Nightclubbing: Melbourne’s Honkytonks

Famed for its sweeping views of the city skyline, flamboyant décor and grand piano DJ booth, Honkytonks was a place where in the same transaction, patrons could get a top-shelf martini and the club's signature "rave juice" – a glowstick suspended in a potent cocktail and served in a bladder-like plastic bag.

Its dress-up parties were the stuff of legend, with themes such as Bastille Day, barnyard rave, high school prom night and pyjamas. The intimacy and character of these nights fostered a tight-knit community of DJs, promoters and bar staff, many who now hold the reins for Melbourne's vibrant nightlife. The memories of these people are almost impossibly rosy, describing a place that bucked the prevailing trends, making clubs smaller, friendlier and more personal, at a time when the opposite was the norm. Since then, numerous venues have tried to recapture the family-like vibe, but Honkytonks' paradigm-shifting, anything-goes weirdness remains a one-off.

Michael Delany (owner)

Friends of mine and I used to live in warehouses in the city, and we'd have parties on different weekends, and we'd always try and trump each other with how crazy our parties were. But you'd always have problems where the toilets would stop working, or you'd run out of booze, or something like that.

Ben Ford (owner)

I guess the general feeling was that we had nowhere to go. We wanted somewhere to go out.

Tamer Hamawi (owner)

We were five to begin with. The four other partners all kind of knew each other, just through their history together. I was the last one brought into the group.

Michael Delany

I used to go to Centrifugal, at the Mercat Cross, and really enjoyed the music. But the drinks and stuff there were horrible. And I also had friends who ran [upmarket cocktail bar] Gin Palace and bars like that. I'd go to places like that, and I was like, "Surely there's gotta be some way to put these things together?"

Mike Callander (resident DJ)

If you were into techno like I was, you were normally resigned to some shitty warehouse space, and you might have been drinking alcohol out of a can.

Michael Delany

I was friends with a real estate guy through the place that I lived in the city. He showed me all these places, and none of them were appealing at all. He kept avoiding this last one that was on the bottom of the list, you know, Duckboard Place. I was like, "Why aren't we going to this place?" He’s like, "I don't think you'll like it, it's really run-down." I was like, "Let's have a look at it." We ended up going there at the end of the day, and you could see it straight away. It was going to be sick.

Ben Ford

It was an incredibly raw space; there was nothing there, zero. It was totally empty. Dark, dank, but with an epic view and a great location. No one from the 20th century had looked at it, really. It was stuck in 1950s rag trade Melbourne.

Michael Delany

It was called "Chantilly Bridal," and it was a bridal-wear sweatshop. There were all these made-to-order wedding gowns in there that no one had ever picked up. It was like, "What happened?"

Ben Ford

I really liked the fact that it couldn't be seen. It was an unknown space, tucked away and hidden. The space surprised you, because when you're going down the back alley it's all dark and grim and you don’t know where you are, and then you come out and you see the view and you realise where you are, physically.

Tamer Hamawi

We got in there, basically demolished the place and started from scratch.

Ben Ford

Lots of friends came along and did a few days here and there.

Michael Delany

We just built it all ourselves. I paid a builder to just give us his license number – because you had to have a license number to get council approval – and he came in with his builders one day and started working. I was like, "Dude, what are you doing? We don’t have enough money to pay you, I just want to pay you for your number."

Ben Ford

None of us could really work that much while the build was happening. I quit my job.

Michael Delany

We just sort of stayed there day and night, smoking heaps of weed and building the whole time, ourselves.

Tamer Hamawi

There were many days of driving around the city, finding bits and pieces, searching through suburban tile factories and finding really awesome tiles from the '60s and '70s.

Michael Delany

We did a lot of tiling there. All the tiles came with these sheets of paper that we found somehow interesting, and we just stamped them with this piano symbol, that was our symbol. We just glued them up everywhere [around the city]. It looked really random and it didn't really say anything about what it was, but they were everywhere for quite a while before we opened.

Ben Ford

In some ways, I found the construction the most enjoyable part of the whole experience.

Michael Delany

We didn't want it to be too much like a glossy club. There were clubs at that time that were designed by architects and had cold, hard surfaces. We wanted it to be a bit glamorous, but a bit lounge roomey, like a bit of an art project.

Ben Ford

It took six months, really.

Michael Delany

It was really trying towards the end of it. All our girlfriends hated our guts. We were just completely covered in paint the whole time and really stinking. We had been really confident about it, we thought it was going to be awesome, and then as it started coming down to the day, it was like, "Fuck, this better fucking work," because we'd all maxed out our credit cards, and kind of been telling everyone how fabulous it was going to be.

Tamer Hamawi

We certainly weren't finished when people started coming in the doors.

Ben Ford

The building inspector gave us the tick-off like, 20 minutes before we opened the door. We had friends standing on carpet panels that had just been glued down. They had to stay there for 20 minutes while the glue dried.

Michael Delany

When we opened, it was just full from the start.

Tamer Hamawi

It was a really good night. People were blown away, and it was quite the achievement. It was my first business, so it was an exciting time.

Michael Delany

It was the most legendary party of all-time. We got all the booze reps in, and the opening night was all free; full cocktails, full menu, all night.

Tamer Hamawi

I loved when we first opened the club, just walking up the back stairwell, the entrance, walking in behind people and hearing them going, "Is this it? Is this really Honkytonks?" And following them up this really dirty, old stairwell, opening the door then they're walking in and being blown away. I experienced that many times, and it was always great.

Mike Callander

Everybody was talking about this place down a laneway. At least in my experience, it was the first instance of this whole thing that's so quintessentially Melbourne now, you know, this laneway culture. This was like the first example of it – that I was familiar with, anyway – or at least that people were talking about in that kind of cult way.

Michael Delany

I always wanted it to be something that was representative of what Melbourne was about, you know, mixing cocktails and dancing and stuff like that. We had heaps of absinthe, before you could really get it in Australia. We used to import it from Czech Republic, and they'd send it to us, unlabelled, as massage oil. Then they'd post us the labels separately.

Mike Callander

You could have a really nice cocktail made by an absolute professional, and you could feel semi-civilised, while you could also be incredibly uncivilised if you wanted. It was the incorporation of really good drinks with really good music. It sounds like an obvious thing, but at the time, or until that time, I don’t think it was that obvious.

Samuel Klett Navarro (AKA Spanish Sam, resident DJ)

The layout really surprised me; how you didn't really get into the party until you actually were inside the party. There was no, like, seeing how it goes. You were in or you were out.

Jaff Tzaferis (host)

I remember walking in there, and I was just gobsmacked by the aesthetics of the place. There was a feel; a different feel to any other nightclub that I'd been to.

Michael Delany

The bar itself was all hollow glass. It had smoke machines in it, so it would fill up with smoke. We blew up so many smoke machines – they would always feed back on themselves and blow up, even if we had release valves. We tried it for about six or eight months, trying to get it right. It looked fucking amazing, but then it actually didn't work; we were spending thousands on these smoke machines. So we covered the whole bar with mirror tiles, and it looked like a giant mirror ball.

Jaff Tzaferis

I just remember the bar being bright and shiny. It was quite alluring; you'd be happy to stand there and wait for a drink. You'd just be looking at various bits and pieces that had been placed there and accumulated over time.

Adrian Fernand (host)

Walking up the stairwell, to entering through the area with the cutout mushrooms on the wall, to the saddle, to the fringe-level lighting and then the furry ante-chamber that divided the main dance area. I pretty much memorised everything in that place.

Tamer Hamawi

There was this foyer area; it was kind of this trippy sort of Western-themed area with the saddle and everything.

Andee Frost (resident DJ)

It would get ridden on the odd occasion by someone who was too wasted.

Jaff Tzaferis

The Honkytonks icon, the DJ booth, was a grand piano. The carpet was a green plaid made specifically for the venue. In the front room, the couches were of hide – cow hide, I believe – and there was bamboo seating there also, along with these frames against the wall, which were a silhouette of some of the owners and some of the resident DJs, such as Boogs.

Ben Pearce (AKA Cracker, head of security)

It was a little bit more boho than most clubs, which I think gave it its reputation to start with, because it had more of an arts vibe, rather than a glamour club, which was the style of the time. I think that gave it an edge; made it more mysterious to people.

Michael Delany

A lot of clubs, I mean probably still now, if you went to dance, it'd be a pretty anonymous sort of space, just dark with strobes and a big soundsystem. I think it had a lot of character, the space; it was kind of like a [members'] club more than a dance club. It was always quite intimate.

Ben Ford

We were old Razor Club kids, and we always had this attitude, "Why don’t they let people in?" Once we did our own place – for me, anyway – I sort of realised it was a great policy. So for the first year, we turned away probably twice as many people as we let in.

Michael Delany

It wasn't such a big place. It only held 280 or something, so it wasn't like, super-hard to fill it. It got a reputation for being really, really hard to get into. But I don't think it was like that, I think it was just too small to let everyone in. Some people would get really pissed off about that, but it wasn't intentional to be exclusive, there just wasn't enough room.

Ben Pearce

A lot of people there were regulars, and it wasn't a really huge club. In a night, with your regulars, you were halfway full.

Julia deVille (barstaff)

It was pretty exclusive when I first started working there.

Adrian Fernand

It seemed quite arbitrary, but once you got inside, you understood exactly why the door policy existed, and why it was as stringent as it was.

Andee Frost

I'll always remember the first time I went, because I didn't get in.

Michael Delany

We wanted to mix it up, and not be trendy, and not be too cool for school. Better to have some real random dags [uncool people] in there with these really fashion-y kind of people.

Ben Pearce

Generally, because we had such a clear vision [of the club's concept], it was actually quite a lot of fun. All the staff were quite in sync with each other and we had some really good, big, heavy, security guards who were all very intelligent, which was also a rarity.

Adrian Fernand

It was a real cornucopia of people. There were professionals, there were club kids, there were those who worked in hospitality, there was a huge New Zealand contingent – for some reason it seemed like half of Wellington was living in Melbourne at the time, and they either worked there or they frequented there.

Andee Frost

Lawyers, doctors, accountants, strippers.

Ben Pearce

Something I always used to like to do was have totally different music down on the door, be it rock or hip hop, and just see how people reacted to that, as well. If they came in accepting, there were going to be a better client, I believe. Someone that had a smile on their face was a really good bonus, too. We worked a lot on feeling, and we generally got it right.

Michael Delany

I always remember seeing people like, you know, some 50-year-old architect guy talking to some young person. Not trying to pick them up, but just interacting. It was genuinely like that. Like, you'd get some old tweaker restaurateur guy who'd come and buy a bottle of $200 champagne, to sit at the end of the bar and pour some for some random person that just walked up.

Adrian Fernand

Everyone was like-minded, in a way. And if they weren't, they'd kind of find somewhere else to go; they wouldn't stay within the realm of Honkytonks.

Michael Delany

Lee Lin Chin from SBS News used to come a lot. I was overseas when it happened, but Mick Jagger came there and danced all night.

Adrian Fernand

I took my own Mum there. It was kind of place where you could take your Mum. I had to walk her out at 3 AM, because she was having too much fun.

Aram Chabdjian (AKA Aram Chapers, resident DJ)

I don't know if I was just younger back then, so the people seemed older, but you got a mix of totally different people. Whoever came there pretty much knew the vibe and what to expect, and once they were there, they were all there for the one thing, which was pretty much the music.

Mike Callander

Sometimes, you would have someone come up and be so excited about a record you'd just played – I can remember doing this many times – actually just giving them the record, going, "Fuck, you really need to have this."

Aram Chabdjian

It was pretty different to where I was going out beforehand. I just felt comfortable going there by myself, listening to the DJs and dancing all night.

Andee Frost

You never really knew who was there, but people were always really receptive to what you played.

Mike Callander

It's a cliché thing to say you could do whatever you wanted, but it really felt like you were supported by the crowd to do whatever you wanted, and they wanted you to do crazy things.

Aram Chabdjian

I remember Michael telling me, "I don’t care if you clear the fucking dancefloor, just do your fucking thing."

Mike Callander

I think Michael has a history of placing people in those positions. He's a very good facilitator, he'll take a chance on people and just go, "Yep, you can totally do this."

Michael Delany

We were licensed until 5 AM, but often we'd just lock the doors and stay open until the DJ wanted to stop playing. The sunrise coming up through the windows was really cool.

Ben Pearce

They were just crazy parties – you'd be there 'till six or seven in the morning, just having a blast, and it never felt like work on those sort of nights, because they were just so much fun.

Mike Callander

There was a gig that was due to finish at 6 AM, and all the security guards were kind of getting a little shirty that we'd gone past six. It was when Michael Mayer was playing there for the first time. The security guards were coming up to me, because I'd put on the show, and they were trying to force me to pull him off the decks, so I was hiding from the security. Michael Delany went over to the bar and put a wad of cash into the tip jar for the bartenders and said, "Just keep going." That was characteristic of his approach to running the club.

Ben Ford

We made the music the focus of the club, without worrying too much about profit. Every couple of weeks, we had an international. It's quite an expensive little thing, bringing in someone from the UK or the US for the weekend, just to play an hour gig. We did that at the expense of making more money than we probably could have. But we always felt that it was all about the music.

Tamer Hamawi

I loved that we were bringing out the more unknown, up-and-coming guys. It really felt like we were educating the Melbourne public on great new stuff.

Andee Frost

On the club's birthdays, Michael used to fuck with us a little bit. He'd make up the DJ sets, and he'd go, "You're playing against this person, and you’re playing against this person," so I'd be playing versus someone who was completely different to me, which would make it a bit more fun and interesting.

Mike Callander

If I had set myself a list of boxes that I could tick for my DJ career, one of them was definitely to be a resident at Honkytonks. It was a real shock to be in my early to mid-20s and have already ticked the box. You almost felt like you could retire.

Aram Chabdjian

It kind of felt like you just started at the top. There was nothing else I wanted to do.

Michael Delany

We were open six days a week. I always wanted it to be the sort of place where if you went to that city, and you're only there on a Tuesday and Wednesday night, it'd still be OK, even if it wasn't wildly busy, you'd get what the vibe was supposed to be.

Adrian Fernand

I ended up going pretty much every week. And then I'd maybe take leave from work, and I think my record was four consecutive times in a week, and I'm not the only one who did that. It was just so much fun.

Michael Delany

You'd get like, Wednesday nights where all the Cirque du Soleil people would spontaneously come in after a show and do crazy callisthenics all over the dancefloor.

Andee Frost

I'd just moved into the city, and I was going to Honkytonks Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night and then Sunday, too. It became my lounge room, for a long time.

Jaff Tzaferis

I was at Honkytonks at least twice a week, possibly more often.

Michael Delany

We'd stay open until 5 AM every night, whether there was anyone there or not. That was something I was very staunch about; you can't close early, because then people just don't know whether they can depend on you being open.

Ben Ford

I'm still tired from it. It actually took me about 12 months to get my bodyclock back to normal after finishing up there.

Michael Delany

This was just prior to social networking, and now that people have that, they don't necessarily need to go out mid-week, because they can stay in touch with all their friends at home, on the couch, watching TV. I think, back then, people would go, "Let’s go out for a drink." Now people couldn't be fucked going out on a Wednesday.

Andee Frost

On the Sunday night I used to do something called "Gag Reflex," we'd have two glory-holes on the dancefloor. There was a male glory-hole and female glory-hole. It was like a kind of prop board, I'd set them up every week. No one used them, they were just a joke. But then one night a girl actually stuck her tits through the glory-hole, so that was a win.

Michael Delany

I remember these two guys having sex against the bar. You couldn't really see anything, but a bouncer pulled me over and he was like, "Dude, what should we do?" I'm like, "Just leave it, how long can it go on?" It's worse pouring a bucket of water on their heads, or dragging them apart, or embarrassing them or something. Stuff like that would happen all the time.

Andee Frost

Michael was the main character there. He let everyone do what they want and be themselves, and let it spiral almost out of control, but just kept it right on the edge.

Michael Delany

Part of the thing that was so good about Honkytonks, it was a bit lawless. Even though it wasn't dangerous or criminal, or anything. It was just crazy. People would act a bit outside themselves there, I think – do things they normally wouldn't do somewhere else.

Samuel Klett Navarro

You could do whatever you felt like in there, obviously within the reasonable limits of human behaviour. And there was no judgement.

Andee Frost

Every year, the club's birthday would be these grandiose events of Michael's imagination; anything from a barnyard rave where the whole club would get turned into a mushroom forest with picket fences and all sorts of crazy shit going on. One time, we made an Eiffel tower out of baguettes in the middle of the dancefloor. Everything would kind of just change. I'd never seen anything like that in a nightclub before.

Adrian Fernand

Mr Geoffrey's Bastille Day Ball was always a highlight of every year. It was just complete, unabashed debauchery. I think there's something about everyone putting on a costume that makes them lose their sense of reason and decency.

Julia deVille

That was the highlight of the club. They were kind of more invite-only events, and they were French-themed dress-ups, where there'd be all you can drink absinthe and wine.

Andee Frost

Michael would make this wine he called "Van Extraordinaire," which had mushrooms in it.

Julia deVille

One year a woman came dressed as a French impressionist painting, so she was completely naked, apart from boots. Everyone was just really respectful, and basically acted like she wasn't naked. I don't think you can go to many nightclubs without clothes on and not get harassed.

Jaff Tzaferi

There were DJs in the female toilets, which created a kind of communal toilet environment.

Samuel Klett Navarro

We were looking for a place to put another DJ. We were looking at doing it in the lobby, or in the smoking area. I remember we were in a meeting and most of the people there were looking at me just going, "What? Nah." Then Delany looked at me and he was like, "Yeah, this is crazy." Initially it was just going to be a once a month thing, but then it ended up being one of the club's signature things.

Andee Frost

Michael basically called us all over to his house for this "secret meeting" thing. He sat everyone down in a circle around his coffee table at home and said, "The club's closing down at the end of the year." He basically got the news on a fax.

Jaff Tzaferis

We found out, and I think we had about eight months' notice.

Adrian Fernand

It came as a major surprise to everybody.

Jaff Tzaferis

We thought we weren't going to have the space any longer. We thought, "Right, well, all we can do is look around for another space and until then we've just got make the most of what we have here and make a big hoo haa about us closing down." So we did exactly that.

Adrian Fernand

The media coverage it got was mental. We had a two-page spread in The Age [a major paper with a circulation of 200,000 at the time]. This was pre-Internet – to get a double-page spread was pretty epic.

Jaff Tzaferis

There were ticket sales for the last Honkytonks. I guess they were going for $100 or $200? It was the golden ticket for the last party.

Andee Frost

Then a couple of weeks before we were about to close, the people who owned the building were like, "No, you can stay, but on a month-by-month basis."

Jaff Tzaferis

We were like, "What? We've made the biggest deal about closing the doors to Honkytonks, and it's over. People are just going to think we’re bullshitting."

Andee Frost:

It was a bit of a free-for-all on the final night.

Jaff Tzaferis

It was a destruction party. Everyone could pretty much take what they wanted.

Michael Delany

We got out drills and let everyone screw shit off the walls. Everyone was walking out with tables, and stuff like that.

Andee Frost

My computer still sits on one of the club's coffee tables.

Mike Callander

That was one where I remember going home and showering and eating maybe twice, because the party just wouldn’t end.

Michael Delany

It started on New Years' Eve and went until the day after New Years’ Day, about 3 PM [about 40 hours]. It got to a point where I was like, "You know, I'm gonna stop it. This could go on for-fucking-ever and it's gotta stop before everybody just falls asleep or something, or dies, or it's just really boring.” So I grabbed ten records and I went out and played these ten records back-to-back. They were all really moody songs about finality and stuff. Like, "Who Wants to Live Forever?" by Queen and "Atmosphere" by Joy Division. It was all like, "BOOM! BOOM!" like doom. And then I played "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin as the last song, and everyone thought there was going to be something after that. I was like, "Nah, that's it."

Mike Callander

Just seeing the family that were left behind, and just having that one last thrash about on an otherwise pretty much empty dancefloor, knowing that it was kind of the end, it was pretty sweet but pretty sad at the same time.

Adrian Fernand

If it had have gone on for ten years, we probably all would have moved on, and we'd look back at it without the same amount of sentimentality that we do now.

Mike Callander

It was incredibly sad for me, when it closed. But at the same time, looking back on it, it was almost the best thing that could happen, for something to finish on a high.

Michael Delany

The club's success was all from the people who went there, more than anything. Who made it their place to hang out. I think, in a way, when it closed a lot of people stopped going out altogether. It was like they identified with the club so much that later, everything else just seemed hollow by comparison.

Jaff Tzaferis

I loved that place like it was my second home. I mean, I grew up there.