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.
Since then it’s gone through a couple of sets of hands. Pixie Weyand bought The Zoo from Curran and, with the latter’s help, staged a 25th anniversary celebration in late 2017. But the Covid pandemic wrought devastation, despite Brisbane initially escaping almost unscathed: in 2020 the city played host to a packed AFL grand final, normally held in Melbourne.
The largesse afforded to major sporting events wasn’t extended to music. Under Weyand, the 500-capacity venue became one of the first to trial socially distanced shows: 100 people, positioned 1.5 metres apart. It took its toll, and Chidgzey took over running The Zoo officially in 2020.
Chidgzey has since expanded into a space that was already a hub of musical activity. Next door, the old offices of music rights managers APRA AMCOS is now The Zoo’s sister venue, the 200-capacity Stranded, named after the debut single by Brisbane heroes the Saints. Downstairs, what used to be the shop Tym’s Guitars serves as a green room for international artists.
The Zoo itself stands at the top of a flight of stairs in a decaying building on Ann Street, in the heart of the city’s nightclub precinct, Fortitude Valley. Among other things, the 500-capacity room was once famous for its lack of air-conditioning, turning packed gigs into a giant subtropical sauna during Brisbane’s famously steamy summers.
That’s been fixed now. But, even in the old days, the venue was an oasis for music lovers – and an escape from the madness that has long permeated the Valley. When it opened its doors, Brisbane was still emerging, blinking, from the corruption and vice presided over by the infamous former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Fortitude Valley had been ruled by a vicious alliance of criminals and crooked cops who ran a protection racket they codenamed The Joke. The Fitzgerald inquiry destroyed them, along with Bjelke-Petersen’s government. Along with the recession of the early 90s it turned the old red-light district into a wasteland. Practically every shopfront was for lease.
For Curran and Smith, it was the only affordable place to realise their dreams. Initially they intended the space to be a cafe-gallery, where local artists could get some exposure. Music was the afterthought that became the main game. “We could only sell so many pieces of art,” Curran says. A stage was constructed using timber donated from the set of the film Babe.
In this seedy part of town, The Zoo became a safe space: for women, for the LGBTQ+ community and for budding artists of all stripes. An unofficial “no dickheads” policy was subtly enforced. “We never sold double shots and we never sold rum,” Curran says. “If you came to The Zoo, you respected the rules.”
Eventually, it helped transform the Valley, and Brisbane too, nurturing many of the artists who dominated Australian music in the 90s: Powderfinger, Regurgitator, Screamfeeder and others. Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens has said that nothing else did as much for Brisbane’s music scene during that period.
The venue would go on to host many more celebrated shows. Forster joined forces with his old songwriting partner, the late Grant McLennan, to form a new lineup of the Go-Betweens which first played The Zoo in December 1995. A month later, Nick Cave jumped up on stage with the Dirty Three – the beginning of his working relationship with Warren Ellis.
The Zoo also hosted the famously fractious Pixies, who played one overflowing night in 2010. Curran remembers only good vibes: “It was just Pixies and myself in the room and they did a two-hour soundcheck. They hadn’t seen each other for a year and they were laughing and joking and relaxed. I just felt like I was in heaven.”
The Zoo is now attempting to diversify, with bookings outsourced to the Melbourne-based agency Calibre Music Management. There are still plenty of rock, punk and metal shows, but K-pop too. “It’s just good business sense to try and have as many touch points with the community as possible,” says a Calibre director, Nathan Farrell.
Farrell says the venue is rebounding, claiming that more tickets were sold in 2023 than any year in The Zoo’s history. But that doesn’t mean it’s out of the woods: in a cost-of-living crisis, getting people through the door is only half the battle. “We’re finding all our venues are reporting that spend-per-heads are down on sold-out nights.”
There’s also the issue of skyrocketing public liability insurance, called out by the Melbourne venue Sooki Lounge. Chidgzey says The Zoo’s bill rose from $35,000 in 2022 to $55,000 the following year and now $65,000 this year, despite there being only one claim in the venue’s history.
It helps that Brisbane’s grassroots scene is thriving: Farrell says he handles up to 15 more young acts there than in Melbourne. Unlike Chidgzey, whose background is in construction and project management, he is a music industry veteran who has attended the Grammys (among Calibre’s clients is Styalz Fuego, who co-produced Troye Sivan’s Rush).
But Chidgzey, who was born in Maryborough and grew up in Brisbane before moving to Sydney, is a music fan. “Music was always the thing that kept me going, kept me happy and kept me motivated and excited, so I wanted to find a way in which to give back to the industry that’s given me so much,” he says. He commutes back to Brisbane every two weeks.
The Zoo is now more comfortable than it once was. The bar has been upgraded, there’s a new kitchen, and air-conditioning has finally been installed – occasioning some grumbling from nostalgic old timers and relief from everyone else. “The one thing the artists don’t mind is the air-con, and the cold frozen towels that we provide on request,” Chidgzey says.
Chidgzey also has Curran’s powerful endorsement, and she returned to collaborate with him for the venue’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2022, which stretched into a 10-day festival. “If it wasn’t for him, The Zoo wouldn’t be there,” she says firmly. “If he hadn’t supported it and done it through those really hard times of Covid, it would no longer exist.”
• This story was amended on 31 March 2024 to correct the year that Shane Chidgzey took over The Zoo. It was 2020, not 2023 as an earlier version said.
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