By Bunny Banyai
At 15, I knew exactly who I wanted to be: Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. All I needed was their clothes, books, and record collection. And there was only one place in Melbourne I could find all three: Greville St, Prahran.
Physically and spiritually, Greville St was a long way from where I lived, on the fringes of Melbourne’s north-east, in the mortifyingly named Kangaroo Ground. I would have donated a limb to live in a Blackburn or a Mitcham or a Box Hill, anything to avoid the raised eyebrows that met me when disclosing my location. I spent every other day trying to convince people that Kangaroo Ground was a real place; add to this my dad being from Transylvania, and people had frequent cause to believe I was a liar and a fabulist.
Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, with their daughter Francis Bean, in 1993.Credit: Alamy
It’s impossible to overstate how important Greville Street was to Melbourne’s counterculture in those days, and the decades that preceded it; a slender enclave lined with everything a budding subversive – or even just a kid emulating their idols – could desire; scores of vintage clothing shops, punk hairdressers, rave shops, a dedicated crime bookstore, a health food café, a rockabilly shop, a two-storey emporium containing most of the above.
I don’t know how my friends and I figured out that Greville Street was the place to be, living so far from the city, and so close to Boronia Mall. Did we conjure its location in a séance? Was it someone’s hip older sibling who pointed us in its direction, or somewhere we read about in the then-ubiquitous street press? Or did we simply follow the scent of brown corduroy, Marlboro Lights, mothballs, and record sleeves?
I rarely went to Greville Street without a specific mission: finding a Courtney-inspired powder blue vintage ’50s cocktail dress, or a Kurt-inspired lilac mohair cardigan. Impersonating your idols in the mid-’90s was a boots-on-the-ground endeavour. With the internet barely known, obsessive fans required the mindset of a truffle pig to hunt down valuable merchandise and wardrobe.
Everything I knew about Kurt and Courtney was learned from Rolling Stone profiles (it was in a 1994 Courtney Love interview that I discovered she and Kurt liked to have sex while listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, a record I promptly acquired, and pretended to like).
Bunny Banyai (in the white coat) pictured with her friends in the ’90s wearing the indie fashion that they found in Greville St, Prahran.
Walking into any one of the Greville St shops as a 15-year-old required nerves of steel. I was always sure some sort of nerd alarm would sound when I crossed the threshold, at which point a withering sales assistant in pink-hued aviators and a burgundy velvet jacket would emerge and subject me to a psychic cavity search. “Yes”, she would conclude, “you are a suburban-fringe private school wog who’s scared of the dark. Your Chuck Taylors are clearly from Doncaster Shoppingtown. Please leave.”
Of course, she was right. I had no business being there. To borrow from Brittany Murphy’s character in Clueless, I was a virgin who couldn’t drive. This humiliation was the price a frizzy haired numpty who lived in a former piggery had to pay for proximity to cool, but I understood it, respected it, even – what’s cooler than gatekeeping? – and submitted myself to the shame at every opportunity.
Warwick Brown, owner of Greville Records is pictured preparing to hand deliver his wares to customers during the 2020 COVID lockdowns. Credit: Eddie Jim
Though I don’t recall being welcomed into the Greville St sanctums with anything warmer than an eyeroll, in one shop things were different. Greville Records was perhaps the most intimidating shop on the street for an indie geek, a long narrow corridor of new and old records, CDs, posters, and rock bios. From behind the elevated counter, Warwick Brown ruled his retail kingdom with a benevolence and tolerance not seen anywhere else on the street – or anywhere else, period.
Teenagers get used to the disdain and lack of interest of adults. They don’t expect the obsessions that crowd their hearts to be taken seriously. Warwick wasn’t like that. He treated me like any other customer, which is to say, like one of the cool people. He put limited edition records aside for me, let me put my band T-shirts behind the counter to be signed in the event a visiting rock dignitary dropped into the shop, sold me tickets to the Big Day Out, and patiently listened to my self-conscious bleating about how annoying and phony all the “new” Nirvana and Pixies fans were; as if I, in my primary school years, had had a front row spot at club shows in Seattle, before all the mainstream idiots caught on.
It was the sort of kindness you don’t easily forget. I kept going to Greville Records long after all the other cool shops had shuttered, driven out by exorbitant rents. I worked at one of those eclectic fashion shops for a long stretch of the early to mid 2000s, when Greville St was on life support, the Continental Café now a boutique nightclub, literally called Boutique.
Greville Records has somehow weathered the ever-changing winds that have blown down its namesake street since its 1978 inception. The goodwill engendered by Warwick, and his long-term former co-pilot – the voluble, equally kind-hearted Steve, who died in 2019 – has a lot to do with its longevity and status as the last of the Greville old guard.
My own 11-year-old now trams down to Greville Records with her dad, who himself made the same trek in the late ’80s. She loves Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo. Warwick, alongside his son, Arlo, and the current store manager, Cody, tend to her earnest requests in much the same way he did for me back in the mid-’90s, never a hint of snobbery or resentment at catering to the mainstream musical infatuations of a child.
In his dimly lit slip of a shop, Warwick keeps Greville Street’s countercultural heart steadily beating – in turn, earning himself a permanent place in the hearts of countless Melburnians, just like me.
Bunny Banyai is a freelance writer and author.
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