It may not have been the Ritz, but Marrickville warehouse-cum-venue The Pitz will be remembered for showcasing the best – and worst – of what independent Australian music had to offer. SHAUN PRESCOTT reports. ECSR photography by ROANNA MANLUTAC.

Faversham Street Marrickville was an ideal address for a venue for several reasons. One of the lesser valued reasons was the late night kebab stall nearby which, despite its rather untoward appearance and unfavourable fibro-to-grease ratio, was a convenient place to stop for the mandatory after-gig feed so sought after in a semi-industrial area after hours.

After visiting the last Pitz show ever last Saturday night, I was reluctant to leave the neighbourhood without indulging in one of these beastly delights, but then, things have changed. There used to be flash parties at this kebab stand after a show: most punters would end up here in long single files, waiting for their dietary fix. On at least two witnessed occasions, folk would sit in circles, munching kebabs and swilling longnecks, sharing enthusiasm, criticisms and joints. Moments like these reinforce that unlicensed venues like The Pitz can only thrive on community spirit and the Sydenham Road kebab store after 1am on a Saturday night is testament to that. Even rank processed meat or the crustiest falafel is digestible if it means sticking together for a bit longer.

For The Pitz farewell do last Saturday night, all the familiar makeshift elements – the crate-mounted stage, the floating mattress, the precarious wall hangs, the drunkenly scrawled graffiti banter, the impermanent fibro walls, the treasure-trove zine library – were gutted, leaving just another hollow empty space and a few people crowded around some bands. A lot of people milled about outside, sucking on fags and drinking from longnecks, but this was never unusual for The Pitz – or any venue for that matter – because people tend to straggle, socialise and lose interest. But still, the vibe was gone and it reinforced the loss. You could tell there was no true solidarity here, that it was just another party. Further, this wasn’t the real seeing off of the Pitz as dedicated punters knew it. This venue had already ceased to exist 18 months ago and has since been utilised only for rehearsals and lodging. So despite the occasion, this space was already a thing of the past.

The Pitz began as a rehearsal space and band dormitory in mid-2006 until the occupant of the warehouse – Matt Downey of Death Mattel – agreed to put on a few irregular shows. It wasn’t until Shaun Hemsley of Sydney label tenzenmen began putting on regular shows – initially every second Saturday but eventually most Saturday and Sunday evenings – that the place took on a life of its own. “I charged Shaun what I would charge any individual band for rehearsal time,” Downey says of the arrangement, “And Shaun, to his credit, gave every cent from the door to the bands on the bill.”

The Pitz hosted some of the more interesting shows in Sydney for more than a year, mostly because for a while it had no serious competitors: Lan Franchis shut down at the height of The Pitz glory days in 2007 and Yvonne Ruve had, by police-enforced necessity, gone further underground. Places like Maggotville, which still remain, never offered the eclecticism that the Pitz did. Instead, it was a more outré punk space. Despite the variety, a sense of community was always a prevalent and vital source of energy for The Pitz, and one of the most remarkable things about the place is that it crossed so many genres, cliques, scenes and stereotypes. Completely incompatible bands would often grace the same stage on the same night. Whether you wanted to hear cutting edge experimentalism or studies in genre regurgitation, The Pitz hosted it all and every willing band in between. “There was an open community feeling about the Pitz,” Matt Saliba of Hira Hira (formerly Very Much Robot) explains. “It was less intimidating than some other warehouses around, where you can feel out of place if you don't have the right uniform.”

Adds Hemsley: “All the time and effort organising shows was validated by the great feeling at the end of an afternoon or evening when everything went well. Everyone had a good time and got to experience some new music. Cleaning up the empty bottles from the street was about the toughest part of any show, [but] I could leave the door and do the sound [desk] and people would come and find me to pay for entrance. Folk would grab their own beers and drop the right amount of cash in [the donation] tin.”

“There was an open community feeling about the Pitz. It was less intimidating than some other warehouses around, where you can feel out of place if you don't have the right uniform.”

My favourite Pitz memory is the Escape the Great Escape festival which had Fulton Girls Club, Ohana, The Laurels and Aleks & The Ramps play – among others - on the same bill to a truly enthusiastic audience. By truly enthusiastic, I mean the type of audience that tries to stand as close to the stage as possible, as opposed to furthest away; the type that butt their ciggies, cease their conversations, and mosey through the entry to press against the speakers. And, as I hope you can imagine, an evening that grouped an emotionally poignant 18-year-old soloist with agit-prop punk rock, blissfully monolithic shoegaze and banjo driven psych-pop equalled a very safe victory for Australian music. All these bands are among my favourites now. The Pitz also exposed me to other local favourites, including the celebratory nihilism of Dead Farmers, the hilariously dishevelled When Chimps Attack (RIP), a truly beautiful collaboration between Moonmilk and Rand and Holland, and – on a number of occasions – the unsurpassable catharsis of The Thaw.

“One thing that sticks in my mind is the Pitz birthday weekend,” Saliba recalls. “Everything there was starting to come together. Regulars would start coming to shows because it was the Pitz, not just because of who was playing, but because it was always going to be interesting. I remember seeing some young bands like Euripides Berserker and Scissor Lock and just thinking, ‘This is brilliant.’ These guys wouldn't be allowed to play most pubs yet they were great, and they would [become] amazing bands or artists if they kept getting opportunities to play shows. Among the young bands, there were some veterans too. Founder had been on hiatus for quite a while and also played on that [birthday] weekend.”

The frequency of shows at the Pitz also meant that enthusiasm was sometimes hard to muster. “We played a lot of shows to no one at the Pitz,” Will Farrier of Ohana recalls. “It was hard to drag people down to a lane surrounded by dim sim factories on a hot Sunday afternoon. People couldn’t be fucked and I don’t blame them. But if you were lucky enough to get on one of the rarer night time shows with a good headliner then it was a really cool space to play. Somehow you had to fit four people onto the irregular shaped stage, but this added to the cramped feel that every floor show needs.”

While The Pitz was most famous for its music events – which hosted groups as punter-pulling as The Hard-Ons, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Peabody and even a dedicated skip-hop event – there were also intimate film nights, feminist workshops, art schools and think tanks. Above all, it was a space for Sydney’s counter-culture to gather and do what they do: argue, make sense and make friends. You can’t bump into likeminded souls in pubs or universities because, chances are, you’re principally against pubs or universities.

So the environment The Pitz provided was fairly utopian for Sydney’s music scene. Unlicensed venues arrive and depart frequently for a variety of frustrating – but often natural - reasons, and in the case of Faversham Street, pragmatism sensibly saw the demise of The Pitz as a venue. While touring bands have still lodged and rehearsed at the Pitz for the past 18 months, public shows became out of bounds due to pressures from the police. “[The Marrickville police] had threatened to alert the council to the operations here,” Downey says of The Pitz’ closure as a venue. “I couldn't risk sacrificing the rehearsal and accommodation aspects of The Pitz because they were, after all, why it was established in the first place. So I pulled the plug.

“I don't regret not having shows here,” Downey continues. “Shaun was a very passionate and well-organised promoter but I never warmed to the idea of hundreds of strangers walking around my studio/house, and the clean-ups were painful to say the least. I also had the neighbours complain about the parking situation outside. The influx would often inconvenience the few warehouse owners that worked [nearby] over the weekend. The guy next door never once complained about the noise of crowds, late night gigs and rehearsals. The only time I ever heard from him was when he couldn't use his own car space after a group of guys told him to ‘fuck off and park somewhere else’. The writing was on the wall.

“The police visits just made it official. I really appreciate having been involved in the social experiment. It seems that no matter how cheap you make an event, or the variety of entertainment Shaun would book, that people overall are a pack of selfish, disrespectful cunts.”

Earlier this year, one of Sydney’s suburban community papers The Glebe, ran a story about the “dangers” of illegal, or otherwise non-licensed “raves” (rave always being the most emotionally resonant buzzword for hapless proximal residents) in the Marrickville council. In a story that ran in December 2008 – a year after the Pitz’ live music demise – the Marrickville license supervisor Sergeant Michael Woods, speaking of unlicensed venues, said: “Generally, the premises have inadequate exits and insufficient fire fighting equipment for large crowds. Generally, we come across them [the venues] about midnight when we’re out on patrol and they happen in areas which are typically deserted at night-time.”

Most of the time – and despite general mythology - police don’t actively patrol areas searching for illegitimate revellers. If this were true, Marrickville would be bereft of unlicensed venues, and currently this is far from the case. There is still a healthy climate here, and the closing of The Pitz isn’t symbolic of anything other than the transient nature of community-oriented musical pursuits.

Despite the work that went into it, The Pitz is only a peripheral history now; a footnote for punters who managed to see their favourite bands in an environment where they’d probably end up dining at the kebab store with them an hour later. The only reason The Pitz stands out – in the wide scheme of things – is because it pretty near hosted everything. It showcased the best and the worst of what independent Australian music had to offer at the time. It opened ears via invading them. A fan of The Hard-Ons, for example, would see how blisteringly brilliant Ohana, while a fan of The Thaw would certainly marvel at the achingly poignant Alps of New South Wales.

Oh, and also - by the by - The Pitz happens to be the place where one member of Witch Hats reportedly pissed on another by accident in his sleep. But that’s another story among potentially hundreds. The stories, I’m sure, will continue to emerge – and that’s the only thing that will keep it alive.

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