Transit Bar is nine years old. While some of us might find that hard to believe, it would be harder still to find a Canberran under the age of 35 who hasn’t wandered down those legendary stairs to witness yet another memorable gig.
Prior to this week’s massive line-up of acts for the week, we sat down with Transit ‘s Musical Director, Jem Natividad, and a pint of delicious craft beer (Hop Hog, if you must ask) to talk about some of the legendary performances over the years.
In the end, we thought it best to let Jem speak for himself.
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Why are we celebrating birthday number nine instead of the tenth? Good question. I guess we’ve never really celebrated our birthday before, so round numbers don’t mean that much. Anyway, ‘9’ seems like a nice odd number to ‘go large’.
Looking back to the early days of Transit, one of the first bands we booked was 4 Dead back in 2006. They were a hardcore band, and tended to be quite volatile on stage. I came along to watch, as I used to be a member of the band as well.
So, for one of the first live shows at Transit, things got pretty crazy really quickly with lots of audience abuse and plenty of yelling and swearing. The lead singer song was hitting himself in the head with the microphone and smashing glasses. They were never invited back, but it was certainly a great way to kick off live gigs art Transit Bar.
It’s always good to see small bands achieve success, and we had Operator Please (2007) play as support for a band I can’t even remember. It was about three months before they went massive with Just a Song About Ping Pong and getting played world-wide. You could tell they had potential, but no one that night knew how big they would actually be.
It’s been a pleasure to host a variety of Canberra folk that have taken to the national and international stage as well – acts like D’Opus & Roshambo, Lurch & Chief, SAFIA Jaytech. Supporting local bands and DJs through the years is very important to us, and we’re glad to be part of having given people their launching point.
Kid Cudi (July 08) was another one that played a few small gigs here on various tours during 2007 and 2008. That’s cool. I like to think we were chancing our arm on artists that could one day be massive. It’s nice to be part of that history.
A really interesting show was Nick Warren (April 09). 10 years before he was one of the biggest names in dance music and getting paid up to $50,000 per set. We got to have him in this really intimate setting… it wasn’t about being off your face, it was a Wednesday night and his fans from a decade ago had families and proper jobs, so it really was all about the music. It wasn’t full in here, and there was a great mix of people, who really understood music, so Nick really enjoyed himself. He was such a lovely guy.
There have been a couple of crazy free gigs that we did as well. The first one was Z-Trip (January 09), who had just gone massive with a live set that was doing the rounds. He’d also just supported The Rolling Stones and then had to walk downstairs to here, which was awesome. We’d done the same thing with Booka Shade (November 08), who were also at the peak of their powers, so it also got a lot of attention around town.
You seriously couldn’t move in here…for either gig. It was summer, and it was crazy hot and crazy busy… As you can imagine, we just don’t do those sorts of shows anymore. We prefer to keep the punters happy and comfortable.
We’ve had Tim Rogers (You Am I) and Adalita (Magic Dirt) through a bunch of times. Their bands were highly influential in Australia back in the 90s, but the great thing about their solo appearances is that they bring a whole different vibe, while still being able to refer to their amazing experiences over the years. They’re icons of our industry, and they still love playing herehere – and so have Sarah McLeod (Superjesus), Kim Salmon (The Scientists / Surrealists), Glenn Richards (Augie March), and Phil Jamieson (Grinspoon).
We’ve had some other bonafide purveyors of indie and rock on our stage too – folk like King Buzzo (The Melvins), Steve Malkmus (of Pavement), Joe Lally (Fugazi), Thee Oh Sees, Deerhoof (one of my favourite bands ever!), and earlier this year Scissorkickchamps brought CJ Ramone (his last name is enough) down.
There was that time we hosted a free secret show for Wolfmother too. I got a call on a Friday afternoon from their manager. They were doing this van tour with the new members – and wanted to drop by Canberra on the Monday night to do a low key show. We couldn’t tell anyone until a few hours before the show was to start, but could drop sneaky little hints via social media. The show was great – and afterwards we all went back to their hotel lobby and played piano and sang until God knows what time.
A lot of people are amazed that we had Grandmaster Flash play here. And it’s really cool, but what’s really awesome is that while we’ve had guys like him and Afrika Bambaataa come through, we’ve also hosted the next generation they inspired – such as DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist. If you look at the Scratch documentary (Douglas Pray) on the history hip-hop DJs, you’d be able to count heaps that have played here over the years (DJ Krush, DJ Craze, DJ Relm, The X-Ecutioners – Rob Swift, Total Eclipse and Boogie Blind at separate shows).
For reasons that still don’t make sense we decided, with two weeks notice, to host GZA, Pharoahe Monch, and Jean Grae on New Year’s Day in 2012. Anyone who’s been on Canberra on New Year’s Day knows that the town is very quiet, and we were going to host part of the legendary troupe. We were terrified no one would turn up.
As it turned out, we sold it out. It was pretty hectic though… five minutes before he was due to hit the stage GZA spilled a coffee all over his pants and I had to help fix it with a hairdryer. We got it sorted, GZA took the stage, and the guy didn’t skip a beat. It was amazing.
Finally, there was Coolio (August ’14). If you were to witness what went on, then you know just what kind of a show it was. However, I’m not going to comment too much, as it might be best left to the mythology of live music at Transit. Let’s let rumour and hearsay be the custodians of what actually happened.
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To join in more of the big birthday week at Transit, click here to see what’s on for the week, and grab tickets to some amazing shows.
