberation, made movies, found renewed energy in the live touring business and began to embrace the digital music revolution. Surrounded by bigger international competitors, they merged and took over and grew. Somehow, they survived, prospered even.

“At our 50th anniversary, I really want to do what I can to ensure the company is here in another 50 years,” says Matt.

His father remains a guiding presence in everything he does. “The principles and values he instilled in me and in the business are very close to me. We didn’t always have the same approach to things, but there’s never a moment where I’m not thinking, ‘Would Dad have liked this’ or ‘how would Dad have done it?’”

And how would your dad have done this movie, do you think?

“It talks about the highs and the lows, the good times and some of the not-so-good times, and from my perspective it was very important to get the balance right and tell an accurate story,” he says. “I think had my dad been here, getting some of those things across the line might not have been as easy.”

Gudinski senior was never afraid to ruffle feathers in pursuit of a dollar or the broader cause of Australian music. But as the roll call of stars who pay tribute to him attests, he inspired incredible loyalty, too. Local stars Neil and Tim Finn, Jimmy Barnes, Red Symons, Vika and Linda Bull and international artists including Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Dave Grohl and Ed Sheeran sing the praises of a man they met as promoter or label boss but came to know as a friend.

Garbage singer Shirley Manson singles him out as a true rarity in the business – a man who not only respected women, he elevated them to leadership roles, too. Coupled with a superb soundtrack that effectively charts the journey of Oz rock, or at least Mushroom’s very significant portion of it, from the early 1970s to the present (it will, naturally, be available as a three-disc 42-song compilation from next week), it makes for a thoroughly engaging adventure.

Had he made the film he’d initially envisaged, says Goldman, it would have been more in-depth, and would have covered more aspects of the sprawling Mushroom story. It would also, no doubt, have drawn out other story threads beyond the companies, and beyond Gudinski himself.

“The best music docs are exhilarating time capsules, and they fly off in all directions,” he says. “They’re not just about music – they’re about creative processes, they’re about society, they’re about the tumults of different eras.”

Circumstances may have conspired against him, but Goldman’s film still touches a lot of those bases. And he hopes that audiences embrace it, just as they have the John Farnham documentary that has set a new box-office benchmark for the form locally.

“People might say, ‘Why are we making documentaries about old white guys’,” he asks rhetorically. “Well, you know, some old white guys are still f—ing interesting and deserve to be honoured. And Michael is one of them.”

Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on August 11 and 13 and is on national release from August 31. Program at miff.com.au The Age is a MIFF media partner.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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