Save The Hopetoun!

Have you heard the terrible news about Sydney music venue The Hopetoun? On Monday night the owners apparently stickytaped a hand-written note to the door saying “The Hopetown is closed until further notice. We apologise for any inconvenience to our patrons.”.

It can’t be a good sign when the people running the place can’t be bothered spelling its name correctly, surely?

SMH explains further:

Sydney rock venue the Hopetoun Hotel has been boarded up and quietly put on the market in a move that has sparked howls of protest from music fans and artists. The Surry Hills venue closed without warning on Monday night, leaving staff, ticket-holders and artists in the lurch.

One of the venue’s owners, Evangelos Patakas, yesterday blamed an accumulation of fines from police and onerous directives from the council to upgrade the notoriously grungy building for the closure, but said it would reopen next year.

The pub needed to install sprinklers, wheelchair-accessible toilets and a sound limiter on the PA, he said. ”It was something we were scaling down but the costs have just blown out so disproportionately.”

Thing is, the Council are denying they’re responsible for the closure.

But a spokesman for the City of Sydney said there were no current directives to the venue to upgrade its facilities and that only one noise complaint had been received lately, which had been resolved.

“The city has been working co-operatively with the licensee of the Hopetoun for the past few months to allow them to keep trading while maintaining public safety,” the spokesman said.

And it seems the owners have put the hotel up for sale, which makes it sound as though their “we’ll be reopening in three months, swears” line is total rubbish.

Anyway. If you’re upset about the Hoey’s closure, you can do what all good middle class people with internet do when they’re outraged and join the appropriate Facebook group – may I recommend “Save The Hopetoun Hotel”?

I don’t know if joining a Facebook group is really going to make much of a difference given the circumstances, but you never know. Remember, it’s a fucking Facebook group that led to Daryl Somers and friends returning to our television screens tonight! If Facebook group joining can resurrect Hey Hey It’s Saturday, we may as well have a crack at using its magical powers to get the Hopetoun back up and running.

MORE: Howls of protest as Hopetoun shuts