WHERE IT CAME FROM · ENTRY 04 OF 05
Punk in Melbourne
WHERE IT CAME FROM · ENTRY 04 OF 05
Melbourne's punk and post-punk scene ran on a specific architectural fact: the city had a lot of pubs with band rooms attached, and the licensing laws that governed them had, by the late 1980s and through the 1990s, produced a remarkably dense circuit. A band could play St Kilda, Collingwood, Fitzroy and the inner north across four different weeks and reach four genuinely distinct audiences without leaving a postcode-sized radius. The Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda — the Espy, to everyone who played it — was the obvious landmark, but the circuit was not about landmarks. It was about volume and repetition: the Tuesday residency, the Thursday support slot, the Sunday afternoon that nobody came to but you played anyway because the room was booked and the PA was already there.
That infrastructure is what allowed a band built around an upright bass and a hollow-body guitar to develop without the pressure of a fixed commercial identity. Nobody needed a three-piece with a double bass to be anything in particular. The venue just needed the room filled to a point where the bar made money. Within that, almost anything was possible, including a years-long process of finding out what you actually were.
The independent label ecology around Melbourne in the 1990s was not glamorous, but it was functional. Labels like Au Go Go and others operated close enough to the venue circuit to watch bands develop in real time rather than signing on the basis of a demo cassette sent through the post. That proximity changed the kind of deal that was possible. A small local pressing — a single, then an EP — could be done on terms that left a band in control of what came next, and the infrastructure to actually sell those records existed in the same cluster of inner-suburb record shops where the venues were.
The EP years before the first album matter precisely because of this: the format suited the economy. You didn't need to have everything figured out to release four songs, and the Melbourne circuit would absorb the record without requiring a national tour to justify its existence.
What a city scene does — when it's working — is provide the conditions for a band to be wrong about itself for long enough to become right. Melbourne in this period offered that because it was stratified: there were venues for fifty people and venues for five hundred, and the path between them was visible and walkable if you were good enough and persistent enough. A band could see exactly what they needed to do next.
The audience side mattered too. Melbourne's inner suburbs had a population of young people who were literate in the genre history — who could hear the rockabilly in the distortion, who understood that an upright bass in a loud band was a deliberate argument rather than a quirky aesthetic choice. Playing to a room that already knew the Stray Cats, already knew the psychobilly lineage, meant you didn't have to explain yourself. You just had to be better than the thing you were citing.
That is the specific pressure the Melbourne scene applied: not commercial pressure, but the pressure of an informed audience with options. You could fail here slowly, and learn from it. What you couldn't do was be mediocre forever. The circuit was patient, but it was not infinitely forgiving.