Dr. Barry Hill is the Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University Faculty of Business Law and the Arts at the Lismore campus on Bundjalung country in New South Wales, and currently teaches in the Bachelor of Contemporary Music program.
Between 2009–2011, Dr. Hill lectured in the Bachelor of Music Industry course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he taught Stu Mackenzie, Eric Moore, Joe Walker, and Lucas Skinner (now Harwood) who were in the process of forming King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
On October 29th 2010, he recorded one of their music performance assessments, and in December 2022 uploaded the video of the performance to YouTube.
It is one of their first ever performances and the earliest publicly available recording of the band.
Throughout our conversation, we cover the stand-out approach of the band, the unique aspects of the Australian music industry, what they did right to make success, innovation driven by the arts sector, and generally break down King Gizzard in terms of their cultural and environmental contexts.