Another one bites the dust
The Zoo is about to join a long list of venues lost to Brisbane audiences.
Her Majesty’s. Cloudland. Festival Hall. The Regent. And now it’s The Zoo.
Another Brisbane cultural venue is closing, with the final gig scheduled for July 8.
The obituaries have been kind. Former Powderfinger bassist John “JC” Collins noted that, when the band was starting out, “You go and sell out The Zoo and you’re on your way.”
Singer-songwriter Megan Washington wrote: “I’m so sorry to hear this. The Zoo is so important to the scene.”
The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster said: “It had a tonne of atmosphere and it always felt like a meeting place and a hangout.”
Of course, we’ve been down this track before. So many times.
Not just the closure of venues, as is happening with The Zoo, but their physical demolition. The wrecking ball has swung in an attempt to erase places that were important: architecturally, historically, culturally, even spiritually.
But some of us do remember.
I was sitting in the audience at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the very early 1980s when actor Stuart Wagstaff, who was playing the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show, stepped out of character to make an impassioned plea: “We must save this beautiful theatre.”
We didn’t.
And while I remember the original Cloudland as much as a venue for university exams as a place where bands — big bands in the 1940s; punk bands in the 1970s — had played, I was among those saddened by its loss in November, 1982.
I vividly remember a photograph in The Daily Sun, where two of the Deen Brothers, the family-owned demolition company preferred by those who wanted old buildings quickly out of the way, were shown waltzing over the wreckage.
Festival Hall — where I’d seen acts including Alice Cooper, Status Quo, Suzi Quatro, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, and Rik Mayall and Ben Elton — also fell to the wrecking ball. Some illustrations evoking what once had been remain in the foyer of the tower that replaced it. Or so I’m told.
I was part of the campaign to save the Regent Theatre, the remnant of Brisbane’s once-thriving “Broadway” district, but we couldn’t stop the developers from knocking down the Elizabeth Street-facing theatre box.
More than a decade later, there’s still an empty hole on that side. The grand foyer remains propped up on Queen Street, but only just. One can’t help wondering how long until a reason is found for its removal or further diminution when a soulless new building inevitably goes up.
Time marches on. People get old and they die.
Who really cares if nothing remains to say that here was a place where we once had fun?