I am breaking every copyright law in the book and hope to god sw keep my details privatebut I pirated a copy of the age article ("sleaze street"-aka, the goings on of king street, part of which jai? (i think) posted on a previous thread) off the factiva database. Thought it was interesting, not that I agree with it as a whole but i guess its kinda interesting to see what an outside perspective is (especially remembering the age is melb's "liberal" newspaper). btw, apologies, i know its a bit long but its the full article including citations...
The Melbourne Magazine
Sleaze St.
Peter Barrett
3,081 words
26 October 2007
The Age
First
50
English
© 2007 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.theage.com.au
It's party season - and the busiest time of the year for King Street, Melbourne's
notorious avenue of nightclubs, bars and strip clubs. So what exactly can Christmas party revellers expect to find there? Peter Barrett takes a tour.
It's fair to say that King Street doesn't have a good reputation. There have been numerous ugly incidents in and around the city nightclub strip in recent years, most shockingly the shooting earlier this year that killed an innocent father-of-three and almost killed a visiting Dutch tourist. King Street has always been conservative Melbourne's alter ego, but in recent years it has evolved from being a precinct where mainstream nightclubs, dancing and music fuelled patrons' passions into something seedier, attracting known criminals, bikies, drug dealers and regular violent incidents.
There are now six venues offering varying degrees of stripping and erotic dancing for men and women, with the boldest verging on the outright gynaecological. Even the veteran four-level nightclub Inflation runs male strip shows for its female clientele on Saturday nights. According to Region One Superintendent Stephen Leane - the police officer in charge of the area - King Street is not, day-to-day, as bad as its public image, but he admits there are ongoing issues with public order, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when as many as 250,000 people come into town looking for entertainment. Authorities have tried keeping a lid on problems by working with venue managers and installing security cameras and better lighting in the street; meanwhile the recent rise in assaults in the city has prompted police and the Government to target strips with multiple venues - particularly King Street - and in August the Government announced it would introduce laws to give police powers to ban repeat offenders from the area. So what does go on over the course of a typical night on King Street? We visited every nightclub, strip joint and bar to find out.
Men's Gallery, corner Lonsdale and King streets
A large door leads from the reception area into a gloomy, almost empty room lit on one side by a long bar and in other places by red neon with a few disco balls glinting occasionally. A blonde, bikini-clad dancer lies on stage, languidly opening and closing her legs for a man sitting directly in front of her - the only customer in the club. The room has low ceilings, sticky carpet and pictures of nudes straddling motorcycles on the walls. The waitress behind the bar explains that the upstairs section opens later in the evening, when most of the patrons will start arriving, after 9pm. She says the girls are not paid by the club to dance on the stage and make all their money from "private dances", held in corners and separate annexes around the venue. Twenty dollars will buy a one-song private dance (about five minutes) and $50 will get you three (about 15 minutes). Despite the lack of customers here at the moment, the waitress says the dancers working on days like these usually do "very well" - when the club is quieter they can "use their personality" to sell more private dances. As we leave, another middle-aged man enters, alone.
Goldfingers, corner Lonsdale and King streets
A set of plush, carpeted stairs with brass rails leads up into a vast venue with multiple dimly lit rooms. In one of the two main bar areas, two men in suits drink beer over a game of pool. Behind them, television screens advertise private lap-dancing rates ($20 a song seems to be an industry standard). Semi-pornographic "arty" plaster mouldings done in Greek or Egyptian style decorate the walls. It is still early and the stage at the other end of this room, which has three poles fixed into the ceiling, is empty. In the main room, there is a bar down one side and a large stage at the end, occupied by a dancer in a bikini. Some 25 men sit in the shadows, mostly alone, nursing beers and uniformly staring at the dancer even though she is barely going through the motions. Of her audience, the most voluble are a group of young men sitting in the chairs directly below the stage, known as the tipping chairs (it is strip club convention that patrons must tip the dancers to sit here). The men are wearing soccer shirts and appear to be on an end-of-year celebration. At the back of the room is a door to a semi-private area where strippers take their clients for private dances - from the main room it is just possible to see a balding, older man receiving a private dance from a woman who slowly strips down to bare flesh while he sits impassively. One by one the soccer boys, too, are taken into the private area by the club's strippers. One of them returns to his friends and raises both arms in the air as if he's just kicked a goal.
The Colonial Hotel, corner Lonsdale and King streets
A regular nightclub. Exterior bluestone walls give way inside to brick arches, exposed disco lights and a Perrier Jouet-branded mirror hanging along one wall - a classy touch, perhaps. The rustic, timber dance floor is busy at lunchtime with office celebrations and businessmen tucking into T¿bone steaks. Television screens play American soap operas during the day. A spiral staircase leads to a balcony area with another bar, more dining and stained-glass windows. Above are two more bars with karaoke on Friday nights (the venue has a capacity of about 1400 people). Smokers spill out into the bluestone alley behind and on Saturday night the footpath is clogged with young people queuing to get in and waiting for taxis at the nearby rank.
Dallas Dancers Bar, 189 King Street (downstairs)
A single-room bar at street-level. The air is spiked with the smell of vomit. Most of the patrons look very young and a group of inebriated girls jump up and down on the slightly raised dance floor to Justin Timberlake's Sexy Back. A jumble of worn couches and chairs are randomly arranged on a timber floor in front of the stage; a Daytona video game sits unplugged next to a cigarette vending machine.
Dallas Dancers, 189 King Street (upstairs)
Another strip club, at the top of a steep set of stairs. It's a large room with mirrors on the walls and a bar in one corner. It's busy, mostly with men but there are a few couples. There are four, single-pole, podium-style stages - each surrounded by the now-familiar egg-cup-like vinyl seats - but only one podium is in use. Here a dancer with long brown hair, dressed in a green bikini is crouched on all fours, slowly wiggling her bottom. An announcer interrupts the rock soundtrack and says, "Get ready, folks, it's show time!" The lights dim a little and a blonde dancer dressed in a white tutu, silver top and high heels, arrives in a spotlight on the main stage. She is bent, doubled over, assuming a wind-up-doll-like pose. "Give a big hand for our very own living doll, Mackenzie!" shouts the man and a heavy bass beat starts, accompanied by a wind-up, clockwork motif as the dancer "comes to life", arms jerking mechanically in "living doll" fashion. A genuine stripper, in that she actually sheds pieces of clothing, "Mackenzie" works through an athletic routine to a medley of rock music including Annie Lennox's Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These). She ends the routine, now completely naked, with a series of impressive mid-air leaps and aerial splits.
Exchange Hotel, 120 King Street (corner Little Collins)
The security man asks for drivers' licences, which he swipes through a black machine "in case there's any trouble". It's "Bosnian night" and the cover charge is $15. The timber-floored room is divided roughly in two by tall, T-shirt-wearing young men (at the bar) and immaculately-dressed women (on the dance floor). Disco lights flash and pulse in time with the music.
Inflation, 60 King Street
The rooftop tent is the only part of the venue open this particular night (there are three other levels) and female customers dominate, with large groups seated at long wooden and steel tables leading towards a raised dance stage at the back. Bon Jovi's Living On A Prayer segues into You Give Love A Bad Name, as 25 girls dance. A bar at the back is clogged with people taking advantage of the gas heaters and at least four "hens" can be spotted in the crowd, distinguished by their lacy headgear. It turns out this is the tail-end of a night called Mandate Male Revue, a male strip show. After a few bars of Survivor's Eye Of The Tiger three young men - apparently not part of the hired entertainment - venture on stage, one still carrying a beer. Several girls take this as their cue to leave.
Showgirls Bar 20, 46 King Street
A roped-off square of red carpet marks the entrance to a bluestone building lit by the neon "Showgirls" sign overhead. Past an elaborate golden goddess statue in the corner, a girl in a booth takes $15 for entry and stamps wrists with a red star. Directly opposite her is a doorway marked THE RED ROOM. In here, a dancer in a white bikini is dancing slowly on a low podium. Behind her, three completely naked women are visible, sprawled over a man on his buck's night, tying his hands together with a white rope. His male companions are laughing.
Stairs lead up to a much larger room that is filled with mostly young men, dressed casually in T-shirts, soccer tops and jeans. Mirrors are everywhere, making it difficult to judge how big the space is. At one end, there is a bar surrounded by banks of television screens tuned to sports and music video programmes. Exposed rafters lend a slightly barn-like atmosphere to the place and two pole podiums are surrounded by men seated in individual armchairs and stuffed couches. To one side of the larger stage is a series of screened-off rooms for private dancing. Three young men seated around the stage talk to a dark-haired woman lounging in a bikini in front of them. She turns around and ushers two other dancers over. The three begin stripping for the men, taking off their tops and then lap dancing on each of them. At one point the first woman removes her G-string, wraps her thighs around the head of one of her clients and bucks violently with her hips, seven or eight times in quick succession. With each thrust, the man's neck can be seen jerking back in an alarming manner. Dedicated customers can buy special $2 tipping notes to tuck into the dancers' underwear and G-strings ($20) in black or white, with "stolen from Bar 20" printed on them.
Centrefold Lounge, 22 King Street
A blonde woman, completely naked, is sitting on a man seated at a small podium stage near the entrance. She is half on the stage, half on him, at times allowing him to nuzzle his head into her chest. It is very dark but coloured lights in red, purple and green illuminate dancers in a room decorated with ornate Ionic plaster columns and an oversized chandelier. There is a sunken bar in the middle and beyond that is the main stage, which is horseshoe-shaped and has three poles for dancing. Eight men and two female patrons are sitting around the main stage while three dancers in very brief bikinis perform to moderately loud house and R&B music. On the mezzanine level is another bar and at the King Street end is a semi-screened room where two men can be seen having separate lap dances. On the main stage, a man gives one of the dancers some money. She takes off her top and rests her breasts on his face. Then she spends a while on all fours showing another man her behind. A dancer dressed in clear plastic heels and black lingerie climbs to the top of one of the poles, grips it with her legs, arches her back and hangs upside down for a moment, before sliding down headfirst and dramatically coming to a stop only centimetres from the stage.
Tramp, 14 King Street (basement)
It is easy to mistake the entrance of this basement dance club with Barcode, a different sports bar upstairs that is shut due to alleged breaches of its liquor licence. At Tramp, it's almost 2am and the long, concrete floor is almost deserted. An owl feeds its young on a nature documentary playing behind the long bar and glass cases are filled with expensive-looking cognacs and brandy. Industrial-sized fans are fixed to the corners of the room while a DJ at the front plays ambient techno. A waitress behind the bar explains that most of the club's clientele are people in the hospitality industry, who come in after 3am to wind down after work .
... cont....



but I pirated a copy of the age article ("sleaze street"-aka, the goings on of king street, part of which jai? (i think) posted on a previous thread) off the factiva database. Thought it was interesting, not that I agree with it as a whole but i guess its kinda interesting to see what an outside perspective is (especially remembering the age is melb's "liberal" newspaper). btw, apologies, i know its a bit long but its the full article including citations...
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