It’s a familiar story for gig lovers in Adelaide: you see a tour announcement for your favorite band, and there’s no Adelaide date to be seen.
Craig Lock of Five Four Entertainment is hoping that narrative will soon change with the opening of Hindley Street Music Hall, a new live venue he and the Five Four team, together with Secret Sounds and Live Nation, are launching this week.
Lock reckons the 1800-capacity venue will provide a middle ground allowing bands to make that elusive tour stop in Adelaide far easier.
“Previous to this existing, you had The Gov [a 700-capacity venue] and the Thebarton Theatre, which can hold about 2500 people,” Lock tells Broadsheet. “You can’t go from the Gov to the Thebby because it’s very hard to make that jump for a band, or if you’re an international act that doesn’t tour regularly, you know that you might be worth 1000 to 1500 tickets. That doesn’t work at the Thebarton Theatre because you’re going to lose money, you can’t do the Gov because you don’t make enough money …
“It’s just completely out of whack, and that’s what it boils down to: why don’t acts come here? They get scarred. Promoters and acts get scarred by bad experiences, and that in turn creates a cycle of bands not wanting to come back here.”
After opening Lion Arts Factory in early 2019, plans for another venue came quickly for Lock and his team, but they were soon scuppered by Covid and heavy restrictions on the music industry. It was “a bastard of a time”, he says.
“There were two years of just battling. While we didn’t have any work to do, I was super busy just trying to survive, fighting the government, trying to get funding … It was terrible, but you couldn’t sit back and just have two years off, that wasn’t what it was. It was two years of extreme stress and clawing for every scrap of money.”
But out of this period of struggle and frustration, an opportunity arose. The relocated HQ Complex had closed, leaving an empty venue in an ideal location on Adelaide’s premier entertainment strip.
“Ultimately [the owners of HQ] spent a lot of money building this building and they built it for their purpose, but they actually got kind of close to what was needed for a really good music venue,” Lock says of the mega club. “So I guess what we’ve done is made it functional and great for a sustainable future as a venue for hire for music and other things.”
The venue has been reworked with the live music experience in mind – for patrons and performers alike. That means changes to the lighting, staging and production, and modifications to the structure of the building. A goods elevator was installed to expedite the process of getting road cases in and out of the venue, and several green rooms were created for the artists. All of this to create a space Lock hopes will welcome more and more acts to town.
“Artists might say, ‘We don’t way to play in a pub room, we want a proper theatre venue,’ so I think we’re really trying to fill that gap with what we’re doing … The types of acts that potentially play here, they might sell 5000 tickets in Sydney and Melbourne and 1500 in Adelaide, but now they can come and get that same quality of experience. They can bring their truck, they can have their production, they can have their green rooms – all of which I think allows people to take the gamble of coming to Adelaide and making it work for themselves.”
Besides the live music hall, a nightclub on the ground level will open to patrons on September 30, operating independently from the music venue, with separate branding to be revealed soon. The in-house kitchen is being outsourced, with Lock and the team searching out “high quality restaurateurs” to bring an offering of their own to the precinct, which Lock says will be the “feather in the cap” of the redesign.
A multi-tiered mezzanine overlooking the stage has been carefully built to ensure as many ideal sightlines to the performances as possible, and there are wheelchair-accessible and gender-neutral toilets.
As we lounge in one of the new green rooms a week before the launch, drills and saws purring faintly in the background, Lock’s excitement for the venue – and its potential flow-on effect for the wider area – is palpable.
“[Hindley Street is] the main entertainment precinct in Adelaide. It’s got clubs, we’ve got bars, we’ve got restaurants, but it doesn’t have a venue – and that’s what this place is now, it’s finally bringing that other element to it.
“If you own a restaurant on Leigh Street and we have a gig here on a Wednesday night that’s sold out, you’re probably going to be booked out … We’re excited to become a part of that community.”
Hindley Street Music Hall will open at 149 Hindley Street on September 15 with performances from DMA’s, Wafia, Mashd N Kutcher, West Thebarton and Jess Day. Tickets are available online.
