Anthonie Tonnon visits New Zealand’s most talked about places to see music, from big city institutions to port town oddities and near-mythical stages in the bush.
Bob Log III performing in the early days of The Mighty Mighty. Photo: Mighty Mighty
“I’d heard the legend of Mighty Mighty and that it was the greatest venue in the country,” musician and promoter Matthew Crawley says. “When my band The Cosbys wanted to play Wellington we signed up to play there and found it was pretty much our spiritual home.”
After seven and a half years of wild nights, Mighty Mighty is closing its doors this Saturday. It’s not the only Wellington venue to be shutting up shop either. Puppies is winding up next month. Meanwhile, San Francisco Bath House has been closed for renovations after Wellington City Council told the venue it had only half the capacity had previously believed.
Mighty Mighty will be remembered for exuberant decorations, hard partying staff, and a communication between audience and performer that was hard to match.
The Berlin-influenced, sensory overload decoration masked a meticulously designed dual environment with a social bar and a glitzy stage with a DIY sound system, and made the bar phenomenally popular with both music goers and yo-pros after work.
“We were very much conscious of not wanting to be a venue - a place where the tide came in and out with the bands, but a place that was about a community that bands or entertainers would come and be a part of,” co-owner Sam Chapman says.
It was an approach that depressed some musicians, but it was also, especially in the late 2000s, very successful, and the generous guarantee (up to $800 on Friday and Saturday nights) provided a shot in the arm to bands not only in Wellington, but from either end of the country. Getting a weekend show at The Mighty Mighty show made a full national tour financially possible for a South Island band.
Crawley says Mighty Mighty opened up communication between the Wellington and Auckland scenes. “What you started to see was an Auckland band going down, borrowing gear off their support act in Wellington, and having a goodwill arrangement that when that band came to Auckland to headline a show, they’d support them or at least lend them their gear.”
However, Mighty Mighty’s booking manager Dylan Herkes said the guarantee made them vulnerable to exploitation - some bands wouldn’t bother to promote their show, relying on the famous in-built crowd. As the venue aged that crowd thinned out, and it arrived later.
The Eversons' Mark Turner and Chris Young recalled the venue being empty at a show until just before midnight, as patrons waited until the venue dropped its $5 charge for the evening.
The bar finally responded by changing the deal - trying more traditional band takes the door arrangements on weekends. Herkes says the bar was "generous to a fault, in a way" with it's guarantee "but we held on to it because we believed in it.”
Bar manager Sally Thompson says she’s tired of interviews in which she’s expected to be negative. “Change isn’t bad, and we don’t want it to be sad, we want to be going out on a crazy rocket ride of awesomeness”.
Listen to Anthonie Tonnon's radio documentary on Mighty Mighty here:
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