Cherry Bar is a fixture on the Melbourne city map, particularly among fans of rock music and late-night partying. Everyone in Melbourne with a vague interest in music has heard of Cherry Bar and likely been there.
But the bar’s tenure on AC/DC Lane has come to end, with a new location soon to be announced.
Open since 1999, it only really hit its stride when owner James Young came on board about 13 years ago.
“When I inherited the bar it was in financial ruin, owing an enormous amount to the ATO and it never had live bands on,” Young says. “I’m very glad that I didn’t do my due diligence, because no one in the world would’ve allowed me to buy the bar. I just got lucky and sold my advertising agency and for the first time in my life I came into some money and I wanted to buy my favourite bar in the world just to make sure I could always get in.”
The bar was open on just Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights during the early years. Once Young joined, however, they started operating seven nights a week with the ambition to put on as much live music as possible. This allowed Cherry to turn a corner financially and over the last decade the bar’s transformed from a successful underground hang-out to a recognised mainstream venue.
“We’re just a door in a building in a lane,” Young says. “Thankfully I saved my best marketing move for myself, changing Corporation Lane to AC/DC Lane 12 years ago. But there’s not a grandiose flashing sign out the front that says Cherry’s there. During the day people can’t find it and even at night they have difficulty finding it.”
A self-styled dive bar, Cherry is capped to just 200 people. It might sound small-scale, but its reputation is immense. It’s become a go-to hang out for local and touring musicians, attracting the likes of Noel Gallagher, Arctic Monkeys, Metallica and Axl Rose.
“You could argue that we’re internationally the best known bar in Australia,” Young says. “When it began, Cherry was a cool underground bar where you could go in and listen to someone play the entire Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album track for track from vinyl. Then it evolved once we started doing live bands to the opposite of an underground bar – a bar that even people who live in Hoppers Crossing and listen to Triple M and may not have been to the bar know of its existence.
“I was in the bar recently and it was very quiet and two couples came in that were both international tourists that had arrived that morning from their different flights from Europe. Both of them said you can’t pick up a guide on Melbourne without reading that you have to go to the Cherry Bar.”
Building a reputation is one thing, but preserving what fed the reputation is harder to achieve. Young doesn’t want to grow nostalgic or fawn over the glory days, but he’s been reluctant to make many changes in the bar.
“We’ve left it exactly the same. Scarcely changed the carpet, scarcely changed the posters on the wall, always defended its integrity. I do wish that I could’ve solved the toilet smell; it’s the one thing I won’t miss,” he says.
Keeping it real has always been Cherry’s number one objective. “The council came down once and said, ‘We see that you’ve got these illegal street posters that keep getting put up in the laneway. They look a bit rough round the edges. We thought we’d come down and … put the posters neatly in a nice little frame and they won’t look so unclean’. To which I said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
“There’s all the other bars around us who have functioning air conditioning and nice smelling bathrooms with their mock gold swan-shaped faucets. But the irony with a dive bar, especially after midnight – we’re open til 5.00am – people connect to the nitty gritty and to something being real.”
People are justified in worrying that the move to a new location means the loss of Cherry’s unique ambience. But while he can’t promise the exact same layout, atmosphere and aroma, Young is transplanting as much as he can.
“I’m taking the staff, I’m taking the red table top bar, I’m taking the red curtain behind the stage, I’m taking the carpet,” he says. “The toilet smell is the only thing I want to leave behind. It’s got to be a late night dive bar, it’s got to have a capacity that’s under 250, it’s got to have live music relentlessly.
“But at the same time, there’ll never be anything like Cherry in AC/DC Lane. It’s the perfect location and the perfect design in terms of shape and how it miraculously sounded so good and how you could stand at the end of the bar and have a conversation while the band was playing without having your ears blown off.”
Stay tuned to Beat over the coming weeks as more information on Cherry Bar’s relocation comes to light.
