This is the home of the Kings Cross Conservatorium, founded by music teacher Stephanie Bourke, comprised of around 230 school-aged students and a dozen or so teachers.

The tongue-in-cheek name purposefully belies the loose, fun feel of a music school that has become a Sydney institution, and where the offspring of some of the eastern suburbs’ most influential and creative residents are sent to hone their own musical talent; where stars are born and rock’n’roll is wrought in the afternoon after school.

Near the kitchen sits an impressive record collection. A front room doubles as an office; whiteboards are crammed with class schedules and band names the students have come up with, such as Green Dick, Sk8er Grrrl, Electric Prime Minister and Hot Ovens.

Folders of hand-scribed sheet music, written in large, child-friendly writing sit neatly in bookshelves — everything from The Beatles to Billie Eilish.

If it sounds a bit like the rambling terrace in the Jack Black film School of Rock — the walls here are lined with posters from gigs the kids have played, and a handwritten sign taped to the desk warns students not to feed chicken legs to Dolly, a border collie who wanders around the premises — that’s no coincidence.

The original incarnation of the music school founded in Melbourne in 1990 was said to have inspired the Hollywood film.

As Bourke, a diminutive strawberry blonde, says, there are rock schools “everywhere” now. “But it is an Aussie invention. And it was invented by a woman.”

Classically trained with a degree from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in piano under the tutelage of Professor Max Cooke, Bourke’s first school arose in Collingwood. She moved to Sydney 10 years ago.

“I wasn’t going to do rock’n’roll high school here. It just turned out that way — because of the way I teach”. Put simply, the way she teaches is entirely uncondescending, practical, egalitarian and distinctly “old school”.

The various rooms that branch off the narrow staircase in the Potts Point campus are littered with guitars, pedal-boards and amps — as well as a few instruments gifted to the school by Courtney Love, an enthusiastic booster who once donated $20,000.

From around 3.45pm these rooms fill with kids.

They variously learn guitar, bass, drums, piano, singing, songwriting, recording and electronic music. Students form bands, rehearse, play gigs and hang out.

For part of the year they rehearse for an annual showcase gig, which sees the school take over Oxford Art Factory for a day, with 48 bands playing across two stages, allowing the students to perform in front of parents, well-wishers, friends, and industry people.

Bourke explains that some bands have outgrown these short showcase sets so she organises gigs at many other legendary eastern suburbs music venues.

They perform piano-centric shows at famous jazz venue El Rocco Room, packed rock gigs at The Lansdowne and The Basement (now Mary’s Underground in the CBD) and have a residency at Kings Cross Hotel, and have even played on the roof of MCA (the acoustics there aren’t great, Bourke says, but the view is great).

“We try and do as much live performance as possible because it takes a long time to get that security on stage and (to) realise that if you feel awkward then that’s what you’re amplifying to the audience,” Bourke says, explaining how playing gigs also strengthens the bond between bandmates.

“We get them to play live as soon as they can stand up without falling over when we hang a bass over them,” she laughs.

Today, she has equality on her mind, preoccupied with high-profile musos calling for more female headliners at the nation’s music festivals. But she is sceptical about affirmative action.

As Bourke puts it: “We (women) have always been there doing some pretty good sh*t. The narrative is always condescending.

“It’s about music.”

Rewind to the late 1980s and it was the thought of trying to teach an AC/DC riff on an old church piano that led Bourke to form her original rock’n’roll high school.

It happened just after Bourke had finished a philosophy degree — one of four she holds.

She was a member of a band, reading a lot of feminist texts and teaching music as a casual job on a convent piano when one of two of her female students requested the aforementioned AC/DC.

She organised to borrow some equipment from friends, and told the students to come to her house for a jam. As an afterthought, she invited the rest of her piano students, and ended up with 20 school-aged girls at her house.

“The next thing you know, we all wanted to keep doing it.”

She’s kept doing it ever since.

There are currently more than 40 bands at Kings Cross Conservatorium, taught by members of legendary Australian acts such as You Am I and The Sunnyboys.

Bands shepherded by Bourke and her staff have played major music festivals, and signed record deals with Shock Records, Sony, Mushroom, and American label Ecstatic Peace run by Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore.

Early footage of Bourke’s kids jamming show Moore among the audience seated on the floor, with the likes of The Beastie Boys, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement and Bikini Kill subsequently dropping in on teenage jam sessions.

Bourke often hears the argument that rock ‘n’ roll is something that shouldn’t be taught or institutionalised, something she dismisses. “Everyone is shown everything. No one is born knowing what an E chord is. So it’s just a ridiculous stance.

“All the way through, up until just last week, I’ve had people telling me why I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. If you’re pushing hard against the norm of something, you have people saying, ‘Why are you bothering?’”

For Bourke, the reasons to bother are clear.

“Some kids are musical but they’re not academic,” she explains. “Or they’re just kids that aren’t gonna practise. If they play with other kids, it can really motivate them. So we know that playing and learning together in a band is very motivating and really beneficial. Because you need to hear what’s going on, it develops their ears really quickly. There’s all sorts of fundamental musical concepts that you can get at and teach if you take away that one task of being able to read music.”

The school has been a major proponent in the rise of young female-driven rock bands, but Bourke insists this was never intended to be a focus.

“Gender isn’t supposed to be the point,” she explains. “I would have never made the school girls-only or anything, because I think that highlights the exact thing that is supposedly not the focus.

“We want people to listen to our artistic output and judge us equally — that’s the point.”

It seems plenty of people are listening. Word of mouth has proved powerful, with the school first choice for creative types in the know.

High profile parents who have chosen to send their kids to the Kings Cross Conservatorium include, among many others, actors David Wenham and Danielle Cormack, fashion designer Alice McCall and Danny Rogers of Lunatic Entertainment. Another is Stephen Pavlovic, founder of record label Modular Recordings, home to such musical sensations as The Avalanches, Tame Impala, The Presets, Wolfmother and Ladyhawke.

Bourke drew her attention to the The Erthlings — a group of four 16- year-old girls who formed their band at Kings Cross Conservatorium when they were just eight.

Pavlovic was sent a song that had been remixed by the school’s electronic class and this put the band on the path to work with electronic label Future Classic, home to world-beater Flume.

Bourke worked with them for eight years, helping them hone their songwriting skills, recording with them, and getting them to a point where they were signable.

Overnight success stories take years of dedicated hard work.

There are a few music managers following what the kids are doing, which means Bourke has to be extra careful to protect her charges. “I want it to grow organically,” she explains of the children’s music. “I don’t want some digital marketing machine creating perception by buying bots and ‘listens’. I want them to experience the joy of getting big on one’s own.”

Despite her talent-nurturing abilities and knowledge of the industry, she has no interest in becoming a band manager herself.

Says Bourke: “I have always seen myself first and foremost as a teacher.”