Ezekiel RodofiliYou may have heard the recent news regarding the closure of the Lazy Thinking organisation’s gig venue. I was fortunate enough to talk with Jim of Lazy Thinking about what’s happening with Lazy Thinking and why this keeps happening.
Lazy Thinking’s socials are here and here.
It’s final gigs for now are here and here.
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Ez: Hey Jim.
Jim: Hey, how are ya?
Ez: Been better but been worse. I guess you’re not doing too well.
Jim: In all honesty I’m fine, mate. Snakes and ladders of life, right? I’m an eternal optimist. It’s been super annoying but there are pros and cons of us trying to find a new home. Things don’t work out the way you always want them to and you’ve just gotta… I hate the word ‘resilience’, but you’ve just gotta find a way and keep going.
Ez: Is resilience part of the reason why you’re choosing to close down Lazy Thinking (the venue)?
Jim: Well, we’ve been served an eviction notice so we have to be out by the end of the year. The thinking for me is that…
Well, Lazy Thinking has never made money, it’s not a business, we lose money every month doing what we do. We put a lot of work into having a small, but incredible donor circle of people who financially support us. Between that and the occasional government grants and the small bit we bring in at the bar, we’ve managed to keep it afloat.
Lazy Thinking is an organisation that does things other than just run a venue now, so my thinking basically was “If we have no future in this address, I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time and energy fundraising to keep the main part of the organisation afloat. Let’s just be decisive, rip the band-aid off, get out now, take a breath. Use the time to do all of the other things we do, and also take stock and find another venue and make sure that it is more cost-effective, basically.
I guess the other thing I’d say to that is I don’t really understand how any… The financials of running a small music venue don’t work anymore for a bunch of reasons. The old models simply don’t work economically anymore. So I want to use it as an opportunity to reset and find a new permanent home that is more financially sustainable for the organisation.
Ez: And that’s probably gonna be the tricky thing, because part of that financial stability is gonna have to factor in ease of access.
Jim: 100%. It will not be easy. I’m putting a lot of work into finding a new venue already, but I’m certainly not gonna rush things. I need to make sure it’s the right fit in a bunch of different ways, so it’s not a decision that we’re gonna rush into.
Ez: But you still have the other things going on.
Jim: Yeah. We relaunched our label (Lazy Thinking Records) about a year ago and that basically applies the same ethos and philosophy that the venue does, so we only work with – by definition – lesser-known and emerging artists. I think the record label industry, even the independent one is pretty risk-averse now. We’re just always trying to support what we think are new and exciting voices.
So the label’s going well. We’ve three or four records coming out before the end of the year. We started the monthly residency about a month ago. We have two different locations where artists can stay. The Sydney location has a studio built in, and then there’s a location on the south coast of NSW. The artists get access to that, all the studio gear, they get a stipend of $300.00 a week, and they get access to a day in a professional recording studio with Tim Bruniges who we work with through the label. He has an incredible studio in Stanmore. They do a show at Lazy Thinking, but this is gonna be the last time they can do that for a while at least.
But they’re our main focuses for now. We were literally two weeks starting off – after a bit of a delay – a free education program. I’m going to find a venue to launch that while we’re temporarily homeless. That’s going to be a range of courses: using guitar pedals 101, how to setting up a drum kit, how to market yourself when you’ve never released music before. Stuff like that. We’re going to launch that in earnest in the next few months somewhere else.
So we’re going to be super busy still. We’re just not gonna be putting on shows for a few months.
Ez: As Lazy Thinking has operated at a loss every month, it’s been surprising to me that it’s been able to survive as long as it has. It’s kind of miraculous.
Jim: I think there’s an important distinction between venues like Mosh Pit and Lazy Thinking that have both just announced their closure, and venues that are affiliated with other business like pubs. That is to not be critical of those venues; we absolutely need those kind of venues as well, but I think the economics are particularly acute when you’re not attached to another business and you don’t have other built-in income streams like Chippo does, or other music venues that tap into other income streams.
So when Lazy Thinking, like Mosh Pit, have a show on, the only people that come into the space are people that are there to see that show. We have basically zero walk-by or walk-in traffic. I think for those kinds of small, dedicated venues in particular, the economics are just so fucking terrible.
Ez: Sometimes you’d see some shows with heaps of people there, but sometimes they’d be very quiet. I do suspect it has a lot to do with how people view and value things post-lockdown, but it still indicates that there is at least an interest and desire for smaller venues and smaller shows.
Jim: I think that’s true, absolutely. Every week, without fail we have shows that are full, that are fantastic and shows that are extremely quiet because we always try and have multiple shows a week that are offering a space to much newer and emerging artists. And again, in terms of economics, we often have really full shows where we almost sell nothing at the bar or the kitchen because those demographics have changed. People drink a lot less than they used to even twenty years ago, which I think is a great thing. I think it’s good the music industry is being forced to find income streams that aren’t just riding off the back of booze. Often I will look around at a pretty full show at Lazy Thinking and looking at the bar takings and scratch my head a little bit, but also really like the vibe.
The live music industry used to proliferate and do well because people used to come in and drink five, six or seven bears. People don’t do that anymore and I think that’s good. I think it’s forcing us to be inventive and look at other models. And yes, that makes things really hard while we’re in the transition period, but I think that’s good for the world.
Ez: You probably have quite a few memories of struggles… you came up in the hospitality industry, if I remember correctly?
Jim: I didn’t, no. I’m a newcomer to hospitality. I came up in the music industry and had a big, boring, grown up job in white collar land for a long time. I opened a restaurant, bar and brewery called The Sausage Factory in the location that Lazy Thinking is in now, with my ex-business partner. When that ended, I kept the space and kind of brought all my babies together.
I’ve only been in hospo for eight years. Nine years? Not that long.
Ez: Being comparatively new to it, what challenges did you face in getting Lazy Thinking past its first few months, and how did you overcome them?
Jim: The first few months… it’s a complicated answer. We started doing shows one day a week. Then it was two, then three, then we built it up to what it became. The financials have always been brutal, so it’s not that it was really hard at the beginning and then it got easier. They’ve always been challenging, and I worked out at the beginning that Lazy Thinking would never work as a business which is why I made the decision really early on that we would go down the not-for-profit route, because what we were doing was basically defined as a charitable exercise.
We’ve never charged venue fees, we’ve never charged up front fees of any kind to artists, so it was kind of obvious to us that what we were doing was a better fit as a not-for-profit type organisation anyway, and so pretty quickly we started leaning into that to make it work financially. I realised it was never a big enough room, people don’t drink enough when we started three years ago for it to work financially in terms of a business that sold beer and hamburgers and gave the majority of ticket sales to the artists.
Ez: Do you think maybe also going that way helped formulate an act of resistance?
Jim: Oh absolutely! And it’s also helped us build a community of people that really care about Lazy Thinking and the organisation. Literally, Lazy Thinking would not have survived as long as it had if we hadn’t formed a small but very dedicated donor circle of people who make donations every month. We could not have survived without that.
We’ve gotten the occasional government grant as well, but it’s only through the donations [we’ve survived]. I think the not-for-profit structure allowed us early on to create an organisation that a lot of people felt some kind of connection to that was often quite strong.
Ez: It is certainly an ideal location and it does suck to see it go. If you can remember, what was the moment where you went “Yep, this is working”.
Jim: In all honesty, we started with a real bang. We were really lucky.
I’d run Lazy Thinking Records for about four years before the venue started. I knew a lot of people in the music community and I tried to tap into the people that I knew and pull favours to get artists that I love that I thought would work well to play in the space. We were really lucky and had some great calibre artists play. In our first two or three shows we had Negative Gears, and Autobahns from Germany who were touring.
I remember those shows and looking at my staff and wondering what the fuck was going on because there were a hundred people there. I think that the support those artists showed us, that really allowed a lot of buzz to happen quickly so we just started with a real bang. It was clear the space worked and sounded way better than it had any right to, people loved playing there, and from day one I made it a priority for us to look after artists.
The stars certainly aligned for us and we got lucky early on with the artists who agreed to play in a completely unknown venue. How well those shows went, how well the community responded to it, a bunch of things worked out for us.
Ez: How have you seen it change?
Jim: I think the main change, for me, and this is very important, is that initially I just wanted it to be a great, accessible music venue. I guess the main change is that I realised very quickly that there was almost nowhere to play for young and emerging artists, and especially right at the beginning of their career the options are very limited. Most venues, for economic reasons, need the artist to carry a significant portion of financial risk, so there are overheads, upfront fees and artists often lose money when they put on shows. So prioritising providing access for them, [which] is just about the most important philosophical element of the venue.
We applied the same philosophy to more successful artists. We’ve had artists such as Kim Salmon, Jack Ladder, but every week we provide access to those new and emerging, and introducing that as a cornerstone of our programming philosophy was the biggest change in year one.
Ez: It seems like small venue space is in a state of constancy and flux at the same time. I remember going to The Houpeton, seeing bands there, and that was a good small venue and then that closed. But it’s a thing that’s been going on in Sydney for a long time, where small venues will open up, stay open for a while and then close. Sometimes it’s a transition period. Sometimes it’s permanently.
Why do you think it remains in this state?
Jim: I think the economics don’t work, basically. The risks are so high that the turnover is just extraordinary. There are a range of reasons for that, and that is probably a separate discussion.
There’s been a lot of government funding gone to venues over the past couple of years, and it reminds me a little bit of the way that the government tried to prop up the car industry in Australia for a while. It’s a failing industry currently because those old models just don’t work, so we’re going through this transition where we’re being forced to generate new models. I think the turnover is so high because the economics of small venues don’t work and there are particular things that are particular to Australia and Sydney that exacerbate them.
We have appallingly restrictive red tape. That has gotten a lot better, admittedly, post-covid. The government has done some good work there, but traditionally it has been restrictive. Our policing culture is appallingly heavy-handed when it comes to live music, and I think that’s changing but it’s still there.
I think there are a bunch of reasons that are broadly at play, and there are a bunch of reasons that mean that particulars of Australian culture and Sydney exacerbate the challenges of the live music industry.
Ez: Do you think it also has to do with, when new music venues start, they tend to stay in more Inner West localities rather than further out west?
Jim: I’m always conflicted by this. I think we’re becoming too much of a doughnut city where we have this sort of inner-cultural clique and we just ignore the rest. We absolutely need more diversity.
The other thing I’d say to that is: One of the biggest challenges to Lazy Thinking is that we’re in Dulwich Hill. We don’t have that foot traffic, we’re not in an area known for going out to live music. There’s the entertainment precinct in Enmore and Newtown. There’s a bunch of venues there and people go there in large numbers specifically to do hospitality things and see live music. We don’t have that.
Yes, we need to get away from the same old postcodes, but it’s a real challenge to open a venue outside of those areas and it’s extraordinarily difficult to make the financials of it work, so it’s a very complicated scenario.
I’m a huge and passionate believer that we need to get far more cultural geographical diversity in Sydney, and I feel like trying to make Parramatta somewhere that’s really significant is finally starting to happen. There’s great things happening The Powerhouse, Casula and Campbelltown Arts Centre. There are things happening that are exciting and innovative outside of Surry Hills and Chippendale and Newtown, but it’s a slow-moving process.