Sydney’s Lansdowne Hotel To Close, Will Become Performing Arts School

Sydney’s nightlife woes continue, with a struggling live music scene set to take yet another hit.

The cornerstone Lansdowne Hotel – a magnificent hovel, beloved by many, and with as much rock n’roll history stained into the carpet as there is beer and piss – is set to close its doors for the final time within as little as a month.

That’s the bad news. The *slightly* less bad news is that it will become home to a Performing Arts School.

A development application lodged with the City of Sydney will see the building handed over to the Academy of Music and Performing Arts – an institution that specialises in dance, musical theatre, and musical production – with the facility set to house some 200 students in a raft of refurbished study spaces, as well as utilising the pub’s pre-existing performance spaces and production facilities.

See? Bad News: Really cool pub closing. Slight Less Bad News: Investment being made in the arts. This differs from your normal style of story in these cases, which usually goes – Bad News: Really cool pub closing. Worse News: Because rich fucks want somewhere new to erect IKEA furniture and engage in brief, wholly loveless sex with disinterested spouses.

The irony of a place that was frequented by Uni students at night being closed to make way for a place frequented by Uni students during the day is not lost on anyone.

Though AMPA COO Isaac Chung Lee asserted the organisation’s intentions to maintain part of the facility as a public performance auditorium, that serves as a small consolation. Gone will be the sticky carpets, the beer taps, the scuffed walls, and the photo collages.

With the Lansdowne joining Sydney’s ever-growing live music venue graveyard, V Spy V Spy‘s barnburning 1986 anti-demolition hit “Don’t Tear It Down” seems sadly appropriate – now, more than ever.

Still one of the greatest rock songs Australia’s ever produced, that one.

“There’s life in it yet.“