Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley Is Australia’s first dedicated entertainment precinct

Punchy, insistent keys and breathy female vocals spill out from the makeshift parking lot stage. It’s a warm night in Australia’s third-largest city and Fortitude Valley, home to the country’s first dedicated entertainment precinct, is playing host to BigSound – a national music conference and festival that attracts the biggest industry players and up-and-coming acts in the international scene.

The VIP-heavy crowd hums, dances and cheers as it listens to the tunes of indie-pop siren Megan Washington – a successful graduate of Brisbane’s music incubator whose debut album would later peak at number three on the Australian charts. Once Washington wraps up her short, 20-minute set, the BigSound crowd pours back out onto the sidewalk. Feet patter the pavement in every direction, following different beats through The Valley’s – as Fortitude Valley is affectionately known – brightly lit, busy streets, seeking the night’s next sonic thrill.

While the annual BigSound event is the crown jewel of The Valley’s entertainment offerings, the area is far from a stereotypically lifeless suburb during the rest of the year. On any given evening, it’s a thriving hub of cocktail bars, bass-heavy clubs, live music venues and late-night pizza joints. Chinatown Mall’s row of cheap restaurants pack down tables as groups of people step out of taxis and into the streets, while a stumble down the nearby Brunswick Street Mall late on a Saturday night yields young men and women – seemingly in endless supply – kissing, smiling and swaying to the bass emanating from the nearby establishments.

Punters zig-zag up and down the Brunswick Street pedestrian mall, few noticing the two dozen brass plaques below their feet that make up Brisbane’s music walk of fame that names local artists and bands that have made it big internationally. Indeed, the star walk is a wade through a mélange of music history that sits at the center of The Valley’s downtown core – an area that houses a trove of live music venues like The Zoo, Ric’s Bar, Black Bear Lodge, The Foundry and The Brightside, among many more.

BUT IF NOT FOR THE TIMELY INTERVENTION of the city’s government, The Valley would look extremely different today. Back in the day, the inner-city suburb was the heart of shopping in Brisbane, until the growing allure of drive-in suburban shopping malls killed retail trade in the 1960s. The Valley’s multi-floor blocks, once home to big department stores, lay vacant before a new darker crowd – think operators of a ring of illegal casinos and brothels – moved in. That was until 1987, when the collapse of a famously corrupt state government that had held office for nearly two decades brought the area’s shady dealings down with it.

The empty buildings – combined with cheap rent – enticed a creative boom around the turn of the 1990s. Old structures along Brunswick Street were carved up into rehearsal spaces used by the likes of now-international music giants Powderfinger and Regurgitator. Local street press like Scene Magazine and public radio station 4ZZZ also found homes in the district, and live music venues like The Zoo and Ric’s Bar popped up as well. While the district’s daytime economy has never bounced back to what it was during its shopping heyday, such developments served to transform the former red-light district into a progressive, inner-city suburb with a thriving cultural economy that never lost its edge.

However, a new problem emerged at the turn of the millennium as urban renewal of Fortitude Valley’s old commercial buildings saw them reinvented as apartment blocks that attracted new residents to the suburb. Tenants moving into the once-industrial area became a vocal threat to the area’s buzzing music scene as they voiced concerns about noise pollution.

“Within weeks of residents moving into the former Sun [newspaper] building, I was getting complaints about noise and vibration,” the city’s former deputy mayor David Hinchliffe says. When state-wide noise regulations forced a small bar at the base of the old newspaper office block to halt live music, it launched Brisbane’s forward-thinking city planners into action. “We said, look, this is going to kill the entertainment precinct that we want to establish as part of Fortitude Valley’s character,” Hinchliffe explains. “We wanted to revive Fortitude Valley as a residential hub, but we also wanted to maintain it as an entertainment precinct.”

And so in 2006, Brisbane launched Australia’s first dedicated entertainment precinct, changing the town plan to allow higher decibel levels within 10 central blocks of Fortitude Valley, plus two small satellite areas in the built-up suburb. “The public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of us creating an environment in which music could flourish,” Hinchliffe says.

The public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of us creating an environment in which music could flourish

Thanks in a large part to these new regulations, Fortitude Valley is now home to a dozen live music venues, twice as many bars that support live shows weekly and a handful of festivals that shut down a few streets each year. The highlight of these is BigSound, which attracts around 8,000 annual participants every September. Now in its 16th year, the event has been instrumental in uncovering huge names in Australian music such as Flume, Courtney Barnett, Megan Washington, Rufus, The Temper Trap, AB Original, Gang of Youths and more.

“The Valley is the only place in the country that has this density and number of venues that you can actually stage something of this scale,” Q Music chief executive Joel Edmondson says of the organization’s signature event, which sees more than 150 music acts play across 16 venues all within a few blocks of each other. Despite being a smaller city, he says, Brisbane has more music venues than Sydney, and as many as Melbourne. “Brisbane is the only place that has this [dense] infrastructure. And that’s what will perennially protect its home here,” Edmondson says. “The Valley is the place that’s known as being the center of music in the country.”

The Valley is the place that’s known as being the center of music in the country

An event like BigSound gives smaller artists a stage in front of influential industry agents and label executives that have flown from all around the world seeking out the next big thing. For music fans, the festival is an opportunity to discover the future of Australian music. “Part of running this event is developing a public audience for new music that is about to break internationally,” Edmondson says. “While at the same time, it being an industry event, the spirit of BigSound is really about inviting Australia inside the local music industry.”

At this year’s festival, which runs from September 5 to 8, BigSound artists will be given two opportunities to perform for the first time ever – extending the festival showcase from two nights to three, plus a closing party on the last night. “It gives people a second chance to see a band they’d like to see and it also gives agents who are based elsewhere a chance to see a band that someone recommends after catching their set at the festival,” Edmondson explains.

IN BETWEEN BIGSOUND FESTIVALS, venues in Fortitude Valley keep the music playing year-round. If you mention The Zoo in this city locals will know you’re not talking about animals. Behind a painted, rose-covered door on Ann Street and up a dozen stairs, punters flash tickets on the landing before skipping up a dozen more into the belly of the beast. Famous for its blackout-inducing heat, the popular second-floor music hall cropped up in the early 1990s when rents were low and artists started colonizing the area. Over the years, it has hosted the likes of The Pixies, Silverchair, Violent Soho, The Black Keys, Ben Harper and Lorde, among others. At one end of the main room, a heaving crowd vibrates well-worn wooden floors, attention fixated on a rocking four-piece making its mark on the red-velvet-curtained stage. At the other, cues chase snooker balls around the green and beer flows steadily from the bar.

Over on Brunswick Street, Ric’s Bar – one of the city’s oldest bars – hosts local up-and-coming acts each week. The venue has the right sort of grunge, where sticky floors put up a fight every time you take a step and smokers are welcome under the stars and fairy lights in the backyard, complete with a classic Aussie clothesline.

And if you cross Brunswick Street Mall to a hole in the wall, up the stairs and into one of the city’s smallest, and certainly skinniest, venues, you’ll find Black Bear Lodge. Mustard-tasseled lampshades, tree trunks for seating and laidback mustachioed staff decorate the vintage-styled hallway of the bar, which hosts live music most nights, with DJs spinning vinyl filling the alternative hours.

Meanwhile, The Triffid – located along Stratton Street in neighboring Newstead – is the place you want to be on a lazy late Saturday afternoon. Beneath a cassette-tape mural paying homage to great Brisbane bands (such as The Saints, DZ Deathrays and The Grates) a mixed crowd sinks local craft beer and eats burgers before heading inside to dance the night away to the night’s sold-out gig.

The Triffid boasts deep ties to the local music scene. Three years ago, just a kilometer away from the band’s bronze star on the music walk of fame, former Powderfinger bassist John “JC” Collins opened the establishment – an 800-capacity venue inside a converted World War II hangar. The state-of-the-art venue, with its curved tin ceiling and open-air beer garden, quickly cemented itself as a favorite hangout for locals and touring artists alike. A meter of acoustic foam padding on top of the roof combined with precisely drilled holes and softening equip this metal shed with some of the best acoustics in the city.

TWO DECADES AGO, WHEN POWDERFINGER WAS JUST STARTING OUT, the band – along with other outfits like Custard and Regurgitator – decided to stay in Brisbane at a time when most musicians were moving south to Sydney to pursue greater opportunities. “We believed a day in the car was worth it because we loved living in Queensland,” Collins says. And the now-retired musician strongly believes that having a slew of good live music venues is key to keeping bands in the city and ensuring a healthy music scene.

“By protecting the music venues, you’re protecting the music culture, and that’s what I think needs to happen,” Collins says from his perch on a bar stool inside the venue’s beer garden. “You need The Brightside, you need The Zoo, you need The Triffid, you need Max Watt’s,” he says, running through a list of venues that play an integral role in the city’s lively music scene.

By protecting the music venues, you’re protecting the music culture, and that’s what I think needs to happen

As patrons make their way out of The Triffid following a night of crisp sound and raucous fun, they do so amid a backdrop of cranes looming over Brisbane’s skyline. Coupled with the recent introduction of mandatory ID scanners in the city’s party precincts, gentrification’s slow march seems likely to pose a threat to Brisbane’s cultural scene once more.

But there is good news, though. Perhaps in anticipation of future backlash, the boundaries of The Valley’s entertainment precinct’s satellite zone will soon be extended by one street to protect venues like The Triffid from inevitable future noise complaints. “Ultimately, if you can protect the places that create the scene, the scene will endure and it will become stronger,” Collins says. “The people of Queensland will benefit from having stronger acts that don’t go overseas, don’t go down south – because the most important thing of having a music scene is keeping them here. If everyone disappears, then you’ve lost them.”