by History collides with banal everyday life in ways that can never be forgotten in Melbourne. Riding an express train from Flinders Street Station, commuters rarely think that a 109-year-old ballroom is a few floors above them. A block away, lunchtime scavengers might find themselves waiting for their six-inch cookies and a cookie at Subway for the magnificent Nicholas building.
Adjacent to both is Forum Melbourne, a live music venue that could inspire tourists and tasteful gig hogs alike. It elevates the experience with a stop at the cloakroom (upstairs, past the lampposts and nude sculptures that border the mezzanine) or a mid-show trip down to the cavernous, carpeted, subterranean bathrooms. When it came to highlighting the city’s most popular live music venue, the Forum was the first and only choice.
Every Melburnian has a special relationship with the Forum. Mine started when I could barely orient myself around the city, let alone consider myself a local. It was where I showed up – keen, single and fresh 18 – the moment the doors opened for a comedy festival gig, leaving me to take a few quiet hours in the twinkling sky, artificial and side carved sculptures the stage. It was where I saw one of my last gigs before the lockout (Hot Chip supported by Harvey Sutherland) and the first place when we thought it was over (Cable Ties, Little Ugly Girls and Mod Con). Three times last year I walked over the mosaic tiles at the entrance and out through the emerging double doors and on to Flinders Street, confirming the gig I had just seen in my top five of all time (Fontaines DC, Carly Rae Jepsen and Caroline Polachek, thanks for asking).
When Harry Styles, fresh from his years in One Direction, embarked on his first solo world tour, he performed a series of “underplays” – deliberately chosen theatrics with a personal flair (for him) that could he sold out easily and he would sell out easily. telegraph the kind of artist he was going to be himself. In Melbourne, that meant just one place.
“The size and style of the venue means you get the perfect amount of atmosphere but still feels intimate,” says Emily Wright, who is marketing director at Marriner Group, which owns and operates theaters across Melbourne, including the Forum. . Her own memories at the venue stretch back 20 years to when Jet played a hometown headline show; Other highlights include the record-breaking Gang of Youths, eight sold-out shows in 2018, and Christine and the Queens in 2020 (“a standout for me”).
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Emily York, the director of the Penny Drop boutique tour promoter, which brought Christine and the Queens to Australia for that series of shows, is in the process of predicting how many tickets an artist can sell and choosing the right venues accordingly. But numbers are not the only deciding factor.
“The fact that he is an artist could sometimes doing big venues isn’t the reason to do it,” she says, describing the kind of alchemy that comes from seeing an artist and a venue click together like puzzle pieces. “Making a Forum” means more than playing to 2,000 people, she says: “It’s definitely a statement venue.”
The Forum was designed to do just that: make a statement. Leave a lasting impression. Draw your gaze up to the sky.
Where the interior is an earthly delight with Greco-Roman columns and a beautiful flower, classical architecture, outside all crumbling stone, decorative cartouche panels, neo-Gothic gargoyles and crenellated parapets, standing strong as if in front of an enemy to ones. Its impressive bell tower is topped by a family of spirea and an onion dome, in patinated verdigris like that on the Statue of Liberty.
It is the ongoing responsibility of the Marriner Group to maintain these heritage protected features. After a meticulous, multimillion dollar interior renovation in 2017, attention has turned to the exterior. According to a condition assessment prepared last year, waterproofing and repair work on the bell tower and surrounding balconies is “urgent” if they are to be preserved. (The distressed paint, on the other hand, “adds to the overall aesthetic”; rockhounds don’t want their landmarks too shiny.)
It was designed in the 1920s by architect John Eberson, who earned the nickname “Opera House John” as a nod to the 500 atmospheric theaters he designed around the world in his lifetime (including Sydney’s State Theatre). The Forum was also known as the State Theater when it opened its doors in 1929, and was associated with the trademark of Eberson, a former set designer and scenic painter.
The flyer for the theatre’s opening night had already announced that it was a “national institution” and invited visitors to enjoy “acres of seats in the garden of dreams”, where they would be transported on a magic carpet to a new world, where , magical skies bathed in constellations, a prestigious jeweled palace is before our eyes.” In a time before international travel was common, Eberson’s work mimicked the feeling of sitting under a clear night sky in a European courtyard, surrounded by history.
The experience of visitors was much less; would feature newsreels, silent features and short stories to an audience of over 3,300 people, along with the largest organ in the world outside the US (now in Moorabbin Town Hall).
Finally, the single-screen theater split into two and the programs were converted to films. Greater Union took over the place in 1981 and renamed its new cinema venue the Forum, but due to the demand for multiplexes the theater closed four years later. A Pentecostal church moved in for the next ten years. It was not until 1996 that David Marriner bought and began renovating the Forum, ten years after the renovation of the Princess Theatre, the same year he took over the Comedy Theater and celebrated the re-opening of the Regent Theater on Collins Street.
For Sally Mather, the Forum’s program director, the 500-capacity upstairs space (once a dressing room for the theater) is full of potential for bands that wouldn’t be ready for the main room – yet.
“We’re always trying to work on how we can give better opportunities to local and emerging artists,” says Mather. Promoters and headliners could be rewarded for booking local support acts, she says, or considering taking the show upstairs: “It’s a very special space to see people operating. We have just upgraded so we can use the space better and offer more options for smaller acts”
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Last year, after entering the upstairs theater for a screening at the Melbourne international film festival, I was lucky enough to see US pop artist Ethel Cain perform one of her two sold-out shows in the an intimate, velvet-trimmed room.
York, who brought Cain to Melbourne for the Rising festival, says the venue’s “special, majestic, stately” energy was the perfect backdrop for the artist, who draws heavily from Southern Gothic and Christian imagery. “She’s another performer of life, and that space came with the spiritual gravity of Ethel Cain’s lived experiences,” she says.
This was just one of the many international shows that made 2023 the Forum’s busiest year yet. Despite this, Mather says the effects of Covid-19 will continue to be felt in the live events industry, especially for emerging acts.
“I’m very concerned about the next generation of artists developing,” she says, noting that higher operating costs for each show mean headliners are rarely able to offer more than one in instead of having two or three support slots. “In five years, our next big headliners won’t be there if we don’t support that stuff in the community at every stage of an artist’s career.”
Cable Ties is a testament to that. The Melbourne punk trio got their first glimpse of becoming a “big chamber band”, says bassist Nick Brown, when they were chosen to open for the Kills at the Forum in 2016. It was barely a year ago , the drummer Shauna. Originally formed by Boyle and guitarist and singer Jenny McKechnie. “We were kind of the first band at the Tote back then,” says Brown. “When you’re a band that plays small punk shows in small venues, you have small ideas in your mind about what you are.”
But a loud, cheerful team that “hit the back wall” of the Forum – where they connected with a crowd of people who weren’t (just) friends – changed Brown’s perception of their abilities. Years later, they would headline there.
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“That was a big eye-opener for me, when I was thinking, ‘Oh maybe we’re not this little post-punk band’,” he says of that first show at the Forum. “Maybe there’s something bigger going on here. You’re kind of back to yourself.”
