In 2003, The Rolling Stones decided to add a different type of show to their Australian tour dates. The band had been playing stadiums across the country – two dates at the Sydney SuperDome, three dates at the Rod Laver Arena and two dates at the Brisbane Entertainment Center – but wanted to add an intimate gig. The booking agents knew the exact location: the Enmore Theatre.
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Situated in the middle of a then dilapidated main street in Sydney’s inner west, still sporting a 1930s art deco façade and with a maximum capacity of just 2,500, the venue was a change of pace for a band that played to larger crowds. tens of thousands. During the space tour, the Stones were wowed: “They loved heritage buildings,” says Greg Khoury, a longtime employee of Century Venues, the company that handles the theater’s bookings, and locked in the gig. It was going to be a legendary night. .
“We all know the story of the thousands of people queuing on Enmore Road who didn’t have tickets but just wanted to hear as much as they could,” says festival usher Nick Stabback. He joined Enmore in the 2000s and currently serves as a booking executive at Century Venues.
Police had to close Enmore Road and escort the band to the concert. In the interest of good sport, staff opened the venue’s central doors so the crowds outside could better hear the show. Those living in the flats above the shops on the other side of the road had the opportunity to go up to the awnings and grab a seat for the hottest show in the city. “Some people can look through these doors from a certain vantage point and see part of the scene,” Khoury says.
The Stones is just one of Enmore Theatre’s many notable shows. For some, this may be where Bob Dylan played a similarly unbelievable show in 2018. Some will remember it as the place where newly elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese drank a beer at a concert to wild applause. A Youth Gang show or the venue where Four Tet sets up DJ decks in the middle of the hall and charges punters just $20 to come dancing. Perhaps you were there the night Ween fans left the venue completely beer-free in 2008, or you have fond teenage memories of camping out on Enmore Road to buy tickets at the box office in the pre-internet age. Maybe you wandered around the back of the venue to give them the Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur friendship bracelets you made after a Hole show in the 1990s.
Of course, it’s not just what happens inside the walls that makes Enmore a beloved Sydney haunt, it’s also the place itself.
“There’s a certain gravitas to it,” says David James Young, a dedicated concert-goer who is currently in the formal process of verifying his Guinness World Record submission for most concerts he’s attended in a year. He saw 365 concerts in 2023 and estimates he has attended 150 to 200 shows at Enmore in his adult life. “[There’s] There is glory in walking in that room; “This truly feels like a sacred hall because it has remained largely unchanged for 100-odd years.”
Heritage isn’t the only thing that makes this a preferred venue for many music fans in Sydney. Rather than being isolated in the Olympic Park or located in the sanitary confines of the CBD or Entertainment District, it is located in a lively, accessible area of inner Sydney. And there’s also a capacity large enough to accommodate notable acts, but not so large that it feels like you’re in nosebleed episodes, giving a feel that Young describes as “huge and intimate at the same time.” (Hot tip: Having seen concerts there from “every position possible,” he considers being on the floor about 10-12 rows back to be the best vantage point.)
Although Enmore has been there for over 100 years, live music wasn’t always on the roster. It first opened as an open-air cinema in 1908, closed four years later and was later sold to Hoyts in 1935, who carried out a large-scale renovation of the venue, transforming it into the art deco marvel it is today. It remained a theater until the 1980s, when it turned from Hoyts’ best-performing cinemas into a derelict supplier of foreign films, when the Eliades family of Sydney bought it in 1986 and gradually built it into the concert venue it is today. Khoury says the place started to come into its own in the mid-2000s, but it took a lot of “blood, sweat and tears” to get there. “It was always a second option for the game, a B-grade option. [suburbs]. “This situation is starting to turn around.”
Although the venue was already “busy” before Mick Jagger came to visit, that fateful gig in 2003 proved to be a turning point for Enmore. “The Rolling Stones were definitely a landmark event,” says Khoury. “It made people aware that theater was a lively, livable music venue.”
The Rolling Stones’ concert also started a trend of other bands filling the stadium choosing to play Enmore. In 2014, Coldplay followed suit, choosing it as the venue for their only show in Australia while promoting their album Ghost Stories; This was a big step after performing to 200,000 people on their previous tours of the country. (They also used the same trip to film a video of A Sky Full of Stars marching down the adjacent King Street in Newtown.) “I was never asked for more. [free tickets] It’s like being at a Coldplay show in my life,” laughs Khira Holloway, event distribution manager for Century Venues.
Later in 2017, he found himself a sourceNot a pop star but a star – a considerable rebranding given his history with One Direction – newly solo Harry Styles starred in the theatre. Ardent fans (and their devoted dads) camped out three nights in advance to get a spot as close to the stage as possible, BYO-ing folding chairs, sleeping bags and portable phone chargers. Styles has inspired excitement perhaps unmatched until 2023, when Enmore snags Fred Again’s first Sydney show. Eager fans left no stone unturned to attend the sold-out concert amid the nationwide frenzy that accompanied the UK producer’s tour.
“Someone gave our box office workers $1,000 in cash and said, ‘I need to get in,’ and [he] he turned her down,” Stabback recalls. “As you can imagine, he still works for us.”
And then there are the acts that Enmore manages to capture when they are on the verge of exploding. In 2012, both Lana Del Rey and Kendrick Lamar played the theater, and each returned to play Qudos Bank Arena on their next Australian tour. Even Katy Perry held a show there in 2009. “I was initiating this change,” Stabback recalls. “He did something incredible by taking out a giant inflatable lipstick cherry and flying it over the crowd.”
Of course, all was not well. Stabback says the venue closed for a year when Covid turned out to be a “terrible time”. But this forced outage gave Enmore a chance to begin long-planned renovations; rapid restoration work, which they initially planned to do “piece by piece, like keyhole surgery”. It was a rocky road initially after the lockdown was eased, but then came the recovery.
“There have been many demonstrations since 2022 and they continue uninterrupted. Stabback says 2023 is probably one of our busiest years on record. “It’s interesting because we’re entering a cost-of-living crisis but we’re still waiting for that tipping point… I think that says something about the value of live entertainment to people; “You will sell your car, but you will still go to the concert.”
And then there was the groundbreaking night of the Genesis Owusu concert. More precisely: “We say it has passed. It didn’t break,” says Stabback.
The demonstration took place during a wet episode of La Niña in 2022. The heavy downpour had created a puddle beneath the ground and Other Black Dog and the crowd began to cut him down as Owusu belted out his fiery, propulsive track. loose, part of the dance floor bent.
Young was there the night of the show. “I noticed a group of people falling down and thought it was just… the hustle and bustle of the city,” he recalls. “It was only when they all stood up and suddenly became shorter than before that I realized what had happened. The sea had sort of parted next to me and I could look at the floor, I saw the sink… But we were all just kind of looking at each other, like, what happened?”
Miraculously, no one was injured. Perhaps even more miraculously, the venue reopened the following night and was back in business with a makeover Genesis Owusu concert planned for the following week.
“Twenty minutes into the show there was a team of engineers and builders under that floor working to get it back up,” Stabback says. “The show must go on.”