Jade Monkey to reopen before Christmas
The new Jade Monkey will include a casual beer garden and possibly a café – and it should be open before Christmas.
The live music venue’s long-running battle to find new digs is well-known.
But with a venue – 142 Flinders St, inside an abandoned church – and a liquor licence sorted, Jade co-owner Zac Coligan feels he’s finally finished one journey, and is ready to start the next.
“It’s quite an odd place to be, actually. I feel like I’m at the end of something, but it’s been such a long time coming it’s really the begging of it again for me. I’m just really looking forward to getting stuck in,” he told InDaily after finally getting his hands on the keys this week.
The new Jade will include a courtyard beer garden out the front, a front bar, plus an internal space for live music.
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“We’re going to have obviously the front bar, and we’re going to have a band area which will be two different rooms. And we’ll probably have some sort of bar in the band area,” Coligan said.
“The outdoor area will be the beer garden. We’re going to do more afternoon things as well, which is something we’ve been looking to do for a while.
“We’re looking [at] Sunday afternoons and Friday afternoons. We want to expand into the day and eventually do some sort of cafe as well.
“I want to reconnect with the old Jade community but also allow for more of a casual drop in Sunday afternoon thing as well.”
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The St Pauls site is split into two separate sections – a small eastern building that the Jade will occupy, and a very large building to the west of the site that used to house the now-closed Heaven Nightclub.
InDaily has previously revealed the government has been in negotiations to take out a lease on the currently-vacant western building, with speculation the creative hub announced in the state budget will be installed into the space.
While there is no firm date for the reopening, Coligan is hoping to be done before the end of the year, in either late November or early December.
The café is a long-term plan, part of the overall expansion of the Jade’s business model.
The new venue is large, and the rent is understood to be significantly higher than in the Jade’s old Twin St site.
Coligan, who is financing the venture out of his own pocket, said conditions in his liquor licence would also pose risks. But it was a risk he was prepared to take, he said.
“It was either do we go ahead with this project at all, or do we disband it altogether.
“The parameters that we were given are going to be difficult. It’s logistical issues to do with capacity and things like that. We’ve thought long and hard about it and I think it will still be possible.”
He hoped some of that cost could be offset by support from the Jade’s community.
“We’ll be scrapping and begging and borrowing. The community’s been great, and lots of people have been in touch over the last year or so to say we can help, we can paint or whatever.
“And I like the idea of it being a community put-together venue in a way. If people want to come along and paint walls and make their mark on it, that’s really exciting for us.”
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