30 September 2009 — Hopetoun Hotel Closes
The Hopetoun is a well-loved music venue in Sydney, and news of its closure is pretty sad, if for no other reason than the fact that Plastic Palace Alice was booked to play there in November. If you read this update, however, you can see that they'd been given the notice to comply to new standards several months ago. It seems likely that they kept booking shows because they didn't know when they would finally be forced to close, and hoped to hold on for as long as possible. The other option was to stop booking shows and to lose money in the process.
Not an enviable position to be in, but I can imagine that a lot of bands forced to reorganise their tour schedules will be pretty upset about not being told sooner. Let's hope they can get everything updated as early as possible. It was a popular venue, and no doubt it will be missed.