Popular live music venue Badlands Bar to close at the end of this year
Popular Perth live music venue Badlands Bar will close its doors in December 2023. The venue announced the news on their social media today.
“We’ve loved bringing you live gigs and good times over the past seven years, but it’s nearly time for us to go,” it read. “Badlands Bar will be shutting it’s doors permanently before Christmas.”
Badlands Bar said it made the difficult decision due to increasing costs.
“For the past 12 months Badlands has been on the receiving end of a whopping 10 fold increase in our Public Liability Insurance premiums despite never having made a claim before. This was the only insurance coverage we were able to obtain to ensure the venue could continue to operate. This is a known, but rarely spoken about issue that has been impacting live music venues across Australia to varying degrees for the last 18 months or so.”
“For us, it has meant that our business that only ordinarily trades around 12-16 hours per week, now needs hundreds of dollars in revenue per hour of opening just to pay an insurance premium that we have never needed to call upon in the last seven years.”
“Being an independently owned small business, these massive increases coming straight after COVID have taken a huge toll on the business. This, in addition to other substantial increases in operating costs across the board in the past 12 months mean that Badlands is no longer financially viable.”
Badlands Bar is set to celebrate its final months doing what it does best – with live music.
“We plan to go out with a bang. So stay tuned….over the next five or so months, we hope to bring you many more great live acts and create many more great memories, so we look forward to seeing you down here again.”
Badlands Bar acknowledged the venue meant a lot to Perth’s music community, but would decline any requests to raise funds to support its survival.
“We appreciate that there may be well-wishers out there looking to raise funds on our behalf. However, Badlands will not be endorsing any fundraising efforts to help with our situation, so if you see anything on Go Fund Me, a lamington drive, or meat raffle in our honour, we’d ask that you redirect any such funds to the good folk at Support Act instead, as that will be where we donate any funds raised on our behalf.”
Badlands Bar has announced it will close at the end of 2023. To stay up to date with upcoming events at Badlands Bar, sign up to their newsletter or follow them on Facebook.
Photo by Rachael Barrett