So how does it all end? As vaccines start to circulate throughout the world, that's the question on everyone's minds at the moment. Of course, in certain places—Taiwan, New Zealand—the shadow of the virus is faint. Recently, we've started hearing hopeful reports from Melbourne, with case numbers in the single digits as of the time of publication. On February 17th, Victoria ended its five-day snap lockdown, allowing clubs to operate at a limited capacity once again. Further easing later that month lifted restrictions on drinking and dancing at venues catering to under 200 guests. The state's rigid policies have seemingly paid off, and Instagram stories and accounts from the ground are giving us a glimpse into parties returning.

On March 4th, we spoke with the people behind Colour, an intimate Carlton nightclub run by longtime Melbourne promoters and DJs Liam Alexander and Benny Rausa. What follows is the story of two scrappy club owners who have worked to maintain their connection to the local scene on and off the dancefloor. Every city and club is different, but the situation in Melbourne might hint at what's to come.

First off, can you both introduce yourselves? Tell me about your respective roles at the club

Liam Alexander: So I'm Liam. Generally speaking, Benny and I share booking roles and responsibilities. Benny came from a venue in Melbourne called The Night Cat, which has more of a live music focus, still leaning towards dance music, and I came from a nightclub called Lounge on Swanston Street. So I was very much in the live electronic and DJ world. In the bookings space, it was loosely divided up in that way. But we share that responsibility 50/50. I do the sort of wages, accounts, spreadsheet and numbers stuff, and then Benny...

Benny Rausa: I oversee a lot of the production and logistics. So week-to-week, day-to-day type of stuff, acoustics, noise emission, stuff like that.

For people who haven't been to Colour, can you tell us a bit about it and how it was founded?

Liam: We were looking for ages. We knew Lounge was closing, and we just kept finding places that were no good until eventually, we found this spot with a 24-hour license. And all of a sudden, it was like, "Oh, we've got this place." We moved in in August 2019, within a couple of weeks of signing...

Benny: There was a very real moment having the keys in our hands and realizing, "Well, what are we getting ourselves into?"

Liam: We opened in October 2019. After renovating for seven weeks, we managed to get it together and then we were off and running. And the basic idea for the space was live music upstairs and a nightclub downstairs with a 24-hour license, so go as late as we could. And try to bring those two worlds together a bit.

Videos are starting to emerge again from clubs in Melbourne following premier Daniel Andrews's announcements at the end of February. Can you set the scene in terms of attendance and the general mood at Colour?

Liam: Well, all the shows have sold out since we reopened.

Benny: It very much was that exact vibe at the start, the keenness of people to buy tickets instantaneously. At the start, when we opened, we were still doing a lot of table service stuff requiring booking groups between two and six. So that encouraged a culture of buying tickets with your friends. But now that we can do freestanding, free-flowing stuff throughout the venue, that kind of keenness has still carried through, I would say, but now as things start to ease up a little bit more, maybe it's thinning out a little bit. But yeah, the eagerness is definitely still there for sure.

Liam: Our current capacity is 33 percent of normal. So we would sell every show out in a month-long period, maybe three or four shows a week, sometimes both levels. But you're talking one-third of normal capacity. So there's this illusion of things being really, really good, both in the physical space, as in the energy and the vibe of the party, but then there's the financial side of it, which is obviously a consideration from our perspective. And on one hand, that was true, somehow 50 to 60 people, rather than 150 to 200, felt amazing because people were literally getting there five minutes after doors, staying on the dance floor, only leaving to go to the toilet or the bar or have a quick smoke, and then it's straight back there. Whereas normally, it's as much about sitting in the smoking area chewing someone's ear off as it is about actually listening to music. There was a sense of, "Fuck, we nearly lost this. Like, let's not forget that."

Can you briefly run me through the rollercoaster of openings and closings over the past year?

Benny: On Friday night [March 13th 2020] we hosted Finn Johannsen for 6AM AT THE GARAGE, which is our DJ duo and promoter name. It was dead. The next night New Order played at Sidney Meyer Music Bowl, and it felt like the last party on Earth. Everyone came out and partied, and then that was that. The Wednesday after, we got shut down.

Liam: We pivoted straightaway. We had heaps of outstanding debts—we're talking tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding debts because we'd only been open for five months and had pretty much no money in the bank account—we started doing alcohol delivery, working as laborers...

Benny: We started doing merch. One of the promoters who had to cancel a party set up a GoFundMe for the club, which was amazing.

Liam: Then we started a record label, Colour Club, and that was the first four months in Melbourne. And then we got global attention for the fact that we came back out into some semblance of normal. And that was when we were doing food because the Victorian government required you to do food to serve drinks. But we didn't have a kitchen. So we thought, we'll just get someone to deliver pizzas—we told everyone to make sure there's a pizza on the table [laughs].

So we did that, for a while, had a few little lock-in things. But it was pretty tame. Then we got locked down again, and that was the long lockdown, 100 and something days. Throughout that period, we were doing the same sort of stuff. We did a bit of work lobbying the state government here with a project called Save Our Scene, which ended up being successful. A few venues came together to do this, but it resulted in $15 million in funding specifically for live music venues and nightclubs. So that helped us at least not have to be too frenetic with, you know, trying to make five bucks off selling a bottle of wine. We could go back to a bit more medium-term planning rather than being so frantic.

And that took us to October, then came another staggered reopening. We did a lot of private hires, seated dinners, seated band, jazz club vibes. A lot of things we hadn't done before, which, in some instances, has been really good, because we're continuing to do them now. Benny's built an amazing Sunday night jazz thing, which we had never done and probably wouldn't have suited us before.

And then [on December 6th], we got the word. It's crazy how these things happen, but we had Melbourne Music Week booked as a whole weekend, the biggest program that we've had since we shut, and four days before, the government said that we could dance again. Which was 500 times more work for us, but we were like, "This is the best thing ever." So all the people who bought the seated ticket, we emailed them and told them we can have a dance now. Just be prepared for that. If you've got any issues, let us know. Everyone was stoked about it. So yeah, that weekend, we had triple sessions, cinema style. So you come to the 6 PM, 10 PM or the 2 AM, which just meant we could sell more tickets. And everybody had a chance to come and see acts. And everyone was dancing. And it was very emotional.

Benny: Very emotional. It was incredible to see everyone dancing for the first time. Standing in front of the PA after that long, that's one experience you can't imitate at home. No matter how many livestreams you watch, nothing will replace that feeling of standing in a room with your friends in front of a big PA and watching a DJ or a band play.

Liam: Someone spilling a drink on you, standing on your feet... [laughs]. Since then, we've pretty much been going in that realm. We had one more lockdown for only five days, but that was a weekend's worth of cancelled shows. And now, we're just trying to think of alternative ideas. We did a big party last weekend, open-air, outside our office. They have a courtyard, so we did a 450-person event there because there are fewer restrictions for outdoor events. At the moment, we're hitting the precipice of the JobKeeper program ending, which is our income supplement from the federal government here. And the commercial rent relief scheme, which is the state's approach to rent reduction for struggling businesses, also ends at the end of the month. So we're about four weeks away from one-third of venue revenue with full expenses. Anywhere in the world, running a nightclub is a high-risk venture. You can make a lot of money, but if you're not making money, you're losing a lot of money.

How many staffers work at Colour? I imagine they were also laid off during the lockdown period?

Benny: Well, including engineers, around 15 people. We were able to retain most of our bar staff due to the JobKeeper Payment program. It was looking grim for a time there, but fortunately, we were able to keep the majority of them. We were super lucky to have a pretty awesome team right through. [Back in fall 2019] our staff—including Shane, Chris and Rafeala, who helped with the build, Confetti, who helped us with the brand design stuff—were all with us on opening night. Five minutes before doors, we took off our work clothes and went into venue management mode. So yeah, super-strong team.

How did the lockdown bring Melbourne's dance community together? Do you feel the scene will be stronger coming out of this period?

Liam: In ways. I think one of the most amazing things has been that venue owners and promoters and bookers and promoters don't see each other as, well, "other" as much as they have before. Like, "Oh, I don't want to tell you what I'm doing because I might clash with what you're doing." That stuff's gone. We've got a venue owner WhatsApp group now with everyone being like, "Hey, what are you paying for insurance?"

All of those barriers have been completely removed, which is an amazing thing. I'm hopeful those kinds of things stay. But I'm also aware that competition comes back pretty quickly. I think that there's a bit of unification at the patron level as well, which is just an understanding and a recognition of how close it felt like we came. From our perspective, being business owners in this scene, we did get pretty close to that. Being over. And that appreciation is still being felt when I speak to people who are doing events, coming to gigs, partying late at night. Whether or not it remains... I don't want to be too much of a downer, but yeah, I think people may forget.

Benny: Yeah, people tend to forget things pretty quickly. But for now, it is nice that people can acknowledge that a little bit. You know, we had a nice thing happen at the club a couple of weekends ago. At a certain hour, once people stop buying drinks, it becomes less and less viable to stay open. Then the managers have to discourse with the promoters to say, the bar's starting to slow down, we might have to wrap it up at this point. In this instance, the promoters went around to all the punters and said, "If you stop drinking, we have to shut the party down." Every person bought a drink.

Liam: We come from being promoters and DJs. We want to keep partying until ten in the morning, and it kills us to have to think about shit like that. But it's nice for people to demonstrate that they understand that it's a bit more of a battle than they realized previously.

I noticed that Sleep D played an all-nighter recently and that [Melbourne DJ and label owner] Moopie's playing every weekend, both local legends. Do you foresee a return to serious residencies for local DJs? At least for the time being?

Liam: That's our plan.

Benny: I think that was our intention before, from the time of opening. The aim of the club was never to highlight an international DJ every single week. We were always wanting to champion local music and local artists.

Liam: I previously mentioned oversaturation in Melbourne. There are promoters in the city of bigger repute who do international shows once a week, sometimes three or four international tours a weekend. And in order to compete, you can get caught up in, "Alright, I need to book my own big act."

It's taking away from the fabric of the culture that's built the city in the first place, which allows for punters to go and see those big acts. And I think that if you want to take a positive out of a really shitty situation, it's that we're going back to the roots now.

The bigger promoters couldn't exist without the young DJs that created that vibe and atmosphere at a house party or at a doof somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and I think that was getting forgotten a little bit. We hope we'll be the flag bearers for that, but hopefully, everyone does.

Do you have any advice for clubs and promoters in places like the UK and US, where the reopening feels a ways off?

Liam: I would say try to think about how you can engage with your community outside of the traditional structures because there are lots of ways to do so. I couldn't believe how appreciative they were to have the opportunity to engage in any way with the culture that they really missed while it was gone. Whether that's dropping a bottle of wine off at their house and seeing each other for a second or them listening to a record you put out. That would be my biggest piece of advice, I think.

Benny: I would have to agree with that. The community exists outside of the physical location itself. That was a super important thing for us to realize during the lockdown. If we don't continue to engage with our audience, it'll be a shame because we'll all be isolated. So for us to be able to do those things and stay connected and vice-versa, people getting in touch with us. We had some really awesome conversations through that period.

Liam: Try to put ego to one side. This approach of unionizing venues has been so beneficial in terms of getting attention from the government. But I've forgotten to mention that one of the biggest problems from our perspective at the beginning was the loss of identity that came with not having our venue anymore. I go down there, I see people, I listen to music, I DJ sometimes, it forms a huge part of my sense of self. So when that's gone... I know lots of places in the world aren't doing as well as Melbourne right now, and I'm sure they're experiencing those feelings. The unionizing between people who have shared experiences can make you feel a little bit less fucked and a little bit less alone.