St Kilda returns to its rock ‘n’ roll roots this week as two rarely-seen documentaries screen at The Astor Cinema as part of this year’s St Kilda Film Festival.
St Kilda Rocks pairs Punkline, which features footage of the long-gone Crystal Ballroom, and Last Drinks, a rough and ready fly-on-the-wall documentary capturing the last days of the Prince of Wales Hotel before the infamous sticky carpet was removed.
We’ve seen footage of many of the bands that played the suburb’s iconic venues over the years, but these two films offer a different perspective: the punters.
Filmmaker Tony Stevens was working as a drama editor at the ABC in 1980, with a couple of documentaries under his belt already, when he and a friend, Sue Davis, realised the crowds they were seeing at gigs were sometimes more interesting than the bands themselves. “Sue worked at a venue called Macy’s in South Yarra, and she knew everyone. We had this idea that … aren’t audiences amazing? It was 1980 and everyone just looked fabulous,” Stevens said ahead of Friday’s double bill.
“We loved the fashion, the haircuts, the attitude. Sue had the contacts and I knew how to shoot 16-millimetre film, so I said ‘let’s band together’.”
The pair made a deal with the Crystal Ballroom’s management to film audience members. “The Crystal Ballroom seemed to be the big attractor of this new look that was happening. We called it punk; everybody called it punk even though it was 1980, so it was officially post-punk,” Stevens said. “Now we look back on it and we say, of course, that was post-punk or New Wave. But you know, during the Renaissance, no one knew it was a renaissance.”
With a minimalist soundtrack by local experimental outfit Equal Local, and field recordings Stevens had of bird calls and police sirens, Punkline – named as a reference to 1979 Australian war photography documentary Front Line – is less than five minutes long, but captures an under-recorded aspect of the music scene at that time. Filmed across “four or five” gigs at the Crystal Ballroom, including an early show by The Cure and local bands The Models and La Femme, Punkline is a fascinating snapshot of the era – even if some of the fashion looks contemporary.
“It’s almost got a timeless look,” said Stevens, who went on to have a successful career directing music videos and documentaries. “But everyone’s smoking indoors. And cash registers! We’re not using cards. Someone noted recently that there are no people of colour in the audiences. So things have changed, but in other ways they haven’t.”
Even if you weren’t in the crowd yourself, some of the footage might look familiar – after the film surfaced on YouTube, Stevens licensed some of the footage to other filmmakers, and it appears in the Birthday Party doco Mutiny In Heaven and more recently in the Mental As Anything film Live It Up.
Kate Morrow and her friend Louise Avery came to the St Kilda scene a little later, but their 1996 film Last Drinks is also a time capsule of the suburb’s pre-gentrification culture. They’d been living on the Esplanade and regulars at The Prince for a couple of years when they heard about plans for the venue’s renovation. Armed with virtually no budget and a camera, they spent a year recording the pub – the staff, the musicians and the punters, who ranged from drag queens performing at the Prince’s legendary Pokey’s night, to punters there for gigs and locals young and old who spent much of their weeks holding up the bar.
“We wanted to capture it because we hadn’t experienced anything like it,” Morrow said. “At the time there was rock-and-roll wrestling, the gay bar, drag shows, the old … barflies. The quality is poor because we had no budget and we didn’t have the equipment, but we just wanted to capture this moment.”
Alongside interviews with musicians who regularly played The Prince – among them The Cosmic Psychos, Fred Negro, frontman of many St Kilda bands, Kim Salmon, Kerri Simpson and Chris Wilson – the film features bar staff, late local queer icon Jan Hillier, who ran the legendary Pokey’s, and many of the regulars.
“There was a big elderly community in St Kilda at the time, when there were lots of rooming houses and affordable housing,” Morrow said, “but it looked after its community. Whether they were drug addicted or marginalised for whatever reason, it felt like quite an open-hearted, warm community. If you lived there, you were accepted straight away.”
Last Drinks screened twice at the (now departed) George Cinema and was a hit among the community, most of whom, it seemed, featured in the film. But Friday marks the first time in 30 years it’s been shown. Tickets for the double bill are selling fast; Morrow has had many requests over the years from people wanting to see the film again.
The legendary pub was, she said, a microcosm of the suburb’s different groups co-existing together. “To us, the Prince of Wales really epitomised this whole strange ecosystem of St Kilda, which just isn’t there any more.”
Punkline and Last Drinks screen together at St Kilda Rocks, at The Astor Cinema, St Kilda, on Friday, June 5, as part of St Kilda Film Festival. stkildafilmfestival.com.au
