“By this stage we had almost a thousand people queued up down the laneway” – Jimmy Sing Interview


On the eve of award-winning Sydney good times emporium Goodgod’s third birthday soiree taking place over two big nights this Labour Day long weekend, Pedestrian caught up with main man and good bloke Jimmy Sing to discuss underestimating the scale of Flume’s fanbase, how one goes about getting Thom Yorke to DJ at their club, and why it takes a village to build a venue.   

Did you ever think you would make it this far?
Not at all. We often doubted we could even get it up in the first place, let alone ever thinking three years down the track – longer, actually, if you include the Goodgod club night before. It’s just one of those funny things where you’re in a venue really working that crazy weekly schedule where essentially we’re putting on six events a week in the back room and then trivia and DJs and dance floor stuff out the front every night as well, so you sort of end up doing ten events a week and you’re often just chasing the structure of the calendar and don’t realise when the year has passed. So the birthdays become a good opportunity to get a lineup together that we fully recommend you check out because they might be a little under-appreciated almost. 

What are the things you look back on from the early days that make you laugh? There’s something incredibly warming just about the chaos that those days had. And that chaos came from us not knowing what the hell we were doing [laughs] and that people coming down into the venue would have no expectation of what the space would be like or what would be happening that night and just come in with the attitude to just go with it. I guess the other thing, that we probably don’t need to broadcast too much, is that we weren’t licensees, so really you could… let a few more things go [laughs]. When you’re actually a licensee you run up against a few things that you end up realising should probably be reserved for house parties, but with that said I think it’s carried through from those early days that Goodgod is just good fun. It’s like a party house where you can get wild but everyone respects each other. We still have never had any big fights or crazy incidents here, which I think is testament to the awesome crowd that comes in. 

What is the weirdest or craziest thing you’ve seen with your own two eyes between those four walls? There was some party where we stupidly got hay bales – there are so many reasons why I would, like, die, instead of approaching that mess and complete fire hazard again – and you still get the moments where you have to stop people having sex on the dance floor or stupid things like that. We’ve now built rhythm where we can get more and more incredible musicians in here and some of those artists have had supersized profiles, the type of people we never thought would play Goodgod. That’s made us feel crazy excited. What’s the question again?



What’s the weirdest or craziest thing you’ve seen with your own two eyes.
Weirdest or craziest thing…um…the most recent one from last year was the Laneway after party, which Chad from Future Classic was organising with us. We’ve done after parties for festivals before and often they don’t really work – I mean you just pretty much get the worst of people because they’ve already had a massive day out, so I was putting the pressure on Chad, I was like “man, we’ve gotta make this work. We’ve gotta make it big”, right? And of course with Future Classic where they’re at now, they put together an incredible lineup and ended up getting Flume and Chet Faker to play – and that was at the start of the year so Flume was already massive. I was still in the mindset of “aw yeah, probably won’t be that busy” and it’ll be like a secret thing. Then Flume put it on his Facebook and from eight o’clock until midnight, we had hundreds and hundreds of kids who looked barely eighteen coming into the club and literally bottle necking the entrance because they were all walking down the stairs and going “Where’s Flume? Where’s Flume? Where’s Flume? Where’s Flume?” [laughs].

It actually didn’t look like these kids had been socialised at all. Like, no offence to Flume fans, but it was like they’d actually never been into a nightclub, restaurant, or venue before. They walked down and we probably had about eighty kids standing there, refusing to move because they couldn’t see where Flume was. This is to the point where we couldn’t get anyone in or out of the venue. By this stage we had almost a thousand people queued up down the laneway [outside Goodgod] and, of course, police came and realised that they couldn’t get into the venue because all these kids wouldn’t budge until there was some confirmation that it was going to be a good night or whatever – was Flume really here? And basically the cops said “hey, no one else is allowed in. Get these kids out of the way.” It was pretty quiet for the rest of the night until 12 or 1 when people with some sense came down. But it just struck me how weird it was seeing people who didn’t have that attitude of coming into a space and being open minded to checking out what DJ was playing or just getting something to eat and have a drink and just relax into it and go with it, you know? I think we’re fortunate to have people at Goodgod who have an open mind and are out to have a good night, no matter what comes at them.  

What personally for you is the most fun night you’ve had there? One of the best nights I just had was a few weekend’s ago at Astral [People]’s second birthday. I think what they’re doing just keeps getting better and better and better, and they’ve perfected a model that we’ve been wanting to represent for ages as Goodgod, where a night effortlessly blends live performance and DJs in a club environment. From 9 o’clock we had live acts like Alba and Jonti and Collarbones til like 1am where it just flowed into DJ sets right til the end of the line of when we had to close at dawn with 150 people in there wanting more and more. They’d gone 9-5 like a good eight hour working day. It had a really euphoric vibe in there. It’s the dream. To have an engaging performance in a club environment. It’s harder than you think! People are hearing stuff that they’ve never heard before but are really open to going with it. That’s one of the ones that sticks with me recently.
 


Having been in the caper for a while now, what have you been conscious of in terms of sustaining a vibe and a sense of longevity? Because there can be quite a lot of turnover in Sydney with regard to clubs and venues.
Fingers crossed we’ve got longevity. The city can be fickle and people can do amazing things that other people just don’t respond to. I think part of what makes this seem like it’s sustainable is that Goodgod is a community. From when we started it’s been based on our relationships with a lot of different people. Not just people booking what happens at the club or the staff working at it, it’s about the people who have a loyalty and shared vision of what should happen in a small venue. People like Slowblow, Chapter Records, Pelvis, Astral, Modular keep on evolving. And then guys like Cutters, the Siberia guys, Daniel Stricker and the Juggernauts, who are doing massive things internationally and then they’ll come back here and do stuff. In fact, they’ll be playing as the House Band again for the birthday. People like Shantan, Silky Doyle and Levins. Them being part of how the venue has changed and evolved, bringing different tastes to the table so that not only does it feel fresh to them and us but for the people coming to the venue. It’s a good living, breathing thing here. It’s not like Goodgod is one genre, one mode of entertainment, one time of the night that you go there, one type of person that goes there. I think a lot of people have an attachment to it in very different ways. Hopefully that’s what gives it longevity. 

What are the other issues or challenges in running a venue in Sydney? I guess it’s the flipside of what we just touched on. Keeping it fresh for people. People sometimes get tired of going to the same room. You have to switch that up a bit. I don’t ever see us doing any big renovations in the near future. It’s the small things you switch up. That’s across everything – the food, the drink and the people as well as the music. Our challenge is to not stop and rest on what we’ve done and hope that people come. I think the key is to keep ourselves excited about what’s coming up at the club that week and that gives us confidence that other people will see something in it. I think it’s important to keep searching for new stuff and meet people who are doing things. Making new friends. 

I think part of that was recontextualising the space. Obviously since you’ve been there, the Dip has opened, you guys have a really popular pop culture trivia night there. Can you talk a bit about opening up the space to other things besides straight up clubbing? Yeah I think trivia has been an amazing one. We were just trying to find something, we knew that we had found our limits to the types of music we could represent on a Wednesday. So it’s been really fun having something in our weekly schedule that doesn’t appeal to one type of music fan: you don’t have to like psych rock or techno or whatever. But on the other hand lots of people have watched The O.C.! (Laughs). It sounds terrible doesn’t it? You do something that brings people together in this other, relaxed way that’s based around TV shows and nostalgia. It’s still got a niche feeling to it – and all the people who present are avid, crazy fans of it – like Al Grigg from Palms and Shag from FBi, they are just out of your head Simpsons fans – that idea of being blindly passionate about something is kind of what we do on the music side of things so it’s nice to do in a more pop cultural way.  

In terms of reimagining the space, if you want to see Goodgod in a different mode you have to come down to the Pelvis parties. Those guys have totally transformed how you do a club night in there. It’s a big collective of anonymous crew. They don’t have any DJs on the flyer. They have this approach where ten of them might put on the night and two of them are DJs and one person does the poster, one person does the video projection stuff. They always do these crazy redecorations of the space that’s kind of like bringing a council cleanup’s worth of stuff to the club. They have this really outrageous, strong aesthetic to what they do while being quite mysterious and not having to identify as particular people. I really like what they’ve done. Every month it’s a crazy good surprise for how they set up and what they do with the space.  

Have you noticed any trends in the way people experience going out and the way in which other establishments have presented the idea of what going out is? Do you still make it out to other places and see what’s going on?  Yeah man. Two things. Small bars, obviously. We’ve really seen a rise in people being able to go out to lots of independent places and the idea that you’ll constantly go out on a Friday night to check out the new small bar. It’s like a new social currency – how quickly you’ve gone to a new spot. That’s obviously been a theme for the last three years or so. Also, people going and eating good meals at pubs again seems to be a thing that people are really embracing again. On the other hand you’ve seen a real drop off in people going to rock and roll gigs in a way. That’ll come back, though. And I feel like there’s been a positive trend of people wanting to go out and dance again. I’m talking really broad strokes here but it feels like there’s a good hunger to go out and rave til dawn again. 

As a Melbourne resident and having lived in Sydney for a couple of years now, what do you see as the major differences between Melbourne and Sydney nightlife? Because it always feels like there’s a slight difference in attitude, I’m just not quite sure what that is.
Yeah man. I almost feel out of touch with what’s happening in Melbourne now. I’ve been up here about ten years, and in the time I’ve been doing Goodgod I’ve gone out to other places less and less, so I’m probably not the best judge of that. But from talking to Melbourne people who’ve come up to play at Goodgod or party at Goodgod, the thing that they often comment on is that it’s really fun to see a space that doesn’t fit into any pigeonhole. It’s not just a music venue. It’s not a pub, it’s not just a band room or a night club or a place people go for after work drinks. People like that’s it got those blurred edges. In Melbourne they’ve commented that there’s nothing quite like [Goodgod] down there at the moment. I know that that’s always changing and it’s always evolving, and there are awesome spaces down there. I’ve always been amazed at what Revolver and The Toff do and how they can become such awesome institutions – real mainstays, you know? I always like to think that people in Sydney get dancing earlier. Actually, that’s another thing people from Melbourne often comment on: that people move a little bit more up here. 

Thom Yorke at Goodgod from PEDESTRIAN.TV on Vimeo.

How does it work to get those huge surprise acts – like the show with Thom Yorke. How does that actually work? Do the promoters come to you or do you hit them up? It’s a mix. A lot of it is the same as how we organise our resident nights – it’s just based on a real relationship, people that you just talk to, share music with and all that sort of thing. With Diplo, for example, I used to distribute his music label Mad Decent for Australia so I’ve known him for years, and he’s someone that really supports things he loves, so he’s always followed what we’ve done with Goodgod and what Levins has done with The Dip, and really he’s just always adamant to come down and do something when he’s in town. It’s often something we just work out a couple of days before. With Jamie XX and the Young Turks crew I was introduced to that mob by Cameron from Architecture in Helsinki and we had a fun party at Goodgod on their first trip to Australia so we’ve done stuff together ever since. With Thom Yorke it was more out of Modular and a circle of recommendation proposing it to Thom and telling him “yeah Goodgod’s a good spot, you should do it there”. So it often comes out of a chain of referrals, and word kinda spreads through the music scene internationally – even up to bigger artists. And when you’ve got smaller artists starting off down here [in Sydney] and getting bigger and bigger and traveling around and they meet bigger people and they talk about where to go in Sydney blah blah blah and they say Goodgod and it happens from there. 

Speaking of bigger people the last PELVIS I went to I saw Baz Luhrmann. (Laughs) Yeah that was because of Jo our door girl who was out partying and told Baz to come down and I think it was nice. He was having a dance at Yo Grito and was out there for PELVIS for a few hours, and even over that time people didn’t hassle him out so I think he just kept on. That was pretty funny. If I’d pick a party for him, I would have said PELVIS. 

What’s in the future? What are your plans? Our plan is really just to keep on building this into a foundation. A community space for Sydney where the quality is assured and, you know that if we’ve booked it it’s gonna be worth checking out. That’s the vision that we keep on going for. Outside of that, we had a lot of fun curating parties for the Opera House as part of VIVID festival and getting to choose internationals to come down and do a party. It would be  fun to do more of that curating stuff. Another thing it would be fun to do a party outside because… we’re in a basement [laughs] so that would be really fun. It would be good to organise a Goodgod Beach Club or something.                    

Goodgod celebrates its third birthday this Labour Day long weekend   

2013 GOODGOD BIRTHDAY NIGHTS
GOODGOD SMASH HITS! 
Saturday 5th October 2013 , Doors open 6pm 
Tickets: Early-bird: $15+bf / General Admission $20+bf  
Montero 
Standish/Carlyon 
The Murlocs 
Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys 
Alex Cameron 
Mining Boom 
Four Door 
Major Napier 
Black Vanilla 
Yo Grito! 
DJ Principal Blackman 
And more to be announced… 

GOODGOD ALL-STARS 
Sunday 6th October 2013, Doors open 9pm 
Tickets: Early-bird: $12+bf / General Admission $15+bf  
Zanzibar Chanel 
Nina Las Vegas vs Levins 
Mike Who vs Jimmy Sing 
Slow Blow 
Shantan Wantan Ichiban 
Pelvis 
Ben Fester 
Ariane 
Marcus King 

Siberia presents The Goodgod House Band featuring special guests  
And more to be announced…

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