“This is our sparkly vagina,” Brooke Olsen tells Broadsheet, pointing to a glowing pink concavity in the ceiling at Marrickville’s newest bar and band room, The Great Club. To be clear, the sparkly vagina is just a ritzy design hangover from yesteryear, but it’s got the kind of Big Greek Energy Olsen and co-director Alison Avron are embracing as the new tenants at the Greek Macedonian Club on Livingstone Road.

“[The club] had been dormant for about two years when we first walked in, and there were still eggshells in the kitchen and broken plates on the dance floor, which is kind of amazing,” says Olsen of the landmark site, which shut down after a brief and rowdy stint under the banner of the Astoria Nightclub.

“But we’ve pulled everything together, as you see it now, in a month. Then we just opened.”

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After a nailbiting year for the arts, The Great Club is no small feat. It’s a 300-seat whopper of a live-music venue, with a kitchen and a new, appropriately sprawling bar. It’s also adding to the area’s burgeoning hub of community-driven venues, including The Gasoline Pony and Lazy Bones Lounge up the road.

“We want to do 100 per cent contemporary music, a really good mix of genres. Absolutely you’ll have your Triple J bands, but you’re also going to have other bands that are really cool and interesting. Probably similar to the Lansdowne, which is unfortunately the only comparison we have right now,” Olsen says.

The pair are up-front about offering a female-run alternative to Sydney’s “dude heavy” venues. And if their resumes are anything to go by, it’ll be a damn fine one. Their experience comprises a decade each running venues in Sydney’s mercurial music industry. Notably, Olsen was one half of Ears Have Ears, an award-winning experimental music program on FBI Radio; Avron was the director of long-running, much-respected inner-west venue The Newsagency, which was evicted from its Camperdown digs last year. The Great Club is its spiritual successor.

For what seems like a rare find in a city where gig space is premium, Avron says there’s no fantastic story about how they snagged the club.

“We just saw an ad in the paper, which is very boring,” she says, laughing. “We literally went venue shopping and the real estate really liked us. It’s still owned by the [Greek Macedonian Club] and they said it would be a good connection with the old and the new. Plus, we didn’t really want to fuck with too much of the history.”

Beyond decaying eggshells and smashed plates, the club’s history stretches back to 1951. It was established as a gentlemen’s-only lounge, but has since hosted everything from crooners to short-lived club nights over six decades. There’s even a small museum of traditional Greek garb and artefacts displayed in a glass cabinet at the club’s entrance. As per the lease agreement, Olsen and Avron are now its official caretakers (“It’s so cool, I love polishing it,” says Olsen). As you walk through the hall into the main room, memorabilia and photos line the walls.

The pair have imbued the space with personal history, too. There’s 200 square metres’ worth of picture frames on the walls, pulled from The Newsagency and grouped into themed areas. Laze about in “The Cat Corner” or feel fabulous beside “The Wall of Big Gay Icons”. Avron says blokes gravitate toward the caramel-coloured chesterfields opposite the bar, dubbed “The Man Area”.

The cocktail list highlights Australian producers by way of local pride. The “Annette Kellerman” is a nod to the local pool and the swimming legend it was named for; it’s a punchy mix of local distiller Poor Toms’ strawberry gin, strawberry and basil compote, built over ice and topped with soda.

Back of house, executive chef Sofia Mousis says she’s gone from sleeping on the club’s chairs as a kid to running the kitchen 40 years later. “I stopped in front of this building and had flashbacks of my youth. As a girl growing up in the ’70s, we had to come here whether we liked it or not.”

Her menu is a best-of from the Greek playbook: flaky spanakopita loaded with cheese and spinach; pork gyros wrapped in house-made pita; and meze to share. Mousis says she’ll also start smoking meat soon. And while her menu changes often, she says there’s no rules apart from “freshness and salt”.

“It doesn’t matter if you have a $300 fish, if you don’t season it properly, there’s no survive-revive.” No chef worth their Saxa can argue with that.

The Great Club
160–164 Livingstone Road, Marrickville

Hours:
Wed to Sat 4pm–12am
Sun 4pm–10pm

thegreatclubsydney.com