“Your Phone’s A World Stage”: G Flip On Livestreams, Lockdown, And Music’s Weirdest Year Ever

“Hold on a sec!” G Flip says down the line from Melbourne, scrabbling to put her AirPods in so we aren’t interrupted by the small baby of a friend she’s visiting.

“Hi Ivy, I know,” Georgia Flipo tells the small human in the background. “I’m on the phone, I can’t talk right now. Oh my God, she’s so cute.”

For really the first time since March, Flipo is busy – she has a full week of socialising in the diary, a welcome situation after the long, long year of isolation.

“I feel like every day I’m jam-packed with work and then also one side of the cousin’s Christmas and the other sides and this side of the family and that side of the family and my basketball team. And then Tones and I is having a big Christmas party soon. So everything’s booming.”

It’s been the most quiet year for G Flip since she started making music; had COVID-19 not happened, she would have been living in LA right now, with festival slots and shows booked all over the map.

Instead, G Flip has spent it much like us, staring at a screen, tuning into livestreams, aching to get any part of the live music experience in our lives again.

To say livestreams came into their own in 2020 is to use a gross understatement. Initiatives like Idol-Aid went early, the first iterations being scratchy but intimate sets over Instagram live. In the months since, brands and major artists have pushed the limits of the medium — Dua Lipa’s Studio 2054 was a dizzying, multi-room production that featured guests like Kylie Minogue and The Blessed Madonna.

Closer to home, the recent Red Bull Music Motel was similarly high production — featuring barn-stomping sets from Tkay Maidza, Baker Boy, and G Flip, it flicked between luxe ’60s motel sets in Sydney and Melbourne. It was less a scratchy livestream than a live music TV show.

So we grabbed G Flip before she disappeared into her week of socialising to talk about the very (very) strange year that was, and the curious feeling of performing to no one.

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Music Junkee: I want to go back to, I guess the start of 2020. What did you have planned for the year? What did you envision it being?

I was expecting another really, really busy year having… I had a regional tour booked in May, which I think sold out at the end of 2019. So I was looking forward to that, and then doing another run of headline shows maybe later in the year. I was also meant to move to LA in March.

Then there was also Splendour and also, what were the other festivals I was playing? I think I was playing Falls. I think there’s just a whole bunch of other festivals. So it was going to be a really busy year, a lot of trips over to Europe, a lot of trips over to the States. A lot of sessions booked for me to do top lining and writing songs for other artists, which I was really excited about. But yeah, COVID came and put a lot of things on hold.

When was the point that you realised this is a lot bigger than just a few weeks staying at home?

I think I was actually in Japan with my bags packed to go from Japan to LA to move to LA. And two days before I was meant to get on that USA flight, I had to come back home because of COVID.

Me and my team and my family all were like, “This will brush over in a few months and then maybe we’ll get you back to LA just in a couple months soon.” And then obviously that never happened. And then it was me sitting at home and being like, “Wow, I think I won’t be getting on a plane for a while now.”

Was that the first break you’ve had in years?

Hundred percent. It’s the first break. The first time I’ve stayed two weeks in the one spot. Although 2020 has been such a rough year for so many people, for my mental state and I think the mental state of a lot of touring musicians, it’s been so good to stay in one spot. It’s been so good. So, so good.

The music industry was hit the hardest. It was the first to go and it’s going to be the last to come back. Do you think the general public, or the average punter realised how bad it was going to be for the music industry?

Yeah, I think the average punter quickly saw, following social media, that everything was just getting postponed or cancelled. And especially with all the rules and regulations that are set in place with crowds, it came pretty evident very quickly that we wouldn’t be doing shows for a while, or the viewing experience of seeing an artist live is going to be slightly altered with having less capacity or social distancing rules.

So I think everyone’s quickly realising and quickly realised when everything was getting cancelled and postponed, that live shows aren’t going to go back the way they were for quite some time.

Livestreams quickly emerged once it had all stopped. Had you done many before and is it different from, say, doing a TV slot or something? 

Well, first of all, the first couple of livestreams I did was just me in my little bedroom studio playing my live songs, which I had already done that around my album campaign. And I’d go live on Instagram now and then, just in general, to just entertain my fan base and play them a song here and there. So that came quite natural to me.

I think the weirdest thing was doing the bigger live streams where there’s such a big crew and there’s satellites. And it’s so formal compared to my rough around the edges bedroom, a quick Instagram live stream that had no prep to it. But those bigger live streams definitely is such a different experience.

The crowd injects so much energy into a performance. So does it feel strange to be in those big production areas, like a warehouse essentially, but have just the odd cameraman there?

Yeah, it’s extremely weird. I find, especially with me, I do a lot of banter with my audiences, that’s part of my show. Because I just like talking shit and I love it when someone yells something out and then I’ll just fly something back at them. And I do a lot of crowd participation in my shows, getting them to sing parts and that’s very much a big part of my spectacle in my show.

So it’s definitely strange being in an eerie warehouse or venue with only camera people in the audience. But at the same time, it’s what you have to deal with. And it’s, in the current climate, what we’ve got to do. And there’s people at home sitting there wishing they were in a room full of people, but they’re at home isolating. So you’ve got to try and give them the same performance you would if they were a metre away from you.

Do you have a different preparation for those kind of sets — like the Red Bull one was so high production, what goes into that?

I prepare like any other set. The only thing that I really altered was [that] I have so much crowd participation in my songs where I get them to sing the chorus over and over, which obviously would not be possible with a live stream. So I changed some of the arrangements of my songs. I had to go over.

I spent a day with my lighting dudes that normally travel with me to just go through the different songs and the colour palettes and to make it look good.

You’ve got to try and give them the same performance you would if they were a metre away from you.

And also the stage is quite elaborate for this Red Bull thing, with the two tiered, two story staging. So letting the lighting dudes know where I’m going to be at this point of the song. And this point of the song I’m going to sit at the staircase. And then this point in the song I’m going to go over to this side.

So trying to make it more of a real visual show and to try and make it cohesive with the lighting and the camera work. Everything to make it just look good for the people at home to make sure that they get a nice experience.

It almost becomes like a theatre performance then. You’re almost blocking out an entire performance like you would do for a theatre or a musical.

Yeah, I guess pretty loose blocking. I feel like me, I’m a very erratic performer and I don’t normally stick to rules — but for that Red Bull performance, I knew for one song I wanted to sit down. Not only because it would look cool and we can get the lighting all on me, but also so I can have a rest because having a staircase on the stage while singing and running up and down the stairs is so not normal.

I was like, we need to have a song in the middle where I sit on the staircase and just catch a breather. But yeah, there was definitely some moments that, with their staging, the two tiered thing, if I went up to the top, all the lighting guys had to be ready because they got to catch me while I’m up there so I’m not singing in the dark.

There’s been a lot of chat about how to monetise live streams and whether they’re actually sustainable for artists long-term. Do you think livestreams are able to be an income stream?

I think definitely they are — what comes first is the safety of all of us. So if we’ve got to keep safe and we’ve got to do livestreams, then I feel like there’s always going to be a chance for artists to make money from it because people still want entertainment. People still want music. And people follow artists for their music, but also for who they are as well. And they want to support you.

I’ve had so many lovely fans who will just go buy some merch, even though they don’t really need another t-shirt, but they just know that so many shows have been cancelled and… So yeah, I think it’s a new way of life. Your phone is basically your world stage. People from other places in the world have discovered me just from their phone. So livestream, it’s the world stage. Your phone’s a world stage now.

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Jules LeFevre is the editor of Music Junkee. She was a guest of Red Bull for the event. 

Photo Credit: Kane Hibberd