The Brisbane music venue the Zoo will call last drinks in July, with the owner listing a “perfect storm” of forces leading to its closure, including cost-of-living pressures and declining alcohol consumption among young people.
The 500-capacity room, which first opened its doors on Ann Street in 1992 in the formerly down-at-heel but now heavily gentrified inner suburb of Fortitude Valley, is one of Australia’s oldest music venues.
The Zoo’s sister venue, the 250-capacity Stranded, will also close its doors at the end of this week. Stranded, housed in the same building as the Zoo, was named after the 1976 debut single by the legendary Brisbane band the Saints.
The Zoo’s owner, Shane Chidgzey, said the venue’s current revenue was at roughly 60% of the previous financial year. “The model is broken, unfortunately, when it comes to music venues,” he said. “We only make money on alcohol sales.
“You’ve got a cost-of-living crisis in Australia, which is huge … And there’s a new trend of not drinking, which is a wonderful trend for health but not so good for bars.”
The Zoo’s booker, Nathan Farrell, told the Guardian in March that while more tickets were sold in 2023 than in any year in the Zoo history, the amount of money people were spending on drinks once through the door was well down.
Chidgzey also cited audiences saving their money for big-ticket international artists including Taylor Swift, as well as the skyrocketing cost of insurance, which had nearly doubled in the past two years from $35,000 to $65,000.
Chidgzey said the venue’s increased insurance costs were partially driven by the venue’s location in a safe night precinct, a Queensland government initiative to curb alcohol-related violence in entertainment zones that began in 2014. There has been only one insurance claim in the venue’s history.
The Zoo’s location in the precinct, Chidgzey said, put it at a profound financial disadvantage.
“It requires additional security, it requires ID scanners, it requires more regulation, your insurance is more expensive and your rent’s more expensive,” he said.
Other comparable venues such as the Tivoli, also in Fortitude Valley, the Triffid in neighbouring Newstead and the Princess Theatre in South Brisbane are not in the safe night precinct, according to Chidgzey: “They’re working on a completely different cost basis to us.”
He also called for the introduction of a levy on major international touring artists to subsidise the grassroots music industry. “They need to be putting a dollar transaction per ticket on that to put into local music.”
The venue’s original owner Joc Curran, who ran the venue from 1992 to 2016, said: “The Zoo was an impossible thing, that became possible because of community, love, and a belief that magic could happen … but now it is time to say goodnight.”
Curran said she was only one of the venue’s custodians, paying tribute to her original co-owner C Smith, Chidgzey, the former owners Pixie Weyand, Cat Clarke and Luke “Boo” Johnston, as well as the “Zooies” – a term of endearment for the venue’s long-term staffers.
Robert Forster, who co-founded the Brisbane band the Go-Betweens with the late Grant McLennan in the late 1970s, said the Zoo was “the first well-run, stable, encouraging, well-organised venue in Brisbane that I’d ever encountered”.
“Permanence had very little to do with the Brisbane scene up until the 1990s, and it really started with Joc and C going down to the Valley.”
Forster moved back to Brisbane from Germany in 1992, the same year of the Zoo’s inception. “It had a tonne of atmosphere and it always felt like a meeting place and a hangout,” he said. “It was great that it was one storey up above the whole mad, ugly chaos of the Valley.”
Later, after McLennan also moved back to Brisbane, he and Forster formed a new lineup of the Go-Betweens which made its debut at the Zoo in December 1995.
Other notable shows at the venue included an early 1996 performance by Nick Cave with the Dirty Three (marking the beginning of Cave’s working relationship with Warren Ellis) as well as appearances by a young Ben Harper and Pixies.
The venue was notorious for its lack of air-conditioning, making for sweltering gigs in summer. This was remediated under Chidgzey’s ownership but, he said, it had broken down and there was no money for repairs. “We’re going out as we started,” he said.
Plans are under way for farewell shows, as well as an auction of venue memorabilia.
