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July 21, 2007
Let's make the world's stupidest stand and truly mean it.
So we saved the Hydey. Possibly. At any rate, the story got a whole lot more interesting.
A couple of days after my last post, I was hosting a fill-in shift on RTRfm's Out to Lunch (hipster new-music show for those not local) and decided to say a little something about the situation and ask for calls. Being used to the phone only ringing when giveaways are on offer, i was surprised to receive about 30 calls over the next hour. What surprised me more, though, was the sentiments of those callers, and how they swayed and shifted over the course of time as I relayed and poked and prodded and provoked responses, having a strange kind of debate where all other participants were only hearing my reflections and refractions.
The first group were the passionate, mad-as-hell impotent ragers. It's not good enough, and we have to take on the corporate whores. That sort of thing. "Do you think you can actually win like that?" I asked them. They believed with enough noise, maybe they could.
Then there were those advocating a long and hard road of government advocacy -- letters to ministers and councillors and investigations into noise-abatement policy. "Great," I said, "but what difference is that going to make to Woolworth's?". If we made life hard enough for them, they suggested, blocking their planning applications and not allowing them to do anything with the Hydey but let it fester, then maybe they'd sell up and move on.
The scene politics reared up from some callers, personal grudges and general anger translating to "fuck 'em and let 'em burn in hell for all I care, I hope they bankrupt, it was better before, and the world was at peace". Valid points, all.
Then there were those who agreed with me. That perhaps it was better to just move on, to believe in the strength of the music scene to outplay, outlast and outwit. That this could be a good thing -- a shit pub is a shit pub, and we'll find another. Some suggested that if bands didn't have the Hydey to take their first few tentative steps in, perhaps they'd be forced to try a little harder at house parties and other venues, and get a little more creative, and in the long run, that might just be a good thing.
Then, finally, there were those who pointed out that there are no other venues like this one in Perth, with both a frontroom of a size that's perfect for local gigs, acoustic or electric, where it never seems empty if there's 2 or 10 or 50 punters, and a backroom that can hold the Perth Jazz Society's grand piano yet is still of the perfect size to host touring artists that will attract a few hundred -- the Will Oldhams, Okkervil Rivers and Laura Veirs of the world. It's just a pub, sure, but if we cared about Perth music, it was one worth fighting for. Shucks.
And then, as I left the studio, wondering whether or not there was any point to any of that conversation at all, the general manager of ALH (the Woolworths-owned company that owns the Hydey) was ringing our talks producer, and the head of WAM was ringing our music producer, letting them both know simultaneously that "due to public pressure": the decision had been reversed and live music would continue.
The interesting part of this story is not that it was a great victory for people power, even as unexpected and easy as it was, but that a corporation was tripped up by its own tactics. As I said previously, Woolworths had every right to do whatever they wanted with the Hydey -- business is business (as my father may have annoyingly said during one of my heated teenage arguments with him). The one thing they did not have a right to do, and did not need to do, was lie to us.
Had they simply told the truth, that they were ending amplified music because they wanted to renovate the pub and turn a profit from it to realise shareholder benefit, they would have faced a lot of anger, but they would have been able to hold out, and they would have done what they planned to do. By framing things in a half-baked lie about noise complaints that did not hold up to the slightest of scrutiny, they were met with a wall of noise, from government, the industry, punters and people from all walks of life, and they left themselves in a position where they could not stand their ground.
When business-as-usual dictates that deception is the most effective method of getting things done, as it does in the big bad world of the high-rises and Blackberries, this tactic made sense. It's Marketing 101 - you'll never get anywhere by telling people the truth. But Marketing 101 also teaches you that consumers are passive, consumers and only that. I'd like to think that maybe somewhere in this messy tale, somebody learned a valuable lesson about that. I doubt it, but I can still like to think it.
So now the Hydey has been saved, at least for the short term. And it hasn't been saved to prove its owners wrong by going on to become a constantly packed venue full of world class bands and punters consuming expensive beer. We've saved the shithole we love, and it gets to stay that shithole, with everything that we love about it intact: creepy dancing drunks, terrible acoustics, no stage, a haze of smoke still lingering a year after the smoking ban. We don't even have to go there to appreciate it -- if it were anything less than empty, well, I don't think this would be a victory, do you?
Technorati Tags: hyde park, perth music, woolworths
Posted by patrick at July 21, 2007 11:09 AM
