Wayne Connolly

Wayne Connolly is a multi-ARIA-Award-winning producer, engineer, musician and composer. He has won ARIA awards for work with You Am I, Josh Pyke and Paul Dempsey and in 2024 was named Australian Engineer of the Year at the Music Producers and Engineers Guild (MPEG) Awards for work with the Teskey Brothers. He began his career in the music industry as manager and in-house producer at Paradise Studios in Sydney. At that time, the studio was home to rooArt, a company set up by InXS and their manager Chris Murphy to develop new Australian talent. Some of the significant artists Wayne worked with as engineer and/or producer at this time include You Am I, Underground Lovers, Died Pretty, The Fauves, Grant McLennan and Custard. Wayne won his first ARIA Award in 1996 as engineer on You Am I’s platinum-selling Hourly Daily and to date has received four ARIAs from eight nominations. He also won the MPEG Awards Australian Engineer of the Year in 2024 for The Teskey Brothers. Over his production career, Wayne has worked with more than 300 bands and artists as producer or engineer including: The Paper Kites (album and EP), Josh Pyke (3 albums), Babe Rainbow (3 albums), Youth Group (4 albums), Underground Lovers (5 albums), Boy and Bear (album and Fall at Your Feet), Hoodoo Gurus (2 albums), The Vines (Vision Valley + new album), Sarah Blasko (‘Flame Trees’), Julia Jacklin, Teskey Brothers (eng. 1 album), Adam Newling, All Our Exes Live in Texas, Cloud Control, Dave McCormack (3 albums), Fractures, Paul Dempsey, White Shadows (Nick Littlemore, Craig Nichols), Dallas Crane, Husky, Grant McLennan, Roger Knox, Little Quirks, Firekites and Chris Cheney. In 2006, the Youth Group single ‘Forever Young’ reached Number 1 on the Australian charts. That year Wayne also received two ARIA nominations for his work with both Youth Group and The Vines. The following year Wayne received two ARIA Awards for Best Producer and Best Engineer for his work with Josh Pyke on the album Memories and Dust. In 2009 he produced the Paul Dempsey Gold-certified album Everything Is True and subsequently won the ARIA Engineer of the Year award. As a musician and songwriter, Wayne’s personal discography includes eight albums under various guises. He was one of the three principal writers in the group The Welcome Mat and is singer and writer in the band Knievel who have released five albums on labels such as Sony/Murmur, Citadel, Quietly Suburban and Painted Sky (Japan). Their album Emerald City was released through Alberts in Australia and New High Recordings in the US. Knievel have in the past travelled to the US and Japan to play shows including SXSW on two occasions and the CMJ festival. For the last five years, he has also been engaged as a tutor at Sydney Conservatorium for their Contemporary Music Course. This role involves assisting students with composition, recording and production as well as contributing to the final assembly of their works. In 2020 he set up an independent label called Scenic Drive signing local artists such as Ellen Soffe, The Nagging Doubts, Salarymen, Grids & Dots, Kate Moth and Victoria. Wayne’s film and TV credits (principally mixing/production) include TV series Friday on my Mind and The Kettering Incident, the Del Kathryn Barton short film RED and feature films Black Balloon, Newcastle, Mullet, Prime Mover, Monkey Puzzle, and Little Fish, for which Wayne collaborated with Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie on the feature track, a cover of Cold Chisel’s ‘Flame Trees’, by Sarah Blasko. Wayne has also worked as a music adviser and consultant for Qantas from 2011–14, curating playlists for aircraft boarding music with a focus on contemporary and established Australian artists, and for Apple Music on music programming and playlisting from 2014–16. His early career was as a software engineer in research and development for music equipment manufacturers Fairlight and Passac, until he got his break as studio manager of Paradise Studios.