Live music venue Badlands to close by the end of the year
After seven years of rocking and rolling, Perth live music venue Badlands is set to permanently close their doors before Christmas.
Announced this afternoon on the venue’s social media channels, the announcement attributed the closure to unsustainable rises in insurance premiums.
“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 7 years.”
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“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.”
Primarily known as a rock and metal venue, the stage has been graced by international and homegrown talent that included this year’s Eurovision stars Voyager, Spacey Jane, Karnivool, Gyroscope, Frenzal Rhomb, Angel Olsen, Hockey Dad, Amyl and the Sniffers, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and many more.
The venue plans to go out with a bang, with plenty of big noise and big parties planned for the coming months:
“So stay tuned… Over the next 5 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.”
Cover image credit: Rachael Barrett via Badlands