The St James Theatre is another messy situation
Grab your mothballs - we're going on a walk...
It’s one of our most precious inner-city music venues, yet the St James Theatre hasn’t hosted a gig since a small fire broke out in the basement in 2015. What’s going on inside, and why have renovation plans stalled? I tried to find out. Let’s go…
It’s cold and dusty. You can feel damp in the air as you breath in. There’s no floor, no stage. Heavy machinery sits idle. Concrete blocks litter the venue. Voices echo into the ether. It looks nothing like how I remembered it.
Someone wrapped plastic bags around their shoes, tying them up over their ankles. That person thought ahead because my white sneakers were ruined.
As I wandered around the remains of a prized jewel in Auckland’s live music scene, I felt like crying. The St James Theatre, the place many have seen Kanye West, The Strokes, The Arctic Monkeys, DJ Shadow and De La Soul perform absolutely legendary shows, was literally in ruins.
The floor had been excavated into oblivion and piles of rubble were everywhere.
Back in 2018, I went on an official historic tour of the St James, the really quite beautiful music venue on Auckland’s Queen Street, just across the road from the Sky World Entertainment Centre, another former titan of Auckland’s entertainment scene.
Together, they’re creating quite the mid-Queen Street dead zone, two giant city blocks of problems that go entirely against Auckland’s Council’s plans to throw a whole lot of money at the city centre to bring it back to life.
I’ve talked about the iMax building in three separate newsletters (here’s part one, part two, and part three) and there’s much more to come on that. It’s been an intense story to work on with so many threads I can’t help but keep pulling on them. I’ll have a major update to tell you about soon.
But you can’t talk about the iMax building without at least mentioning the St James Theatre. When you look out across the road from the back of Event Cinemas on the upper floor of the iMax building, you can see the scaffolding all over the St James - both the street-facing front tower, and the venue behind it.
Staring out of one building that’s unloved and increasingly unused, where tenants are leaving in droves, at another that hasn’t been open to the public in years is an ominous sight. It feels like one could quickly become like the other.
This can’t be allowed to happen.
If the St James looks bad from the outside, it’s just as sad on the inside. For the tour, about a dozen of us spent a couple of hours walking around the building, wandering across the rubble floor, checking out the dusty seats, talking to the current owner, and asking things like: “Why?”
You can read that story, from 2018, here. The bit that still stands out to me is when George Farrant, Auckland Council’s heritage advisor and our tour guide for the day, described the St James as “a body lying on an operating table”.
It’s still waiting for an anesthetist to arrive. According to this Stuff story from the end of last year, nothing has changed since my 2018 visit. It’s still largely in the same state. All upgrades have stalled, waiting for help to arrive.
So what’s the problem?
It’s complicated, as this episode of the excellent Radio NZ podcast The Detail explains.
But it’s also quite simple. Basically, the St James can’t be fully restored until someone fronts up the money to build an expensive apartment block in front of it. The venue needs new toilets and an elevator installed to allow access to the upper venues, and that can only come from a new apartment complex.
That was supposed to happen in 2016, but investors in the apartment block pulled out, stalling renovation plans for the St James Theatre.
Here’s how I put it in my NZ Herald story.
Yep, just like the iMax building, which is enmeshed with The Civic, the St James Theatre and a yet-to-be-built apartment block are intricately intertwined, and can’t be untangled.
It’s all a massive logistical nightmare, and a crying shame. At the St James, right now, there’s no floor or stage. All told, there’s still as much as three years’ worth of work to be done to fully restore it. It’s ironic: the city centre desperately needs a live music venue that’s the size and space of the St James. It has one. It just can’t be used.
As our tour progressed, some stunning touches were revealed that showed the restoration project has roots in the building’s 1928 origins.
This original ceiling has been painstakingly hand-painted and looks incredible…
The building’s statues are painted, shined up and good to go…
And these brass angels are ready to perform for punters once again…
Some of my favourite concert memories are from the St James. Once, sick as a dog, I staggered into the building as The Strokes casually killed it in 2006. I rocked out down the back with John Campbell next to me, who’d arrived, still in his black suit, toting a briefcase, from the Campbell Live studio.
I remember seeing Dylan Moran perform a fiery stand-up show that ended with him swaying drunkenly as he berated a woman with a honk of a laugh for much of his encore. Yes, it’s a multi-purpose venue: I’ve seen movies there, and fashion shows too.
But it’s the music that really stands out. There have been stunners by Che Fu, DJ Shadow, a pre-Fergie Black Eyed Peas and so much more. When I mistakenly moved to Wellington for two years I missed out on two-night stands by Kanye West and Roots Manuva and have kicked myself over it ever since.
I also didn’t get to see the absolutely legendary Yeah Yeah Yeahs show when The Mint Chicks played an opening set so ferocious the roof started falling apart.
Looking at those photos, though, makes me feel depressed. I asked Steve Bielby if there was anything to update for this piece. “The project is still on hold at the moment. We’re investigating options about starting it again but that process takes a little while,” he replied.
So, right now, it’s stuck. You could put the stories of the St James and the Sky World Entertainment Centre together and say Auckland is falling apart. We need to get our shit together. Collaboration between the building’s owners, Auckland Council and the various trusts involved in these projects needs to happen to keep our public spaces and entertainment venues in good health.
Because if we can’t do that, then what’s the point of spending all that money on restoring Queen Street? To have an operational city centre, you need to give the public places to go, things to do, food to eat, and shit to see. Entertainment hubs do that. Live music venues do that. Cool heritage buildings do that too.
Letting buildings decay to the point where I have to write soppy newsletters about them does not do that. I wish I didn’t have to write about them, but here we are.
Five things you need to worry about this week…
Master of None’s third season landed last night after a four-year break and some scurrilous rumours about its creator, Aziz Ansari. He’s disappeared behind the lens for a separate story about an entirely different couple, and reviews are good…
On Tuesday, a bonus behind-the-scenes TV series is airing for anyone who loved that Borat sequel. It’s called Borat Supplemental Reportings Retrieved from Floor of Stable Containing Editing Machine, because of course it is.
On Thursday you might want to close off Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the internet as the long-awaited, highly-anticipated, bound-to-be-a-disappointment Friends: The Reunion hits screens. TVNZ 2 and OnDemand has it from 7pm.
Two new Amazon Prime Video series might be worth your time. The first is the Anne Hathaway sci-fi vehicle Solos, which is streaming now, and the second is Panic, a horror anthology series which looks all kinds of grim. I’m eyeing up Apple TV+’s second season of For All Mankind for my next binge.
I absolutely hated J Cole’s super-serious snore-fest The Off Season. Instead, I’m spending this week listening to rapper Mach Hommy’s Pray For Haiti, another densely layered trip from the Griselda squad. Wiki and Nah’s Telephonebooth is also a warped rap experiment that works in small doses. Lucky it’s only 28m then.
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