In 2003, the Rolling Stones decided to add a different kind of show to their run of Australian tour dates. The band had been playing stadiums around the country – two dates at Sydney SuperDome, three at Rod Laver Arena and two at Brisbane Entertainment Centre – but wanted to add one intimate gig. Their booking agent knew just the spot: the Enmore theatre.
Situated in the middle of a then-shabby main street in Sydney’s inner west, still bearing an art deco facade from the 1930s, and with a maximum capacity of just 2,500, it was a change of pace for a band more often found playing to crowds in the tens of thousands. On a tour of the space, the Stones were enamoured: “They loved heritage buildings,” says Greg Khoury, a longtime employee of Century Venues, the company that handles the theatre’s bookings – and locked the gig in. It would become a legendary night.
“We all know the stories of the thousands and thousands of people that were lined up on Enmore Road, who didn’t have tickets but just wanted to hear as much as they could,” says Nick Stabback, who started out an usher at the Enmore in the 2000s and is now head of booking at Century Venues.
The police had to close Enmore Road to traffic and provide escorts for the band on their way to the gig. To be a good sport, staff opened the venue’s central doors so that those crowded outside could better hear the show. Those who lived in flats above the shops on the other side of the road were able to climb out onto their awning and nab a free seat to the hottest show in town. “Some people, from a particular vantage point, could actually look through those doors and see part of the stage,” says Khoury.
The Stones is just one of many momentous Enmore theatre gigs. To others, it might be the place Bob Dylan played a similarly hard-to-believe show in 2018. Some will remember it as the place where the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, at the time newly elected, skolled a beer to wild applause at a Gang of Youths show, or the venue where Four Tet set up DJ decks in the middle of the floor and charged punters just $20 to come dance. Perhaps you were there the night in 2008 when Ween fans drank the venue entirely clean of beer, or have fond teenage memories of camping out on Enmore Road to buy tickets from the box office in the pre-internet age. Maybe you loitered around the back of the venue to give Courtney Love and Melissa Auf der Maur friendship bracelets you made after a Hole show in the 1990s.
Of course, it’s not just what’s happened within the Enmore’s walls but the venue itself that makes it a beloved Sydney venue.
“It’s got a certain gravitas,” says David James Young, a dedicated gig goer who is currently in the official process of authenticating his Guinness World Record submission for most concerts attended in one year. He saw 365 gigs in 2023, and estimates he’s been to between 150 and 200 shows at the Enmore over his adult life. “[There’s] a majesty to walking in that room – it really feels like a hallowed hall because it has remained largely unchanged for the 100-odd years.”
The heritage isn’t all that makes it a preferred venue for many Sydney music fans. Rather than being sequestered away in Olympic Park or set in the sanitary confines of the CBD or Entertainment Quarter, it’s in a vibrant, accessible stretch of inner Sydney. And then there’s the capacity that’s big enough to house noteworthy acts, but not so large it starts to feel like you’re up in the nosebleed sections, lending it a feeling that Young describes as “simultaneously massive and intimate”. (A hot tip: having seen gigs there from “every possible position”, he rates being on the floor about 10 to 12 rows of people back as the best vantage point.)
While the Enmore has been there for more than 100 years, live music wasn’t always on the lineup. It was originally opened in 1908 as an open-air cinema, enclosed four years later, and later sold to Hoyts in 1935, who undertook a large-scale renovation of the venue and transformed it into the art deco marvel it is today. It remained a theatre until the 1980s – by that time having gone from Hoyts’ best-performing cinemas to a derelict purveyor of foreign films – when the Eliades family in Sydney bought it in 1986 and slowly built it into the concert space it is today. By the mid-2000s, the venue had started coming into its own, but getting there took a lot of “blood, sweat and tears”, Khoury says. “It always used to be a second option – a B-grade option – to the play in the [suburbs]. That started to reverse.”
While the venue had already been “busy” before Mick Jagger came to visit, that fateful gig in 2003 marked a turning point for the Enmore. “The Rolling Stones was certainly a cornerstone event,” says Khoury. “It made people realise that the theatre was … a vibrant, viable music venue.”
That Rolling Stones gig also kickstarted a trend of other stadium-filling bands choosing to instead play the Enmore. In 2014, Coldplay followed suit, picking the venue as the site of their only Australian show while promoting their album Ghost Stories – a big step down after having played to 200,000 people on their previous tour of the country. (They used the same trip to film the video for A Sky Full of Stars walking down the adjacent King Street, Newtown.) “I’ve never been asked for more [free tickets] in my life as I was for the Coldplay show,” laughs Khira Holloway, head of event delivery at Century Venues.
Then in 2017, looking to establish himself as a rock star, not a pop star – a considerable rebrand given his past in One Direction – a newly solo Harry Styles played the theatre. Fervent fans (and their dutiful dads) camped out for three nights in advance to get a spot as close to the stage as possible, BYO-ing fold-out chairs, sleeping bags and portable phone chargers. Styles inspired a level of fervour perhaps not matched again until 2023, when the Enmore nabbed the first Sydney show from Fred Again. Eager fans tried anything and everything to get into the very much sold-out gig, amid the nationwide mania that accompanied the UK producer’s tour.
“Someone walked up and handed our box office staff $1,000 in cash and said, ‘I need to get in’ and [he] turned him away,” Stabback recalls. “He’s still working for us, as you can imagine.”
And then there’s the acts the Enmore managed to snag as they were right on the precipice of blowing up. In 2012, both Lana Del Rey and Kendrick Lamar played the theatre – each returning to play Qudos Bank Arena on their next Australian tours. Even Katy Perry held a show there in 2009. “I was ushering on that shift,” Stabback recalls. “She did this amazing bit where she pulled out an inflatable giant cherry chapstick and rode it across the crowd.”
Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. When Covid hit – “an awful time,” says Stabback – the venue shuttered for a year. But that enforced downtime gave the Enmore a chance to embark on long-planned renovations, fast-tracking restoration works they’d planned to initially do “in piecemeal, like keyhole surgery”. It was initially a rocky path after lockdowns eased, but then came the bounceback.
“Since 2022, it’s been a landslide of shows, it’s just non-stop. 2023 was probably one of our busiest years on record,” Stabback says. “It’s interesting, because we’re coming into a cost-of-living crisis, but we are still waiting for that tipping point … I think it says something about the value of live entertainment to people – you’ll sell your car, but you’re still going to go to a concert.”
And then there was the night a Genesis Owusu gig broke the floor. Or, rather: “We’re saying it subsided. It didn’t break,” Stabback says.
The show happened in the midst of a particular soggy stretch of La Niña in 2022. A period of intensely torrential rain had created a waterlog under the floor and as Owusu busted out his fiery, propulsive track The Other Black Dog and the crowd began to cut loose, a section of the dancefloor buckled.
Young was there the night of the show. “I noticed a bunch of people had fallen over and I assumed it was just … the hustle and bustle of the mosh,” he remembers. “It was only when they all stood up and were all suddenly shorter than they previously were that I realised what had happened. A kind of sea had parted next to me and I was able to get a look at the floor, and I saw the sink … But we were all just kind of looking at one another being like, what just happened?”
Miraculously, no one was hurt. Perhaps even more miraculously, the venue was back open and running the next night, with a make-up Genesis Owusu gig scheduled for the following week.
“Twenty minutes after the show we had a crew of engineers and builders underneath that floor and working on that to get that back up,” says Stabback. “The show must go on.”
This is the first in a new series turning the spotlight on the best live music venues around Australia. What is your favourite? Let us know here and we’ll share your stories and memories
