Let’s keep rock’n’rolling – and save the Cranker | David Penberthy

We can get misty-eyed lamenting Adelaide’s great music venues, writes David Penberthy, or crank it up now to save the Cranker before it’s replaced with another soulless entity.

Readers of a certain age with a shared dishevelled youth will have fond memories of the many music venues which made Adelaide such a great place to be in the ’80s and ’90s. My generation gets misty-eyed thinking about venues such as Le Rox. I struggle to count my many nights I spent at that old Light Square venue. It was such a great space with that big long bar and terrific wide stage. It played host to bands which were dark and moody such as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Triffids through to poppier bands such as The Lemonheads, the Hummingbirds and Clouds.

One night while I was doing Year 12 my mate Doug and I hopped into his old yellow Renault and drove into town to see Jonathan Richman play there, purely because one of mates had just given me a tape of the first Modern Lovers album and I had been caning it for days. Seeing that show is almost my favourite musical moment, and it happened right here in Adelaide, at a place that last time I checked was being used as a storage facility.

It is valid to get misty-eyed about all this because much of it – most of it – has now gone. In the space of a generation Adelaide has lost so many great venues. Many of them have been replaced with soulless entities which add nothing to the city’s life and appeal.

The Tivoli Hotel, pictured here in 1992, is now a block of flats on Pirie St.

The bleakest of these is the Tivoli. For years the Tiv was the place to go if you wanted to see a genuinely packed crowd going completely berserk, thrashing around to the likes of the early Hunters and Collectors and the brilliantly inappropriate Painters and Dockers, famed for such dulcet tunes as Nude School and Die Yuppie Die. The Tiv was also the place which helped great local bands such as the Mark of Cain get their start. Their shows were notable for four things; their lateness, their tightness, their ferocity, and their capacity to leave you deaf for the next day.

The Tivoli is now a block of flats.

I don’t know what is happening any more at the Holdfast Hotel where they used to have that glorious beer garden made out of besser blocks and where punk bands such as Where’s the Pope and the Bearded Clams would attract an unruly southern bogan crowd. It’s almost too painful to enter a pub which I only ever associated with getting beer through your hair and sand in your sneakers.

The Old Queen's Arms Hotel on Wright Street shut down long ago.

The Old Queens Arms was the place to go to see bands such as Iron Sheiks. It shut down long ago. The Lion is still a great pub but was better when the Butthole Surfers were playing in it.

The Flinders Uni Tavern was once a smoke-filled dosshouse which played host to a revolving roster of raucous rock outfits. I went there on a date once in first year uni, thinking it might be nice to take a girl I’d met who had was studying law via St Peter’s Girls to see the Exploding White Mice. We never went out together again. Now the “tavern” feels more like a café, proudly boasting that it makes healthy falafel rolls, frequented not by punks and goths but buttoned-down youngsters worrying about their HECS bills.

The Adelaide Uni Bar hangs on but not in the form it did in its golden age when the likes of Mudhoney and Rocket from the Crypt toured from the United States or where Sydney’s Lubricated Goat – famous for the being the first band to appear nude on Australian television thanks to Andrew Denton – played a legendary show in the late 1980s.

Then there are much-loved venues which still host live music, but do it despite and not because of the demands of the city’s new middle-class residents. I really can’t stand these people, the ones who move into the city for the buzziness of it all, and then promptly complain about how it’s too loud at night. The Austral spent a small fortune soundproofing its back room, the Exeter has had to make its sets finish earlier to keep the recently-arrived residents in the new apartment complexes happy. There ought to be a law called “who got here first”, with the pub winning on the grounds that they have been making noise for years and reserve the right to keep doing so.

The iconic Crown and Anchor Hotel on Grenfell Street.

I could go on as there are other venues we have lost, too. And we may be set to lose another one, the Crown and Anchor, where it’s being mooted that what Adelaide really needs is yet another soulless tower to accommodate several hundred overseas students.

The irony of all this is that Adelaide is a designated UNESCO City of Music, one of just 59 worldwide, which honours its status as a special place which reveres and celebrates its musical tradition. Sorry, but this all feels like hits and memories to me. We don’t revere our heritage, we merely remember it, as the long list above of fallen venues attests.

People who don’t care probably figure that many of the afore mentioned bands aren’t household names anyway, so the issue is a fringe one for weirdos like me with strange taste in music. But there are so many successful mainstream performers who will never get a start without a place like Le Rox, or the Tiv, or at any of the places that have now gone.

We need the state government to get involved in the battle to save the Cranker. We need the City Council to play a role too, if it can drag itself away from worrying about fence heights for suburban soccer matches. If this is a city of music, it should act accordingly and afford proper protection to the places that created our musical identity. Failing that our city becomes a series of rectangular boxes used to house young people from overseas who are doing accounting at UniSA.