Following on from their cover of The Specials’ 1981 hit ‘Ghost Town’, Sydney based reggae/indie rock group Sticky Fingers made a pretty direct claim on their home city’s lockout laws and how it renders the live music and night life scene practically defunct. Stretching across the Sydney CBD entertainment precinct, the new lockout laws in place by the NSW government are an attempt to crack down on public displays of drug and alcohol fuelled violence.
With lyrics like “This town, is coming like a ghost town, All the clubs have been closed down” and “Bands won’t play no more, too much fighting on the dance floor” it’s hard not to draw parallel between the issues present both in-song as well as what’s currently happening in the night-life scene in Sydney. We spoke with Sticky Fingers own Paddy Cornwall (bass, vocals) on the issue, and its effect on his personal life as well his life as an active musician.
“You look at an area like King’s Cross, which has basically been almost fully shut-down,” states Cornwall. “I guess the flip side of where they might’ve went wrong is a lack of cultural diversity, where basically it’s a place, to an extent, where a large amount of people go there just to get shitfaced. There’s just clubs and strip clubs, and not to say that clubs and strip clubs aren’t tons of fun, but without having that massive amounts of diversity, that’s when you might be seeing a bit more violence.”
“On the other side of the coin, I’ve got an example where there was this thing that happened a month ago called the ‘King Street Crawl’ on the main drag of Newtown where every single bar and club on the street had live music from midday to midnight. Stickies played a pop-up show as did The Preachers and a bunch of other bands, and you look at something like that where the entire day King Street was totally flooded with people but there was not one single report of violence” Cornwall elaborates. “I reckon you’re gonna find the reason is, when people who are drinking are actually engaged with something they’re not going to find the time to even act out because they’re too busy having a good time.”
“Obviously you’re going to see a whole lot more people coming to Newtown on the weekends. You can’t stop people from having a good time; they’re always going to find a way,” he muses. “I guess the thing with lockout laws… and to me this seems obvious, the problem with lockout laws is that it actually hasn’t addressed the issue, the issue being that Australia seems to have an aggressive drinking culture.”
[include_post id=”434044″]Cornwall then mentions his perspective on this, due to touring with the band, and how Australia compares to the rest of the world when it comes to alcohol and its surrounding culture. “You go to somewhere like New York for instance and they just don’t drink the same way we do. The way that I’ve been brought up – I’m personally a binge drinker. When I drink, I get pissed; I go out and drink a lot.”
“If there is this issue of drinking then it’s not going to be something to change overnight, its got to be something that’s going to have to be a bit educational. As a general concern of everybody you can’t just say “Well everybody go home and watch Game Of Thrones and eat pizza” because sometimes people don’t feel like doing that” he states, toying with the idea that it should be approached with less of a legal perspective and more of an education and health issue.
He goes on to mention how the lockout laws that have been put in place have affected Sticky Fingers as a band as well as the life of their contemporaries. “All five of us all used to work behind the bar of the Annandale Hotel. We used to play there, we used to play the Hopetoun Hotel a lot and we used to play the Lansdowne. These are all between 200 – 400 capacity venues” Cornwall states, reminiscing.
“Those three venues I just mentioned don’t exist anymore”, he states, echoing how drastically the scene has changed and become more constricted over the past few years. “There’s a whole bunch of venues in Kings Cross that have called it quits due to the lockout laws. You talk to lots of Australian people and we’re heavily prided on our long export of live music. If these bands don’t have anywhere to carve their chops from the get-go, in these small to medium sized venues then we’re not going to have any bands in the future, or we might but they’ll all be shit, because they’ve got nowhere to play!”
“It’s also been interesting seeing the by-product of lockout laws in Sydney, like I said before, you can’t stop people from doing what they want, which is having a good time on the weekend.” He mentions, echoing the futility of it all.
“For instance there’s a Greek restaurant in Newtown called Steki’s, which has a restaurant license, and because they’re serving food they’re able to stay open until the wee hours of the morning. So that’s gone from being a traditional style Greek restaurant and now it’s kind of like an incredibly trendy place to go to and drink wine, hang out and listen to this awesome live Greek band, and of course there’s the whole warehouse scene popping off in Marrickville and surrounding industrial areas, too.”
On the subject of how lockout laws affect bands and live music, it was narrowed down to people having a general lack of awareness on how these laws affect music fans and music in general. “If you’re strangling the people who are keeping the doors open, the doors aren’t going to stay open” Cornwall mentions, regarding that serving alcohol and selling drinks is the lifeblood of venues and that they don’t normally make the bulk of their income of selling tickets.
[include_post id=”434044″]“It goes beyond just lockout laws and it’s more about the government and the local council’s attitude towards the arts in general. It seems to be an incredibly low priority,” he mentions. “Going back to the Annandale hotel, they used to have a 3AM license and they copped a couple of noise complaints and suddenly they got their license changed from a 3AM to a midnight license. This wasn’t even taking into consideration the 24-hour McDonald’s next door and the plethora of brothels and everything – all this noise on the street that the Annandale just copped the blame for.”
“The Annandale isn’t a kind of pub that has people coming in during the day, it makes all of its bread and butter between the hours of 8PM and what was 3AM, but then next thing, they’re only making money between 8PM and midnight, and so that’s kind of what ultimately sent the Rule brothers bankrupt.”
Despite everything, Cornwall is adamant in his unwavering optimism concerning the future of Sydney’s nightlife, stating simply; “Lockout laws wont last. If you look at the stats it seems to be proving in its own right that it’s not really doing anything. Its’ just sort of shifting people around the joint and not really addressing the issue.”
