Published: 8 September 2023
Last updated: 12 March 2024
A new biopic shows how family grief drove the music mogul to succeed - and bathes a generation of Australians in the glorious soundtrack of their youth.
At the centre of the Mushroom-authorised documentary on Australia’s chief music mogul, Ego: the Michael Gudinski Story, is a silence all the more conspicuous for the ceaseless noise in which its enveloped.
We’re all armchair psychoanalysts and the biographical documentary, by definition, invites us to ponder what makes the person tick; in this instance a person who, at his sudden and untimely death two years ago, was chief executive of the Mushroom Group he co-founded in 1973, now the largest independent music and entertainment company in Australia, home to eight record labels and more than two dozen specialist divisions as well as Frontier Touring and Chugg Entertainment.
As director Paul Goldman intimates early on in his 105-minute tribute – a torrent of star-studded anecdotes, clips of iconic artists in sweaty ecstasy on stage, triumphal aerial shots of stadiums packed with screeching fans — Michael Gudinski’s story really began before his birth with his sister, believed to have been murdered as a baby in Nazi-occupied Lithuania and basically never spoken of again.
His father kicked him out of home after he dropped out of school and sneered when one of his companies went into liquidation.
We imagine her absence was a daily presence in the Gudinski family abode near Caulfield racetrack, where at age seven the future entrepreneur began charging punters for parking on the empty block next door. For what else could explain Gudinski senior’s steadfast and cruel disapproval of his son but crippling grief and guilt over his lost daughter?
Gudinski’s father, a civil engineer, reacted with scorn when at 15 his son was making $500 a week staging dances. He kicked Gudinski out of home after he dropped out of school, sneered when one of his companies went into liquidation — “that’s my bum of a son” — and then when one day he saw his son doing the books assumed he was handling “monopoly money,” which was, linguistically at least, not inaccurate.
Over a boozy lunch in 1975, Gudinski was one of five men who between them stitched up Melbourne’s music business; when competition emerged, we’re told, “Michael would effectively wipe it out”.
