EXCLUSIVE: Your First Look Inside Brisbane's Newest Live Music Venue

This week an exciting new multi-purpose music venue opens in the very heart of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley entertainment precinct, promising to be much more than its core goal of becoming a top-notch live music venue.

The Music was recently granted the opportunity of a walkthrough of The Foundry’s new digs, the décor already proving an aesthetically pleasing mixture of urban decay and designer chic.

More than a mere venue, The Foundry is hoping to become a creative hub for all things music-related, fully utilisng the massive two-level complex that they’ve taken over (adjoining the Elephant Hotel on Wickham St). With its motto of “Built For Music. Built By Musicians”, The Foundry has been established by a crew of musos and industry folk, with the single aim of augmenting the existing Brisbane infrastructure to take the city’s already vibrant music scene to a whole new level.

"We don’t want to set any limitations on what we can do."

“We don’t really want to step on anyone’s toes,” explains The Foundry’s venue manager Corey Herekiuha (himself an ongoing veteran of rock bands such as Velociraptor and Tiny Migrants). “We want to be part of a collective of venues in the Valley, but to steer us in a different direction we have the accommodation upstairs for bands, which is going to be included in the venue hire which is itself quite cheap and reasonable for the area. Plus there’s a massive green room – it’s big enough that we could pretty much fit another show in there. We want it to be a ‘one stop shop’ experience, so bands can fly in and get a train or cab here and we’ve got backline, a sound guy and lighting guy provided, accommodation provided, the green room with booze and then a late check-out – being a muso as well, one thing I hate on tour is having to get up at 10am after a late night and going to bed at 6am, so we’re going to do a midday or 1am checkout. The location is central, it’s easy to get in and out and there’s a loading zone downstairs so if they do bring extra gear they can load in easily.”

But it’s not all about making life easy for bands, there’s an emphasis on ensuring that punters have the best time possible as well.

“Access to the room is important – we wanted to make it was easy as possible for people to get in here and have a good time and see some bands,” Herekiuha continues. “We decided to cap the room at 300 tickets – we think that’s a good number, with enough people to fill the room and have a good time and enjoy themselves – and when the bands finish at say midnight, we’re going to stay open and have local DJs like James Wright and Jeremy Neale as residents. We just want people to be able to chill out – we have arcade machines, pool tables and a huge smoking deck; we just want people to have a good time and stay here as long as they want. If we wanted to we could fit 600 people on this whole floor, but we want to keep it comfortable to see the band, that’s the priority.”

But, importantly, The Foundry also plans to become a creative hub for the SEQ music scene, with the converted rooms upstairs from the band room having already been taken by a diverse array of industry types.

“We’re in the process of tidying up the rooms – it used to be an old backpackers and we’re converting those rooms into office spaces,” Herekiuha tells. “We’re trying to help the industry – people who have been using their bedroom as an office to book shows or manage bands or whatever can now get an affordable office in the Valley and have meetings in the board rooms upstairs, or mingle with the bands and punters playing downstairs. We wanted to create an industry hub with a diverse array of people – we’ve got a publicist, a training room for 4ZZZ, a record label, a zine, graphic designers, photographers even an actual artist. It’s going to be very creative and we hope that flows downstairs. We want it to be a vibrant place that complements rather than supersedes what Brisbane already has to offer – we’re all friends and Brisbane is such a small town, so we just want to add to the scene.”

And from a purely musical perspective the main thing that they want The Foundry to be is inclusive.

“We don’t want to focus on certain genres – if anyone wants to play here we want to be able to let them,” Herekiuha smiles. “We want to, for example, have some solo artists play on a Thursday and have nice chilled out time, then the next night have a raging punk band so it’s full on, and then on the Saturday have an indie band or a dance act – it’s important for us to appeal to everyone that’s into music. Even producers/DJs would be great to get onboard to play here – we don’t want to set any limitations on what we can do. We just want to make the room the best it can be, and appeal to both the punters and the artists who might want to play here. We just want this to be a fun environment (within reason) for people to work at as well as for people to come and watch good music. We want it to be a cool place to hang out, and no matter who’s playing you can have a good time.”

All pics by Markus Ravik.

The Foundry launches this Friday, 6 Mar — head to theGuide and The Music App for more details.