10,000 Gigs Grant & Nomination for Best Regional Music Venue
Duration: 2024-2025
10,000 Gigs: The Victorian Gig Fund
We are very pleased to announce that The Coolroom has received a grant under the 10,000 Gigs: The Victorian Gig Fund which will support 20 gigs over the next nine months in the The Coolroom. s over the next few months we have already announced that will recieve this support includes Jesse Lawrance Music, Sally Ford and the Idiomatics, Hetty Kate Trio, Peter and the Wolves, and lots more to come.
The first round of 10,000 Gigs: The Victorian Gig Fund will fund 144 venues to stage paid gigs by local artists. Venues awarded grants include iconic Melbourne venues such as The Tote, The Jazzlab, Mamma Chen’s and Laundry, regional venues like Ballarat’s Volta, Barwon Heads Hotel and Theatre Royal, Taproom and The Coolroom in Castlemaine, along with suburban venues including Narre Warren’s District 14.
We are also very pleased to announce we have been short listed for Music Victoria 2024 Awards Nominee: Best Regional Venue/ Presenter (Over 50 Gigs). This nomination is recognition, we believe, for the tireless work our venue has done to create a program that connects our regional audience with the best in small venue acts possible in our active listening venue.
We have embraced music from a range of genres from jazz to experimental, from country to blues, world music and singer songwriter, nurturing both local talent and some of the best of Melbourne and touring acts from elsewhere, whilst providing a venue for new work, album launches and regular income for musicians.
To Thank The Room
Duration: September-October 2024
Sold out for Sun 22 Sept. Second screening Sun 29 Sept, 2.30pm. New screening Mon 23 Sept, 6pm.
TO THANK THE ROOM Winner Best Melbourne Documentary at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2024.
‘So few films try to capture everyday life… I enjoyed it so much. Just beautiful‘ – John Flaus – Australian screen and broadcasting legend.
Sessions expected to sell out, so please book early!
Maggie Fooke set up the 10 room Brooklyn Arts Hotel in downtown Fitzroy as a guest accommodation for ‘artists and lovers of the arts of all kinds – including conversation, activism and philosophy’ to stay, when visiting Melbourne.It was rather a well-kept secret, but Maggie and Brooklyn clocked up 25,000 guests stays over 13 years of operation – many of those return visits. In late 2019, Maggie emailed her regulars that she had reached the decision to sell the building and close the hotel. And that there would be a film. Join in and help me document Brooklyn’s last 100 days, she wrote. TO THANK THE ROOM is that film:
Documenting the courageous and compelling Maggie Fooke, along with her soft-voiced housekeeper Helen MacKay and Maggie’s feisty also-arts-focussed daughter Aphrodite through the final days of this beloved and ‘quirky’ institution. Maggie joins others in filming ad hoc, engages guests in conversation and the filmmaking process and we the audience are alongside her intimately as she, in her original wild way, is determined – at any cost – to enjoy and share her creation to the last drop.
Length: 77 minutes. 20m Q&A post-film.
Feature Documentary Directed By Belinda Lloyd. Featuring: Maggie Fooke, Helen Mackay, Aphrodite Feros-Fooke, and Bajjah [the dog] Executive Producer: Maggie Fooke, Editor: Larry Lawson Original Score By Emily-Rose Sarkov A KIND WORLD FILMS PRODUCTION
Sunday 22 and 29 September| Doors Open at 2pm | Screening 2.30pm | Show also Monday 23 September at 6pm
The Sentimental Bloke [1919] will be presented in-cinema with a music score by Jen Anderson, which is performed live by Jen Anderson & TheLarrikins [Dave Evans and Dan Warner]. The film, an icon of Australian silent film, is based upon the best-selling verses of C.J. Dennis. It humorously tells the heart-warming story of Bill – the Sentimental Bloke – and his sweetheart Doreen
“The pièce de résistance of Australian feature film-making from the silent era” The Guardian
About the Film
The film is the digitally restored version which incorporates new footage found in the vaults of the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and restored with the vibrant colours of the original tinting and toning. Director. Raymond Longford was one of the Australian silent era’s most prolific and successful film directors.
An adaptation of C.J. Dennis’ verse narrative of life set on the backstreets of inner Melbourne in the 1910s, The Sentimental Bloke is a tale of redemption, depicting the social rehabilitation, courtship and marriage of the titular ‘Bloke’, Bill (Arthur Tauchert) to his sweetheart, Doreen (Lottie Lyell). Lyell, an international star of the Australian silent era and a filmmaker in her own right, co-wrote and edited the film with Longford, her partner and key creative collaborator until her premature death in 1925, from tuberculosis. Lyell was 35.
For the film, Longford and Lyell relocated the setting from Melbourne to Sydney, shooting on location in Woolloomooloo, which then enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a tough inner-city neighbourhood, as well as at Manly Beach and the Hornsby Valley (the orchard scene). Longford’s direction – Longford was himself an actor before becoming a director – elicited a remarkable naturalness from his talented cast, which also featured Gilbert Emery in the role of Ginger Mick.
A hit when it opened at Melbourne Town Hall on the 4th of October 1919, The Sentimental Bloke broke domestic box office records and screened to packed houses for some years. It subsequently disappeared without trace once ‘the talkies’ took over until the 1950s when it was rediscovered in a film library in NewYork!.
*The Digitally remastered versions is presented courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Jen Anderson and The Larrikans
About The Band Jen Anderson Jen has earned an international reputation as a composer and improvising violinist. With a strong classical training background and many years of professional performance improvising with numerous bands, she has also composed music for film, television, theatre and dance.
Jen has enjoyed national success with her score and live performance of string quartet music to the silent film ‘Pandora’s Box’, and further national and international success with her score for the silent film ‘The Sentimental Bloke’. Jen and her band the Larrikins accompanied the screening of the film at several prestigious screen events including the London International Film Festival (UK), Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Italy), Telluride Film Festival (Colorado USA), Tokyo Film Festival (Japan) and Chungmuro Film Festival (Seoul, Korea).
As a composer for film and television her many credits include Ablaze (documentary feature film, 2021) The Show Must Go On (documentary 2019), Hunt Angels (documentary feature film) The Goddess of 1967, Simone de Beauvoir’s Babies (ABC television mini-series), and the silent movies Pandora’s Box and The Sentimental Bloke.
The Larrikins Dave Evans Dave Evans is one of Melbourne’s most acclaimed musicians, widely recognised for his mastery of all musical genres. He performs regularly in Northern Europe and has performed and recorded with The Band Who Knew Too Much,Bric-a-brac, and Jen Anderson & The Larrikins. Dave Evans has performed across Australia in mainstream theatre shows and avant-garde works. He played the featured accordionist in the stage musical Warhorse. His interpretations of tango on the accordion bring his jazz improvisation skills to the fore as well as showing an authentic understanding rarely heard outside native Argentina.
Dan Warner Dan Warner is a songwriter from Melbourne, Australia. In the 80s and 90s, Dan sang and played rhythm guitar in several local bands including The Warner Brothers, Overnight Jones, Dan & Al and The Largest Living Things. Dan now plays with his band The Night Parrots featuring Marcel Borrack, Clio Renner, Nathan Farrelly, Adam Simmons and Ash Davies. Dan has contributed to The Sentimental Bloke project as one half of The Larrikans with Dave Evans.
A biunial magic lantern built from mahogany and brass in the nineteenth century by Newton & Co.
Article from Castlemaine Mail Feb 2024
Some of the most intense experiences to be had at the turn of the last century were produced by the magic lantern apparatus as people sat together, shoulder to shoulder, in the dark.Head to the Coolroom at the Northern Arts Hotel this February as Crank Williams, Patsy Decline and Martyn Jolly work their magic, reconjuring the same sensations and emotions felt by Australian audiences over a hundred years ago.
Colours will swirl and twist in the dark, stories of heartache, despair and desire will be vividly rendered on the screen.They will be performing a series of authentic, original chro- matropes — optical devices where a handle and a cog spin concentrically patterned discs of glass in opposite directions to generate psychedelic pulses of pure colour sensation.
They will also be performing a series of ‘dissolving views’, where hand-coloured squares of glass made from ‘life models’ photographed against painted backdrops, are dissolved oneinto another to illustrate a story or a song.
Crank Williams will be performing vocals; reel-to-reel tape recorder from the 1960’s with its original magnetic heads, a heavily used RCA 1/4 inch tape recorder from the late 1960’s; 1951 National Chicagoan six string lap steel guitar; Hagstrom six string hollow body electric guitar; and a1965 fender tube reverb tank.Patsy Decline will be performing vocals; and playing a Moog theremin (a modern-day model of a classic instrument de- signed by Leon Theremin in the 1920’s).
Martyn Jolly uses slides from the 1800s and early 1900s including; the Lights of London Town, and hand-tinted life models magic lantern slides, to recreate the magic experienced by audiences more than 100 years ago.
7.30pm, Saturday, February 10 and 2.30pm Sunday, Febru- ary 11 at the Coolroom- Northern Arts Hotel 359 Barker Street Castlemaine.
Tickets: $20/$15 or $55/$45 for a share package (two tickets plus bottle wine).
Seating is limited so bookings are essential – events.humanitix.com/magic-lantern-show.
