‘Sell out The Zoo and you’re on your way’: Powderfinger mourns venue loss

Powderfinger’s John Collins knew the five-piece was on the way to something big when the band played to a packed house at The Zoo – a rite of passage for up-and-coming Brisbane bands for more than three decades.

“You go and sell out The Zoo and you’re on your way,” the band’s former bassist said.

Bernard Fanning and Darren Middleton during a Powderfinger gig at The Zoo in 1995.Credit: Photo reproduced with kind permission of Powderfinger

It was confirmed on Wednesday the 500-capacity Fortitude Valley venue, upstairs at Ann Street’s Shannon’s Buildings, would close on July 8.

Upset at the venue’s demise, Collins said The Zoo was a huge part of Powderfinger’s development – both on and off the stage.

“Ian [Haug], our guitarist, he was working there when they opened, in the kitchen.

“They supported musicians through staffing, and we also played a lot of gigs there. We had a great relationship with The Zoo, and it was also a great place to see local bands for us.”

The Zoo’s owner, Shane Chidgzey, said the closure was the result of a “perfect storm” of increased cost-of-living pressures, insurance, declining drink sales and punters’ preference for big international touring acts that led to the difficult decision to shut up shop.

The Zoo will close its doors for good on July 8.Credit: Robert Shakespeare - Fairfax Media

“I would rather be responsible and plan for its closure than get to the end and having a whole bunch of people filing bankruptcy and not paying my staff and not paying super and all those things,” he said.

“We are a responsible organisation. We’ve always paid staff, always paid super, we’ve always done all those bits and pieces.

“We’re behind on a few bills here and there, but when it got to the point where I realised that there’s no way we can keep up, I’d rather be responsible and go out with a smile versus going out and everyone hating us because we closed the doors with a day’s notice.”

Chidgzey, who took over the venue in December 2020, said the situation had become worse in the past year.

“We were just under $2 million last financial year for revenue and we’re probably lucky if we hit $1.2 million this year,” he said.

“That’s a massive drop-off in one year on a venue that already loses 600 grand a year – over three years, I’m nearly $3 million in the hole just trying to keep it open, but when I lost all of that revenue this year, it’s been kicking the can down the road, unfortunately.”

It is a pressure being experienced across Australia’s live music industry. This year’s Splendour in the Grass music festival at Byron Bay was cancelled in March, following on from similar announcements from the organisers of Groovin the Moo and Dark MoFo.

Collins, who now runs two music venues in the Valley – the 800-capacity Triffid and the 3000-capacity Fortitude Music Hall – said the entire industry was feeling the pinch.

John Collins at The Triffid.Credit: Chris Hyde

“You’ve got young people who’ve got high rents, money’s tight, so they don’t go out and spend money in the bars or before the show, or after the show, and the spiralling costs of running a venue,” he said.

“It doesn’t take a scientist or mathematician to figure out that if your costs are up by 30 per cent and your revenue’s down by 50 per cent in some instances, where’s it going to go?

“That’s the end of that conversation, isn’t it?”

As for The Zoo, Collins said its demise would leave a huge void in the Brisbane music ecosystem.

“When we opened The Triffid, we deliberately – 100 per cent deliberately – stayed away from that capacity of The Zoo,” he said.

“Our idea was to come in between as a stepping stone for bands, who would play at a small venue, then they go to The Zoo and once you’ve been to The Zoo, the next step is The Triffid and the next step after that is The Tivoli.

“We tried to stay out of [The Zoo’s] path, because we didn’t want this to happen.”

Chidgzey said the model for small live music venues was broken and pleaded for government help for the sector.

“Firstly, I think they need to put some level of excise tax, like $1 a ticket, for the big internationals are coming through – no-one’s going to notice $1 extra,” he said.

“If that could be funnelled into a fund to help the venues, reverse-correlated so the lower end of the venues get more because they’re the ones that struggle.

“That money can go towards insurance and rent.

“If Taylor Swift and Foo Fighters and so on and so forth come out, they’re selling hundreds of thousands of tickets – well, there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars that goes towards assisting the local music scene.”

Despite how it has ended up, Chidgzey said he had no regrets about taking on the storied Brisbane venue in 2020.

“This was an opportunity to save the venue during COVID, because it was going to close at that point in time,” he said.

“If anything, we gave the old girl another 3½ years that it wouldn’t have had before.”