Shane Chidgzey is talking a mile a minute, sounding half-street hustler, half-tech bro. “I didn’t come from the music industry initially,” says the Sydney-based entrepreneur and owner of Brisbane’s The Zoo, one of Australia’s longest-running music venues. “I was looking for a way to disrupt, because I like to disrupt as a basis for most of my businesses.”
The Zoo has endured plenty of disruption in the last few years. Established in 1992 by two young women, Joc Curran and C Smith, it’s still emerging from a difficult period after Curran sold the venue in 2016. “I’d given it 24 years of my life, and I needed to have a life outside of that,” she says.
