It's been 230 years since Scottish poet Robert Burns first wrote about the best-laid schemes of mice and men and their tendency to go completely tits up, but it's a caution that remains as relevant as ever in 2015, as the organisers of Brisbane's new venue and creative hub, The Foundry, found out following their all-too-brief emergence onto the city's scene a few months ago.
The venue may be just about ready to return to the Valley with a relaunch party featuring Dune Rats, Palms, Orphans Orphans and Major Leagues on 20 August, but the wound cut deeply at the time.
"Obviously, it was pretty stressful and pretty upsetting, because we'd all just put so much into it, and we were all so fuckin' excited about it," The Foundry booker Pat Balfe tells The Music of the team's discovery that the venue's building required further structural work before they could stay operational. "Like, the first couple of nights were sweet; the industry night was a real good one to do, and then Velociraptor, like, even though the floors were fuckin' shaking and going crazy and we had to kind of cancel it, they still got to play most of their set and everyone had a fuckin' sick time."
"I'm really hoping to support as much local music as we can through record sales and merch sales."
Despite the heartbreak of having to shut things down, however, Balfe is philosophical about the situation, and believes the obstacle was something of a blessing in disguise.
"I also think, like, the time that we've had in between March and now has really given us a chance to solidify our systems and all our backend stuff, and really, really come back into it 100% perfect, because we had a pretty short turnaround time between January and March to get that stuff together," he says. "So it's given us some perspective and given us an opportunity just to really nut everything out and figure out what we want to do and how we want to do it."
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Among the latter developments to have come out of The Foundry's forced hiatus is, arguably, one of its greatest new strengths — the addition of the ground-floor Foundry Records store/cafe/hangout/venue, to be managed by Music Industry Inside Out founder and community mainstay Martine Cotton, with a little launch assistance from ex-Skinny's head honcho Simon Homer — a prospect about which Cotton is delighted.
"I think it's going to be an incredibly exciting project, because it's going to become a part of that big community that The Foundry is building, and I think The Valley has been lacking a good central spot to go to in the daytime," she says. "It's just going to create a really beautiful scene, I think."
"I'm really hoping to support as much local music as we can through record sales and merch sales ... and we're gonna be opening till 7pm, which means people can come through after work or on their way to gigs and browse through the records and maybe have a beer before they set off for their adventures a bit later on."
That's presuming, of course, they even want to leave in the first place — after all, as Cotton explains, "There's a stage, and we're gonna have a proper PA set up, so we're going to feature a lot of regular in-stores — live performances and signings — so that's going to be a big part of what we do."
