Spirits Of The Hoey. A Love Letter To The Hopetoun Hotel
By Liz Giuffre and Gregory Ferris
Images by Bryan Cook
Melbourne Books
By The Barman
Love letters aren’t meant to be literary works; they’re words from the heart. That’s as apt as any descriptor for “Spirits Of The Hoey”, a 208-page softcover ode to a Sydney pub that closed its doors 16 years ago.
Every city should have a Hoey. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Sydney had a few of them. I was always more of an Excelsior person, but The Hoey had something that it and other pubs lacked (maybe with the eventual exception of The Sando at Newtown) and that was a clientele that regarded it as a second home.
Back then, cheap rents and plentiful run-down inner-city housing meant the Sydney underground musical scene’s nexus was a handful of postcodes spanning Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and maybe Paddington.
You could have thrown a blanket over them (preferably black - as someone sonce said, it wasn't a colour but a way of life.) The Hoey was “the local” for many musicians in the scene. It may not have been Ground Zero for the city's underground rock but you could see it from there.
The Hoey was undeniably a Sydney live music institution. From humble beginnings in the 1980s of rhythm and blues bands playing in a corner, book-ended by stacked pool tables, through a live music hiatus in ther early ‘90s when it was bought, and in its second life until it was crushed by the weight of oppressive over-regulation, it was beloved.
Hoodoo Gurus, The Clouds, Paul Kelly, Sarah Blasko, Mental as Anything, iOTA, Big Heavy Stuff, You Am I, Beasts of Bourbon all trod The Hoey's small stage and/or drank at its bar. X made it home for afternoon gigs.
Going there was a unique experience. The PA was OK, depending on where you stood; the sightlines were shitty and (you had to dodge the rooms supporting pillars or lean against them if it was packed), and getting a beer at the bar was hard work when a crowd was in. All of which didn’t matter much to many people, because the sense of community and variety of bands you could see made the place special.
The authors were part of it and their book reflects as much. They add their own narrative, but wisely let the participants tell the story. And by participants, I mean players who, more often than not, were punters, bookers, door people and publicans.
You may quibble about who was asked and who was not. It would have been impossible to please everyone, and some of ther choices probably came down to availability or willingness to talk. First person accounts from the likes of Susie Beauchamp (Box The Jesuit), Clyde Bramley, Cathy Green, Tex Perkins, Lo Carmen, John Kennedy, Ed Garland, Jon Roberts (Barbarellas), Matt Galvin, Terry Serio, Ross Johnson (Vrag, Machine Gun Fellatio) Andy Travers (Happening Thang) all get airtime.
The voices of Greedy Smith and punter Dangermouse are absent (probably because they’ve passed on) but they are commemorated in photographs.
Speaking of, the book would be a pale shadow of a Spirit without imagery. It’s provided in spades by Bryan Cook – aka “Cookie” – a punter-turned-photographer who shot countless shows at The Hoey and other Surry Hills venues. If you’re a Facebook friend of Cookie you would have seen many of them online already. Presented on the paper page, they’re even more effective. Cookie had/has a knack for composition and framing.
The sheer volume of his work being presented in the book makes it worth the price of admission. The failing of presenting so many photos displayed as galleries under the heading “You Should Have Bin There” is that so many of the subjects have gone unidentified. It was a necessary device on the part of designer Demetrius Romeo, but a lost opportunity, nevertheless.
The use of montages of ads from onetime street press bibles, The Drum Media and On The Street, is also powerful and reflects the broad base of music that The Hoey's reputation was built on. It wasn't always three chords and two guitars. It was sometimes ragged and also esoteric. How many Sydney pubs spawned their own compilation LP? If you missed the "Rock Against Work" Tuesday shows what was your excuse (it's boring, I know, but I was usually at work.)
The weakness of “I was there” books is always that everybody who might buy them simply wasn’t. Cookie’s photos overcome that hurdle and so does the fact that even if you weren’t a regular, a fuck of a lot of punters passed through its narrow doors and stuck to its carpet.
The narrative also trails away and fails to capture the outrage that accompanied The Hoey closing its doors for good. The story is all too familiar for those who remember it but it needing telling, just to tie up the loose ends for those who don't and to partly explain the retreat of live music scene in Sydney and a myriad of other places.
We won’t see its like again or that of The Hoey but at least we can read about it.
Spirits Of The Hoey on the Web
