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Music

A Look Back At Ballarat's Bridge Mall Inn

The 'Bridgey' was the city’s oddball beacon of gig-going and bonding throughout the 1990s’ alt-rock boom.

Images: Tim Bignell

Being a music fan in Ballarat right now, there are more options than ever for gigs – and of course Melbourne is just over 100 km away.

But as the regional centre (and Victoria’s third most populated city) weathers the usual waves of local bands starting, succeeding, leaving or breaking up, one constant is the spectre of the Bridge Mall Inn, an enduring emblem of Ballarat’s devotion to live music.

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Shuttered in 2003, “The Bridgey” (also affectionately called “The Rat”) was the city’s oddball beacon of gig-going and bonding throughout the 1990s’ alt-rock boom, as well as for some years before and after. Housed in a historic building that almost dates back to Ballarat’s gold-rush heyday, it had been a pub since the 1850s. But in the second half of the 1980s, it crystallised as a destination for misfits of all stripes. And though other venues housed great bands during the same time, including the now-defunct Civic Hall and the local unis, the Bridgey was different.

Music publicist Lou Ridsdale recalls it as “dark and dingy but full of life … It felt dangerous to be there but also really welcoming.” She went to the pub in secret until her parents found out, but her mum said she could keep going as long as she stayed safe and didn’t tell her dad. “I instantly felt at home,” she says. “It provided the sense of belonging I never got at any local sports club [or] church.”

Still, the pub’s reputation preceded it, and Ridsdale’s father wasn’t the only local who didn’t approve. “Nefarious rumours about the bar and its shady characters followed me in but were soon forgotten,” says illustrator Bren Luke. Web designer Marc Oswin, who fronts Mark With the Sea and co-runs Ballarat indie label Heart of the Rat, recalls similar apprehensions: “There was always a stigma attached to the Bridge Mall Inn that made me a bit reluctant to go there.” And after he finally went? “I knew this was a community I wanted to belong to.”

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“Ballarat was an ultra-conservative town in the late ’80s,” reminds Ridsdale. “Full of footy heads, subservient women, fervent churchgoers and people who never coloured outside of the lines.” The Bridgey provided a much-needed meeting place for what she calls “a minority of fringe dwellers: the goths, the sensitive types, the artists, the Theatresports fans, the punks, the poets, the music buffs.”

The ground level housed the “dingy” bar and band room, while the second level had a lounge and DJ space dubbed ‘The Murder Room’, due to the reported 1930 shooting of a barmaid there. The third level was accommodation, often utilised by out-of-town bands passing through on their way to Melbourne or Adelaide.

Meanwhile, the Bridgey was nurturing a local scene that yielded a disparate range of exports, from grind-metal legends Damaged to radio-friendly pop band The Mavis’s to profound indie rockers The Dead Salesmen. “There were punks, hippies, metal heads, acoustic lovers, poets, actors and artists,” recalls Salesmen frontman Justin ‘Hap’ Hayward. Some of the era’s bands that still get cited repeatedly are The Fat Thing, The Five O’Clock Shadows, the Shooting Czars and Sheep Weather Alert. Sound engineer Rex Hardware started recording and archiving sets from the venue in the late 1980s, when the jam-friendly series Banana Arcade began to spawn early incarnations of the Salesmen and Mavis’s.

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“The Mavis’s kicked the whole thing off for my generation,” says Hayward, also citing The Boxing Tostados and art-school weirdos The Fat Thing. “Then new ways of playing music were happening through Immaculata and Uncle Phester. Epicure really went national but were just humble all the way through. God, there was Damaged, Spontaneous Human Combustion and War. Then the next wave of bands kept that scene together when it could have been over a lot earlier.” He also recalls killer sets by visiting acts like The Wild Pumpkins at Midnight, The Devil’s Cabaret, Mighty Servant and Spencer P Jones.

Later on, classic Australian bands like Something For Kate, Augie March and Jebediah would all play The Bridgey.

Bren Luke remembers a hypnotic gig by US slide guitarist Kenny Brown, famous for playing with blues icon R.L. Burnside. But beyond just being a music venue, says Ridsdale, “It was our safe haven – a place to congregate to celebrate art and music and life, to embrace weirdness and all the things in between which make society’s fabric shine even brighter.”

According to web designer Aaron Matthews, who plays in Swhat and Mark With the Sea and co-runs Heart of the Rat, the pub was a vital centre of gravity. “When you were looking for a rental house,” he says, “it was an absolute priority that it was within walking distance to the pub, as kick-ons were essential. On big nights, when closing time was near, you’d often hear ‘kick-on at Young Street’ or ‘kick-on at Peel Street’ – whoever was willing to have half the pub rock up at their doorstep.”

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Hayward recalls a string of patient publicans over the years: “They put up with a lot and looked after some of the most marginal people in Ballarat: young drunk musos!” But for at least one generation, the pub’s golden age was when Patrick O’Driscoll was booker and bar manager. ‘Paddy O’, who later opened the beloved music venue Karova Lounge and ran the welcoming pub The Mallow, died in 2011 at age 39. O’Driscoll had a great many roles, including “bar manager, best friend, best yarn spinner, sage and so many other things,” says Hayward.

“He was larger than life,” says Oswin, “and the weird and wonderful members of society were drawn to him. He was pivotal in building Ballarat’s reputation as a must-stop destination.” Interviewed for the 2011 Ballarat music-scene doco A Pygmy Tribe, produced by Epicure drummer Dom Santamaria, O’Driscoll reflected on the mindset of the city’s punters: “People [here] want to hear something different … they’re probably not as concerned about tight playing as good songs and a certain energy.”

In the same doco, various musos describe how live music helps so much in a regional town that gets unbearably cold in winter. Terry Byrne from The Five O’Clock Shadows praises the communal vibe of gig-going, with strangers connecting in a way that says, “Hey, at least we’re not alone in our loneliness.”

Since the pub closed in early 2003, the building has housed a youth clothing shop (now closed itself) and a surf and ski shop – which, as Ridsdale puts it, is “odd for a town with neither surf nor snow.”

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Today there are many Ballarat venues honouring the Bridgey’s legacy, including Karova Lounge, Babushka Bar, The Eastern, Main Bar and Sutton’s House of Music. Each strives to foster some of what the Bridge Mall Inn did in terms of passionate fandom and friendships.

“The people I met [there] are still my best friends today,” says Oswin. Luke echoes that: “Most of my lifelong friendships found their origin there. [Those] days get more and more precious to me over time. It’s very difficult to replicate the feeling of a place like that.” And while Hayward still plays semi-regularly with The Dead Salesmen, he looks at old Bridge Mall Inn gig guides now and realises just how lucky they all were: “There would be two or three amazing bands on from Wednesday night to Saturday. I took it for granted.”

Doug Wallen is music editor of 'The Big Issue' and a freelance journalist based in Ballarat. Follow him on Twitter - wallendoug.