Having the LAST LAUGH
Two years ago Sarah Wills and Lise Carlaw chose to walk away from radio, finding the long hours and travel an impossible juggle with young kids. Their gamble paid off, with the pair’s podcasts and Disco Club a huge success
Leaving behind a booming radio career was daunting for Sarah Wills and Lise Carlaw. But they were at breaking point. Young kids, lots of travel, long hours – and not even seeing their faces on a bus on a busy Gold Coast street sparked joy. So they did what any woman with a well-paid stable job would do – they blew their lives up. “It was so freeing,” Wills, 43, says.
“We were pretty broken.
“There was some crazy, weird hours, there was a lot of travel.
“Lise’s husband is a shift worker, mine is a farmer – it was not an easy time to navigate logistically, and our kids were a lot littler (Carlaw’s sons are now 14 and 10, and Wills’ daughters are 13 and 10).
“One of our key moments was we’d seen our faces on a massive bus on the Gold Coast and we both looked at it and we thought that was the moment where you’d be like, ‘Yeowwwww – we did it, we’re Oprah’ – but it wasn’t.”
So they did in fact blow up their lives. They can laugh about it now, but two years ago they weren’t laughing. They wanted to do things that made them happy. They wanted to … dance.
So they left their on-air jobs with Southern Cross Austereo in 2022 and in November that year put on a “disco” for women their age – or any age – to dance like no one’s watching to daggy music with their best girlfriends. And people came – and the next one sold out, and they knew they were on to something.
“Of course, when you have a salary from a radio network, both families felt incredibly stable – you’d be lying to say anything else,” Carlaw, 44, says. “And obviously, when that came to an end, we had to have those discussions, separately and with our husbands.
“We were like, ‘We’ll keep going, guys – we have no contract but we’re not taking desk jobs. We’re not going back to PR. We’re still doing something. But there will be no salary.’ I mean, of course, they’re massive decisions.
“But we had their unwavering support. “There was a very trying six months – that was really full on.
“But we just knew we would pull it off.” Fast forward two years and the now wellknown and hotly anticipated Disco Clubs are literally changing lives.
The pair, with Carlaw living in north Brisbane and Wills in the city’s south, now travel the country with their dancing shoes on – even if the shoe of choice can go from sparkly stiletto to comfy sneaker. That’s the beauty of their Disco Club, where everyone’s invited, you can wear whatever you want and be home in bed by 10pm.
Such is the market they’ve tapped into, their events now sell out in minutes. So keep reading, because we have exclusive new dates for the rest of the year.
“It’s so much fun – and I think a lot of those adjectives aren’t words we automatically reach for, I suppose because it seems like we should be doing very serious things. But there is such a simple joy that has come from getting women together to dance,” Wills says.
“And I think we’ve been surprised at the intensity of the things women tell us during or after a disco club,” continues Carlaw. “That is the thing that keeps shocking us in a way.
“Women, teary eyed, grasping us by the shoulders and saying, ‘Do you know what you’ve done? I needed this so much – this is it’.”
Wills says she’ll never forget a woman who came up to them after their first big gig in Brisbane.
“She was crying and she said, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed this but from the year I’ve just had, you’ve made me remember who I am’,” she says.
“We were just standing there like … just women who had a great night out dancing – but it hits so much deeper.
“It’s permission to do something frivolous and I don’t think we give each other enough space to do that, because life is serious. There are big responsibilities, so when you give yourself that time and space to just be a bit silly and loose it taps into something and reignites something.”
And their dance card is full, with 13 events this year, selling out venues that hold 1100 people. And it started like all good things do – with a simple conversation.
“It was October 2022 and we’d been having a
IT’S A TIME IN LIFE WHERE THE KIDS ARE GETTING OLDER, YOU GET A BIT OF FREEDOM BACK
number of conversations between each other and with other women that we’d interviewed about how we all just missed dancing, how you reach a certain point in life for us in our 40s, where the wedding dancefloors have stopped and you’ve got to wait for someone’s 40th or 50th for a big bash,” Wills says.
“And we really missed that.”
“And it’s a time in life where the kids are getting older, you get a bit of freedom back – but you’ve changed as a person too,” explains Carlaw. “Also, our tastes have changed. We want to be comfortable.
“We don’t want to get home late. We don’t want to necessarily be really hungover the next day – hence the early start and early finish.”
And the music. They both agree it’s all about the music.
“We listen to music from when we were younger – like full credit to Dua Lipa, but we don’t know all the words to her songs – but we know all the words to Britney and Whitney and it brings out a silliness,” Carlaw says.
“So we thought bugger it. Let’s just do it.” So they went to a bowls club in Brisbane, found a function room – you can imagine the carpet, they laugh, and a 77-year-old man called Norm behind the bar pouring beers – and Disco Club was born.
“We booked out the function room, we hired a speaker on rolly wheels, we curated – and I say that word loosely – a Spotify playlist, which kept skipping on the Bluetooth speakers,” laughs Wills. “We had no lighting – we just turned it off – but three-quarters of the room was glass panelling which made for natural daylight which isn’t really where it’s at, but we put the word out and we had, I think, about 80 women turn up.
“And even then, we just knew that this was special.
“Because even with all the rough edges, people – the women – were just so happy to be dancing and laughing and having a reason to get together. And it was easy. And we were all home by 10.30pm. So then we just thought, well, we’ll keep rolling them out, and they got bigger and bigger.”
In fact, Disco Club kept doubling in numbers. Their initial 80 jumped to 150. Their last one in Brisbane had 850 and sold out in three hours. By the end of this year, they will have sold more than 13,000 tickets.
“So we’re selling 850 tickets, but we could sell double that,” Carlaw says.
“And of course we’re at the point now where we’re trying to work all of that out because the essence of Disco Club is also in a weird way how intimate it is.
“Even though you might be thinking – 850 people, how could it possibly be intimate?
“But there are a few key pillars throughout the evening that allow us to make it all about being together – and they are things we won’t ever take off the menu.”
It’s an “if you know, you know” premise for Disco Club loyalists – and, sorry readers, but we are sworn to secrecy for those new to the experience. All we can say is, they may or may not include two very well-known ballads – with lyrics projected on the wall so all dancers can have their karaoke time to shine.
“Not only do we want Disco Club to be a really safe and happy place – it’s very inclusive as well,” Wills says. “We don’t want people to feel like they’re missing out because they don’t know the words to the ballads that we selfishly love singing.”
With Brisbane selling out so quickly, the Queensland mums kept getting messages and emails asking when they were bringing Disco Club to the rest of the country.
“We were getting DMs like … ‘When will you bring this to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide?’ – and we thought ‘oh God, it’s so scary’ – we were so scared to leave Queensland,” Wills says.
“But we booked in the days for the first six months of this year and they sold out. “Perth sold out with 750 people.”
Their first Sydney gig was 400 at the Imperial in Erskineville – it sold out in two hours. The second one was 550 at the Oxford Arts Factory in Darlinghurst – and again, they were conservative on ticket numbers, nervous to enter the notoriously tricky Sydney market. They needn’t have worried.
“Now we’re scoping bigger venues because we know there’s a big appetite in Sydney – but it’s just finding the right ingredients that make it – because we know now what works and what doesn’t,” Carlaw says.
“We’ve had women show up on their own and walk out of there having met groups of other women, exchanging numbers, meeting up at the next one.
“And that’s such a great feeling for us to know that it can do that for people.”
“We laugh and mockingly say we’re a really big deal in the Australian dance community,” Wills laughs. “With our unco steps and everything.”
The pair met when they were both pregnant with their second children, now both aged 10.
“We have seen each other’s kids grow up, really,” Wills says. “We met online while we were on maternity leave from our respective jobs and within four months of meeting, it felt like we were old souls making up for a lifetime of not knowing each other.
“And within four months,” Carlaw says, “I’ve had a daydream where we’re holding microphones on stage and I just said, ‘Yeah, cool. That sounds good. Let’s do it.’
“That’s how it started. We started putting ourselves out there as a female duo, which at that time, particularly in Brisbane, wasn’t a thing.
“And that was just MCing other people’s events – our first gig, we got paid $200.
“We very quickly realised that we wanted to create the events we wanted to go to – because it was a lot of effort, particularly when we were in our early 30s, to get out, leave the house, hire a babysitter – and if you were just going to go to a boring event … so we started creating these kinds of amazing panel events, and we would fly in and pay for it all ourselves and we’d get local sponsors and bring people like Zoe Foster Blake and Mia Freedman. And from that we got tapped on the shoulder to work in radio, which again, was never on our agenda.
“But I guess that’s what happens when you get women together who have the same mojo.”
That woman who tapped them on the shoulder to get into radio just happened to be Gemma O’Neill, who was working in broadcasting at the time. She has since also followed her own joy and started the business Besties with her own bestie, KIIS FM’s Jackie “O” Henderson. Serendipitously, O’Neill is now Wills’ and Carlaw’s manager.
“We are braver together – would I have done half of what we attempted without Sarah going ‘That’s a fabulous idea, you nutcase’ and vice versa?” Carlaw says of their friendship. “There’s absolutely no way.
“We probably would have stayed (in radio) and continued to strive for the media jobs.
“And really, there is no comparison – we’re much happier right now – there’s no question.”
“And we get so much more career satisfaction out of having women come up to us at Disco Club, or who listen to the podcast saying, ‘Well, I could be your friend – we are the same person, you’ve made me feel like myself again’,” continues Wills.
“That means a whole lot more to us.” Carlaw says the other beauty of a sweaty, swaying dancefloor – for which a ticket will set you back $80 – is that it’s “incredibly democratic”.
“Even though it’s our job now, it’s very much a big part of our business model – but when you’re on the dancefloor, even for Sarah and I – we just forget about that,” she says.
“I don’t think about my kids.
“I don’t think about my family.
“I don’t think about any of that – and that’s very liberating.”
“The tagline that we say for Disco Club is it’s everything we miss about nightclubbing and nothing we don’t,” Wills continues.
“It’s women doing the worm, women picking us up and recreating the Dirty Dancing scene.
“It is an absolute unshackling of responsibilities – just for a night.”
“Everyone is sweaty by the end,” continues Carlaw.
“You can wear whatever you want – you can glam up and do your sequins but at the end of it we all look like bedraggled rats,” she laughs.
“We’ve had people say to us on the way out, ‘You need to do this once a month in every city’ – it’s like this urgency in them, almost like they’ve found the holy grail of what makes them feel themselves. So they want it again.”
The pair are genuinely best friends, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact they’ve worked together for the better part of a decade.
“We’ve always said our friendship comes over any business opportunity, and I think that’s reflected,” Wills says.
But while dancing with your girlfriends may seem like “a fun hobby” – it is in fact a very considered career strategy.
“We’re a company, we’re a business, it’s not a hobby,” Carlaw explains. “But when your entire brand is friendship and having fun, some people can sometimes confuse that with thinking it’s not that serious – but it’s probably the most serious thing we’ve ever done, in a way.
They did a lot of soul-searching when they were 39, which is when they started a podcast called Forty, which did really well, and spawned a book. They currently present a weekly podcast, The Lise and Sarah Show as well as other projects. “And there was a lot of … well, what now?” Wills says.
“Here we are, we’re moving into our fifth decade, what does this look like? Who are we meant to be? And so I think that was almost like a form of therapy, for us to figure out the way forward because there have absolutely been so many ups and downs, particularly from a business side of things.
“We’ve always been very steadfast in each other, but it’s been a pretty wild ride so far.”
And, as Wills says, what you think will make you happy can surprise you in the end.
“I think because even when we were in the thick of very legitimate media jobs in radio, and we both were like, ‘This is it, this is what we’ve always wanted’ – and thankfully, we were both on the same page – a number of things happened, and we were both like, ‘Actually …’ and there was this whole other parallel universe out there for us.
“So … you blow your life up.
“But it’s been worth it, it’s been so worth it.”