After a year or so of driving my production all around NSW, I started doing a few shows at Burgundy’s Night Club in the City of Sydney RSL. The venue had a great inhouse PA, Soundcraft 24 channel desk and some kick-arse JBL speakers. Bands had to bring in an operator who also supplied mics, stands, leads etc. To cut a long story short, I was soon being booked by most bands who did the room on the recommendation of the club’s Entertainment Manager. He was a wonderful old school guy who loved live music and we hit it off.
I first worked at the venue with a reggae band called Calabash who had adopted me as their sound-guy as I was cheap and knew what a reggae band should sound like. We did a run of four Saturdays in a row at Burgundy’s and each week the crowds got bigger. By the fourth week, I was walking up George Street towards the show after having dinner in Chinatown and I wondered why there was a 100-metre queue outside my gig. It then dawned on me these were punters waiting to get into our show.
The gig was a riot, punters dancing on tables, 650 tickets sold for a venue licensed to hold 250. Of course, this is the night the licensing police turn up! Anyway, the Entertainment Manager somehow convinces the police that there are only 250 people in the room, the other 400 are on the other levels of the venue!
Put simply, this was the gig that changed my life. Eventually, the venue asked me to look after every gig there which was one to three shows a week. In the meantime, The PA People hired me as an audio designer, so I sold off most of my redundant equipment and spent my days designing sound systems and my nights operating sound systems. We picked up another inhouse venue and the pattern emerged in my life that would last almost 20 years – Monday to Friday days gig designing, 2-5 nights a week mixing.
Working for The PA People was an amazing learning experience and although I left just after the Sydney 2000 Olympics, I still work as a casual for them 20 years later and are still mates with people I worked with back in 2000. I suppose this is good advice to the younger techs out there, if possible, try to leave employers on good terms!
Anyway, as Burgundy’s Night Club was getting too popular, changes had to be made. We were frequently way over our maximum punter limit and there was a rise in violent incidents, some of which unfortunately involved me! Drunk punters jumping on stage, one loony threatening me with death, another causing a brawl that involved the band’s stage roadie and me when a drunk punter would not get out the way when loading out. As a result, it was decided by venue management to change the type of bands from party style acts to more funk, soul and Afro bands. This had the desired result and crowd numbers went down immediately starting a phase of my life where I started to work with some of the best musos in Sydney. Some of these bands were Craig Calhoun and The Brothers of Oz, Jackie Orszacky, Doug Williams & The Black Mass and Jeff Duff & The Prophets. It was by working with these musos I started to realise I needed to lift my mixing skills as these players where on another level above what I was used to! Whilst the younger punters looked at the 2 x 45 minute sets the band played each night as the time to leave the dance floor, a lot soon realized some of the bands were superb and hopefully gained a better appreciation of brilliant live music.
Over the few years, I worked at Burgundy’s, the bar and restaurant staff, security and myself and the DJ all became good friends and sometimes we would go out for drinks when our shifts finished at 2am. There was a Spanish restaurant/nightclub just near us so about 20 of us went there one night. The venue’s security knew us and let us in for free, so we settled in for a few drinks and some fun. Unfortunately, the venue’s owner decided to hit one of our staff members, so our security threw him out of his own club! The venue’s security was powerless as they were hopelessly outnumbered, plus they didn’t like the guy anyway!
The next major event in my career happened when Burgundy’s decided that they did not want live bands anymore; fortunately, some of the band leaders went out of their way to get me other gigs. Jeff Duff booked me for every show he could, Craig Calhoun got me a few shows at Sydney’s legendary venue The Basement, and this started another great stage in my life!
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