Hot Dub Time Machine

A Fringe booking that became a career

Tom Lowndes, who performs as DJ Tom Loud, had been DJing since 2002 when he built Hot Dub Time Machine for the 2011 Sydney Fringe Festival. The premise was one constraint applied without exception: play the hits in the order they were released, start somewhere in the middle of the last century and finish in the present, and let the audience feel the years passing under their feet. It was less a set than a route.

The idea travelled faster than the man behind it expected. Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe in 2012 turned a local curiosity into a touring proposition, and in 2013 he sold more than 15,000 tickets across the Edinburgh run and gave up other work to DJ full time at the age of 35. A four-star review of that 2013 Edinburgh run, at an Underbelly room capped at 400, described a show running from 1945 to the present day, with original music videos on large screens behind the decks and a crowd packed too tightly to dance properly — the format essentially as it still stands, at a fraction of the scale.

Scaling up, and the festivals he built on the side

Lowndes returned to Edinburgh every year from 2012 to 2019, and the venues kept getting bigger: by 2017 he was headlining the Royal Highland Centre across two nights and selling out Brixton Academy twice in the same year. The festival bookings followed — Coachella in 2014, then Tomorrowland, Reading and Leeds, Latitude, Benicàssim, EDC Berlin, Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival and Groovin the Moo, plus a sideline in large sporting events including the Australian Open, Formula One and the Hong Kong Sevens. His own accounting puts the total past 200,000 tickets sold, with his largest crowds at Edinburgh's Hogmanay (80,000), Sydney's Domain (40,000) and Falls Festival Byron (30,000).

The brand also spawned a promoter business. He co-created Hot Dub Wine Machine in 2016, which was rebranded simply as Wine Machine the following year and grew into a multi-state touring festival, alongside Stein Machine in Edinburgh and Snow Machine in Japan. He separated from those ventures in 2020, and since 2021 has been managed by TMRW Music, with Coalition Presents handling UK and European bookings.

The tours are the discography

There is no album to point at here; the body of work is a sequence of annual rebuilds of the same show, each with a different centre of gravity. One year was weighted towards boogie, the 2024 edition leaned on rock, and the tour that carried it — 100% Bangers, presented by TMRW Music with Live Nation — ran a 1962-to-2024 span through Perth's Metro City on 25 May 2024, the Forth Pub in Tasmania on 8 June, the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney on 15 June, Festival Hall in Melbourne on 29 June and the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 12 October.

The 2025 tour, Can't Stop, dropped the theme altogether. Eight dates from March to May took in Australia, New Zealand and Bali, covering 1962 to 2025: Gluttony at Adelaide Fringe on 8 March, Hot Dub on the Bay in Melbourne on 29 March, the Goods Shed in Hobart on 26 April, the Tivoli in Brisbane on 2 May and the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney on 24 May, with Auckland, Christchurch and Bali attached. Speaking before the Adelaide date — a city he calls his spiritual home, and where he plays inside the Fringe rather than beside it — Lowndes described building each setlist against several competing demands at once: chronological order, an energy curve that climbs within each decade, enough technical mixing to interest him, and material that works for both a first-timer and the regulars who have seen the show thirty times or more. Then, he said, "when I'm up there, I chuck it out the window and do what I think is right."

Where he stands in 2026

This year has been a spread of one-off bookings rather than a headline run. He appeared on the bill for the Synthony Festival at Auckland Domain on 21 March 2026 — an orchestral-electronic event whose main draw was a new Auckland Philharmonia programme conducted by Sarah-Grace Williams — and played the Princess Theatre in Woolloongabba, Brisbane on 30 May.

The most widely documented set of the year came in June at the Isle of Wight Festival, in the Big Top at Seaclose Park, where he ran the timeline from 1970 up to 2026 in front of a full tent. Local coverage recorded a wholesale singalong to the Village People and Lowndes telling the crowd, after a long haul from Australia, that the Isle of Wight is one of his favourite festivals. Concert-tracking records now log more than 200 past performances for the act.

Two dates are on sale as of mid-September 2026. On Saturday 26 September he closes out The Final, an all-day AFL Grand Final party at the Ice Cream Factory in Northbridge, Perth, running 10am to 10pm on big screens, with his DJ set and a silent disco after the siren and tickets at $79.90. Then on Friday 20 November comes Hot Dub on the Harbour at the Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney — the fifth edition of the harbourside party, doors at 6pm and a 10.30pm curfew, tickets from $92 plus fees, with supports still unannounced. He is also billed for Lost Paradise at Glenworth Valley on New Year's Eve, which is on a waitlist.

What the format actually is

The show has kept the same mechanics for well over a decade, which is unusual for a touring dance act. Lowndes plays on vinyl turntables, running Serato with Mix Emergency so that the video mix is cut live from the same decks as the audio — the visuals are not a pre-rendered film running behind him but a second mix he is performing in real time. That is what makes the improvisation possible: if a decade is landing, it gets longer, and the running order shifts on the night.

The reliance on chronology is also the show's honesty check. A set that starts in the mid-1950s and ends this year cannot hide behind a genre, and it exposes the DJ to the parts of pop history that do not mix easily. Recent tours have solved that by narrowing the start date — 1962 for the 2024 and 2025 runs, 1970 at the Isle of Wight — rather than by loosening the rule.