Book details the rise and decline of Newcastle's pub rock scene

The live entertainment scene was once completely different. In her first book Rock This City: Live Music in Newcastle, 1970s-1980s Newcastle historian and researcher Gaye Sheather recalls regularly performing with her band Timeworx in the Tuesday 10pm to 2am timeslot at the infamous Jolly Roger nightclub.

After Weekender expressed their surprise about there being a demand for live music late on a Tuesday night, Sheather says, “That’s highlighted something else for me. Because for you that is unusual, but for us that’s just the way it was.”

Rock This City was the result of a 10-year project for Sheather to discover what was happening during those decades in the Newcastle pub rock scene. It began as a University of Newcastle PhD completed in 2013 and then was rewritten as a book.

Sheather recalls it as a golden age where hotels and clubs across Newcastle and Lake Macquarie’s suburbs echoed with the sound of pub rock, sometimes up to six or seven nights a week.

“We loved to go out because we had such a big population of young people,” Sheather says. “That working class sensibility we have in Newcastle, I think, played a role as well.”

Groups like The Heroes, DV8, A Rabbit, Total Fire Band and Live Wire were household names during the era. Many personalities of that scene were among the 26 interviews conducted by Sheather for the book, including Mark Tinson (A Rabbit, The Heroes), Greg Bryce (DV8), Dana Soper (The Magic Bus) and former journalist and musician Leo Della Grotta (Baron).

A commonly-asked question is why no band ever cracked national stardom, if the era was Newcastle’s golden age? While the bands received strong support from local radio stations 2NX and 2KO, Triple J was yet to go national, so unless bands were given an opportunity on national TV show Countdown it was difficult to reach new markets.

Another obvious reason was the Newcastle music scene’s reliance on covers. Some bands like DV8 and The Heroes included originals in their sets, but hit songs were expected. The Heroes’ had a minor hit with their song The Star and The Slaughter, which was written before the Star Hotel Riot. The band are famous for playing the night of the riot, not Cold Chisel, which is a commonly-held misconception.

“Newcastle audiences really wanted to go out and hear music that they knew and songs they could sing along to,” Sheather says. “There were lots of bands playing top-40 music. Up until the late ‘80s it was expected that Newcastle bands played cover versions and it was the opposite in Sydney. So it was two different populations that wanted something different.”

While no national stars sprung from the scene, Sheather believes it helped create an environment that Newcastle’s most successful bands The Screaming Jets and Silverchair later took advantage of in the 1990s.

“Certainly The Screaming Jets because they were right on the tail end of the period I write about,” she says. “I guess the environment had changed by then and Triple J has become national, so there was more scope for bands to play to greater audiences.”

A combination of factors are cited by Sheather as to why the pub rock golden era fizzled out in the late ‘80s. A fire that killed seven people at Luna Park in 1979 led to the NSW Government adopting new safety measures, restricting the number of patrons in pubs. That made it less profitable to employ bands and gave rise to duos and trios. 

The gentrification of Newcastle’s CBD and inner suburbs also led to noise complaints, the rise of poker machines and big screen TVs with sport created competition and iconic music venues like the Bel-Air Hotel and the Jolly Roger and Ambassador nightclubs shut their doors.

“Instead of the band being the reason for the night out and the privileged entertainment, as time went on there were lots of different entertainment on that Friday night in the same room competing with the band in the corner,” she says. “It more or less became a juke box in the end.”

Rock This City: Live Music in Newcastle, 1970s-1980s was released last week.