The Hyde Park Hotel – known locally as “The Hydey” – is one of the last character pubs left in Perth catering for original rock bands that haven’t broken through to widespread commercial success.
There was once a thriving Perth indie circuit, with roots going back to the 70s. The Vic Hotel, Steve’s, the Shents, the Fitzgerald, the legendary Hernando’s Hideaway (Perth’s own short-lived CBGB’s, home to The Victims and other first-wave Perth punk bands) – all once great alternative band haunts – have been turned into samey faggoty glass-and-chrome hotel-cum-eatery-cum-café yuppie joints, or have been demolished in the advance of ‘progress’. Perth’s good at that. Anything with character is targeted and eradicated. What a shiny little city we have here. Perpetually just-unwrapped.
Anyway, I popped into the Hydey for the first time in a while a couple of Saturdays ago. Roddy Radalj had invited me to check out his new band, The Smokin’ Eldorados. Continue reading The Smokin’ Eldorados at The Hydey→
You know, don’t you dear readers, that I pride myself on writing my posts my way? Always shooting for that quirky but precise turn of phrase, dipping and dabbing in the figurative palette…you get the picture. You gotta have ideals. Doubtless I miss the mark sometimes…but I hit it sometimes, too.
Saw an advance screening of a truly remarkable new Australian movie on Saturday: September.
Set in the Western Australian wheatbelt of 1968 (but actually filmed in Yass, near Canberra), the movie focuses on the friendship between two adolescent boys on a farm: Ed, who is the white son of a farmer, and Paddy, whose Aboriginal family is virtually “in service” to Ed’s father. These were the days in which Aboriginal farm workers were given shelter and food in exchange for their labour, but no wages. Paddy’s family lives in a shack across the field from the farmhouse.