Happy Hour At The Crematorium
Adam Smith
An unreliable, half-remembered love letter to a place that raised us, sometimes wrecked us, and
gave us everything we didn’t know we needed. A jagged ode to Adelaide’s filthiest church of sin
and salvation. Welcome to the Toucan.
What I remember most about those nights is the crush to get in. A few hundred sixteen-year olds,
half-cut and jammed together in a shit show of cigarette smoke and poor impulse control. No
line, no order - just a wild, feral surge of horny teenagers clawing at the door, heads twisted with
nicotine and the sweet, dumb thrill of getting away with it all.
When the doors finally swung open, the simmering mania cranked up to full fucking boil.
Security staff with rat’s tails and neck tatts tried to bring order to the chaos. A tough ask, holding
back a tsunami of the inbred offspring of Adelaide’s aristocracy, high on pilfered liquor cabinet
booze and inherited privilege. Spooner girls decked out in Country Road and Lacoste. Sweaty,
flush-faced boys in boat shoes, beige moleskins hugging their half-mongrels, untucked stripey
‘going out’ shirts. Blue bloods with popped collars. A full entitlement of rich young fogeys.
For me those nights started with a quick detour to the Feathers Hotel at the top of Greenhill
Road. After stashing my P plates, I’d roll through in my ‘62 Beetle and roll out a couple minutes
later with a couple of six-packs for me and my best mate John. We'd pull into a side street a few
blocks from the venue and neck drinks in the back seat, fogging the windows with our excess
adrenaline. Talking shit and plotting. Which dickheads to avoid, which girls - if everything
aligned and the pheromones hit just right - we might make out with.
Sometimes JD - another mate of ours from school - would join us. We’d smoke and riff on
starting a band, the kind that would burn the world down and build something new from the
ashes with sound and power and great haircuts.
The backseat pregame was often the best part of the night. No pressure or posturing. Just a
self-contained teenage riot of energy and potential.
We aimed to arrive just after the doors opened, mostly to avoid the worst of the aggro - the cocky
meatheads looking to impress their mates by shoving us skinny alt-rock kids into bike racks.
The venue was the faded Burnside Town Hall. Built in the 1920s, it boasted a sprung wooden
dance floor and wraparound balcony purposely designed, it seemed, for barely consensual
underage grappling.
A couple of girthy lunkheads from our school had come up with the idea for these nights. I knew
both of these chodes and didn’t care for either of them. But despite the occasional schoolyard
beef, they did usher me in a couple times when entry was at a premium.
They called it ‘Seniors’.
A DJ from SA-FM would spin a few sets of top 40 hits and adolescent bangers. ‘Don’t Change’
by INXS. ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits. ‘Addicted to Love’ by the louche, slightly creepy
Robert Palmer. Bryan Adams sang about his first real six-string in ‘Summer of ‘69’ - a
guaranteed floor-filler.
Most nights featured a local cover band knocking out similar hits of the day. JD and I would lap
this shit up. As a newbie bass player, my eyes were locked on chord shapes and amp settings and
how the bass player carried it all off. Slung low and played with a pick? Punk as fuck. Strapped
on too high? A fucking disgrace.
Seniors was frequented pretty much exclusively by that private school, straight, white cadre of
Young Liberals, destined for a career in law, divorce and court-ordered rehab.
But before long a new type of kid started rolling through. Public school punks and goths from
Marryatville, Glenunga, Adelaide High. These kids bludged school to rifle through op shops,
shoplift tall cans of Silhouette Black and copies of The Face. They had records by The Cure, The
Jesus and Mary Chain and The Smiths. Their parents probably let them smoke weed at home
Some had even started bands - real bands that played gigs. They took Medislims, slam danced
and set off fire extinguishers in the hall. The girls were tough, sexy and terrifying. They could’ve
easily beat us up if they wanted to.
When the house lights came on, everyone spilled out to the carpark. Usually I would fuck off
pretty quick, keen to sidestep the crackling potential of random violence from blue-ball fuckwits.
But one night, at the edge of the crowd, I got talking to a girl in a leather jacket, ripped jeans and
Ripples. She was leaning up against a car, smoking - tipsy and catastrophically magnetic.
“So, what are you doing now?” she asked, her pout hit somewhere between an invitation and a
warning.
“Nothing much. Heading home I guess”.
I had a midnight curfew and a mum who waited up until she heard a key in the door.
“Shame,” she breathed calm and close. “We’re going to the Toucan. You wanna come?”
***
That was the last night I wasted any more time at Seniors. I was headed somewhere else. A place
where cute girls in biker jackets and ripped jeans drank and danced and broke hearts. A place
that smelled like piss, hairspray and bad fun.
Officially? The Tou-Can-Tou. But everyone I knew just called it the Toucan.
It was a glittering shithole. A glamorous dive bar. A clubhouse for teenage delinquents,
reprobates and androgynous dilettantes. The barstaff didn’t give a fuck how old you were, what
school you went to, or if your parents were waiting up. It was grimy and disintegrating. It was
fucking glorious. And for a while there, it was ours.
After moving from its original digs in Hyde Park, this version of the Toucan resurfaced at 181
Hindley Street, deep in Adelaide’s west end badlands - a twilight zone of sex shops, yiros joints
and broken glass glittered car parks. After dark, it turned into a feral playground for packs of
pissed-up suburban warriors - cunts wired on truckie dust and testosterone, fists cocked, looking
for teeth to loosen, eyes to blacken.
That end of town hummed with menace. And right in the middle of it was the Toucan - a citadel
of debonair junkies, fabulous burnouts and teenage joyriders. Crossing that threshold for the first
time felt like stepping out of a John Hughes movie straight into the pages of a DIY punk fanzine.
Like some of us, it was damaged, beautiful and barely holding itself together.
A ticket booth jammed right inside the door, the main bar stretched along the front wall to the
right. Up the back and to the left, a DJ booth. Above the main stage was a mural that should’ve
made sense, but somehow didn’t. A trio of cartoon toucans frozen mid-jam - checkerboard suit
jackets, stovepipes, wayfarers and bucket hats. Deranged mascots for The Young And The
Wasted.
A dance floor took up the remaining space on the lower level. Off to the left, the toilets -
graff-scrawled crypts that smelled like someone OD’d in there weeks ago and was still haunting
the joint.
Two sets of rickety stairs at either end of the main room led up to a second level. A smaller bar
with a balcony view of the broken angels in the shadows below. A beer garden was bolted onto
the side, the perfect soundstage for tear-stained teenage soap operas.
Kids from all over the city turned out. Goths, punks, mods, queers, rockabillies, B-boys, new
romantics - assorted weirdos and miscreants from every corner of Adelaide’s subcultural
zeitgeist.
The girls that lit me up were heartbreakers straight out of a Tim Burton fever dream - hair like
melted vinyl records, fishnets, tartan minis and Docs, lips crime-scene red. I was underage and
underwater in this lair of beautiful monsters.
On one of my first nights there, I pushed through the crowd as Sigue Sigue Sputnik strafed the
dance floor with their electro sex lasers - heart pinballing around my ribcage as I tried to spot
someone - anyone - I knew. At the upstairs bar, I waited. Tried to act nonchalant, like I was one
of the regulars. Halfway through ordering something illegal, I felt fingernails slip under my shirt
and rake all the way down my back.
I turned to face two Dita Von Teese doppelgängers. Stereo catwomen. Red lips, green eyes.
Identical beauty spots seductive pinpricks of danger on flawless alabaster skin. One leaned in
close, close enough for breath and perfume and menace.
“Honey, I’d love to take you home. Cut you up. Keep you in my freezer”.
Turned on and absolutely fucking petrified, I quietly choked on my own soul.
But I was in.
This wasn’t some high school dance. This wasn’t a safe suburban night at home watching Hey
Hey It's Saturday! - this was something else. Something exotic, erotic and utterly intoxicating.
It was a dump. A temple. A fuck-you riot of patent leather, secondhand smoke and perfect
eyeliner.
But it was ours. Our CBGBs. Our Crystal Ballroom. Our Danceteria.
Our Toucan.
***
I first met Michael Pulsford - the artist formerly known as Mahat - in those filthy Toucan toilets
sometime around August ‘87. I knew him as the detonating drummer for goth/punk teen
supergroup ‘Rats In The Walls’ and man about town. We were both in op shop suits, rakish ties,
synchronised shoulder-length blonde hair. Clocking our matching looks, he introduced himself,
grinned and announced ‘Alright then - from now on we’re gonna be mates’. And just like that we were. Still are. Over the decades, I’ve had the honour of making some glorious noise
alongside him in a few killer bands. He's one of the greats - on stage or off.
I wanted to know how the Toucan first got its hooks into him - not just the music, but the messy,
sleazy, outlaw majesty of the place.
“Sometime in Year 12 at Adelaide High - before we started ‘Rats in the Walls’ - I remember
seeing my mate Kristoff scrawl something in a school book that said ‘Gothic Death’. I thought,
fuck me - that’s a really great name for a band. So me, Kristoff, and our mate Shane threw
together this really raw, really spare Cramps-y, early Bad Seeds sort of thing.”
Gothic Death played two gigs. The first, a lunchtime show in the school hall. Their second and
final gig was at the Toucan.
“I barely remember the set. I do remember Kristoff being nervous because he’d written this
really nasty song about a woman he’d been seeing. He tried to mumble the words, but of course,
a mate of ours went up to her afterwards and was like, ‘Did you hear that song? That was about
you.’ She was like, ‘Fucking hell. What a bastard!”
He told me how he used to sneak out after his parents had gone to bed. Climb out the window,
walk across the South Parklands past the beats and men fucking in the bushes.
“It got pretty sketchy sometimes. I’d stumble back in at 3 a.m., reeking of tobacco and whatever
else. I smoked a lot back then because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.”
As we talked more, he went on to describe how looking back on it, the Toucan could only have
existed in a small city like Adelaide.
“It wasn’t just about the dance floor - though that was important. Adelaide was just too small for
dedicated clubs for each specific subculture. So the Toucan was this weird, shared space where a
bunch of different tribes overlapped. You got exposed to music you might not have otherwise.”
Mike didn’t realise how rare this was until he left Adelaide and met people from other cities
where scenes stayed on their own turf and didn’t interact so much.
“In Melbourne you had the Punters Club, an indie band venue, where you could go seven nights
a week and see live music. But you're not going to hear Run DMC or Dead or Alive.”
For Mike, being exposed to a bunch of different music meant having to wait for your moment of
dance floor glory - the tracks you’d be willing to be seen dancing to. Some people didn’t care -
yeah, whatever. It's all fun. But others were more factional. The B-boys skulking in the corner,
waiting for Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’ or any of the early Def Jam joints. The goths
murderously biding their time, waiting for Siouxsie and The Banshees, the Sisters of Mercy, The
Cure.
“It created this kind of cross-pollination. In bigger cities with bigger scenes, you could stay in
your own lane forever. In the Toucan, you didn’t really have a choice.”
That was the beauty of it, Mike reckons. No one group was big enough to take over the room.
“There were definitely subcultures back then, and people picked sides. But at the Toucan, there
just wasn’t the numbers for anyone to go, ‘Oi, fuck off! This is our place’, you know? You had to
get along - it was this weird unspoken truce. And that’s what made it so good.”
***
Kristoff Barrington is sitting in the front seat of his car, laughing his arse off. For the next hour
he spills stories about the Toucan and all the busted-up glory of being young and not giving a
fuck.
At the Toucan, it was hard to miss this human landmark. I remember a girlfriend of mine once
saying Just meet me at Kristoff like he was some kind of teenage lighthouse, holding steady in
the midst of the mayhem.
We were never super tight. We had mutuals and knew each other enough for a quick nod or a
chat about bands, guitars - whatever. But even then, I could tell Kristoff had something. He had a
knack for bringing the drama to low-stakes moments and turning them into something epic.
So this whole thing feels less like an interview, more like cracking a beer with a mate you didn’t
know you missed.
I have to ask about that infamous Gothic Death gig at the Toucan.
“I was shitting myself - just so nervous. My oldest brother, David, slips me a pill and goes, ‘Take
this, you’ll be fine.’ It didn’t help at all. Made everything worse! I got even more paranoid.
We had this pretty offensive song about a certain girl. I didn’t even know she was there. So we
finish the set, and next thing she’s right in front of me. Bang! Slaps me across the face. Not my
finest moment. But at that age, I didn’t have a clue. I just thought it was punk.”
So winding it back a bit, I ask what a typical night out looked like for fifteen year old Kristoff
before he found the Toucan?
“Parks, mostly,” he says. “Bottle of Wipeout, a flagon of whatever. Sometimes house parties if
someone’s parents were away. I remember one in North Adelaide... got absolutely blind. Next
thing I know, I wake up and there’s cops everywhere, clearing the place out. They chuck me in
the back of a paddy wagon with four or five others. But those idiots left the doors open while
they were chasing more people - so I bolted. Ran across town, straight into the Toucan.”
He talks about sneaking out late, constructing a fake body under the sheets - not too neat, not too
rigid, just crumpled enough to pass a tired mum’s midnight cellblock check.
From covering tracks to dancing to them, I ask if he remembers what got him on the Toucan’s
dance floor.
“There was one that went ‘Take a ride on the Sugar Train… Take a ride on the Sugar Train.’ As
soon as that song came on, my best mate and I would run to the dance floor - didn’t matter where
we were. It was our signal - Okay, I'll meet you as soon as that song starts. Same with Soft Cell’s
‘Tainted Love’. I wasn’t much of a dancer, though - more of your stand-around-drinking type.”
When I ask if the Toucan gave him a musical education, Kristoff doesn’t hesitate.
“No two ways about it. I mean it wasn’t just the songs we got exposed to - it was the people.
You’d meet someone, hit it off, and next thing they’re handing you a tape, or telling you about a
gig. Your tastes just got blown wide open. Your friendship circle too. It taught me how to deal
with women for sure.”
For a lot of us, the Toucan was a crash course in how to be a semi-functioning adult. We learned
how to act - or not - in a club.
Kristoff agrees.
“We had to learn how to interact with each other. It was really positive in that respect.”
He pauses, fires up a durry, and lands on something simple and true.
“I mean, Adelaide back then? It was a big country town. Not much for young people to do. I
don’t know what it’s like these days, but back then the Toucan gave us a place to be ourselves. I
was wearing capes and velvet jackets and shit. Not a lot of venues were rolling out the red carpet
for that kind of look, you know?”
For alternative Adelaide kids in the late ‘80s, standing out sometimes meant standing in the
firing line.
“But fuck it. Whatever. You didn’t even think about it. You’d be surrounded by bogans looking
to start some shit, but it didn’t matter. That’s the confidence of youth, right? ‘This is me,
motherfucker. Deal with it.’”
As he talks, I can’t help but picture Kristoff on a bus headed for the Toucan - curls lacquered,
pointy boots up on the seat, cape spilling into the aisle. As dead-eyed suburban fuckheads lob
insults at him, this magnificent gothic peacock, this dark overlord of the Circle Line just sits
there - too cool to care, too strange to kill. This is me, motherfucker.
I ask how those years changed him. What was the difference between the Kristoff Barrington
who walked into the Toucan for the first time, and the one who walked out?
He leans back in his seat, thinks it over.
“It’s like when you take acid - it cracks something open in your brain. You don’t know it at the
time because you’re just living it. But it shaped the rest of my life. I still don’t dress normal. My
taste in music’s broad, probably alternative - though I hate all those labels.”
I know exactly what he means.
“Yeah, it was a perspective shift. A life-changer, really. I’ve never really stopped to think about
it, but yeah - that place played a big part. I mean, I married a girl who used to go to the Toucan.”
I laugh - so did I.
“Well now it’s sounding a bit incestuous,” he grins. “But yeah. What a great club. It had its flaws
- sleazy owners and all that - but it was ours.”
We talk about how it feels when you bump into someone from those days. It’s like a secret
handshake. A flash of recognition, a certain look. No one really talks about it much, but you can
tell - it meant something. It still does.
As we start to wrap up, I ask Kristoff if he could meet his 1987 self, what would he say? Any
advice?
He pauses just long enough to take a drag on his dart.
“I’d tell him to have a good time - but recognise when you need to pull up a bit. I partied too
long, probably should’ve hit the brakes a bit earlier. Other than that? Maybe don’t stress so
much.
But I think we’d get along. We’d talk about Nick Cave. And not worrying about what other
people think. You do when you’re young - you care a bit too much. But then one day you wake
up and you don’t give a shit anymore. And man, that’s a beautiful thing.”
I can’t think about the Toucan without picturing Maya Mitra. The whole Toucan scene wasn’t
something Maya joined - it happened around her. I don’t think there was a single night back then
when Queen Maya wasn’t in the house. Tall, striking, cool as fuck and always in some cunty
little outfit that made the rest of us feel like we were playing catch-up to a style memo she had
posted months earlier.
I spoke with Maya for the first time in thirty-five years. We dug through the wreckage of those
half-remembered nights - chased down ghosts that had snuck out of bedroom windows - the
ghosts of songs that got under our skin, bled into our bones and rewired us on a cosmic,
molecular level. We unearthed memories that have stuck to us, whether we wanted them to or
not.
“I don’t even remember how I ended up there,” she says. “I reckon it might have been Sophie
Petit or Lucy Markey. At the time I was living this hellish existence in an all-girls Catholic
school - too tall, too brown, too poor, no dad - it was endless. Then one day Sophie was like,
‘Fuck this. Let’s go to the Toucan. Tonight’. Next thing, I’m sneaking out my window on
Thursday night for dollar drinks, fourteen years old. That’s how it started."
She laughs at the absurdity of it all. "I'd come home before dawn, wash my makeup off, get a
couple of hours sleep and go to school."
I ask if she remembers her first night at the Toucan.
"No, not really. All I remember is that it felt like I had found my people."
Was she nervous walking in? Scared?
"I don’t think I ever felt scared. The only time I ever felt nervous was when Katie Snarksis or
Trish Berger would throw drinks on you and walk off if you looked at a boy they liked. But it
was all cool - I don't remember ever having a beef with anyone. I don't remember fights breaking
out or anything like that.”
And then there was the music. The thing everyone talks about with the same kind of ache - the
soundtrack to those euphoric, sweetly seditious nights, all built around the rush of getting away
with it for a few stolen hours.
What were the big tracks for her?
“The Cult,” she says, no hesitation. “Anything by The Smiths, Nick Cave, Joy Division - peak
gothic, ‘depressed Maya’ mode. My god - ‘She Sells Sanctuary’? I can’t hear that song and not
think of the Toucan. ‘Blue Monday’ is another one like that.”
She’s got more.
“Even now, if I hear ‘How Soon Is Now?’ there's something that hits me on a cellular level. I
will sit in my car listening to that as loud as I can. My windows are literally shaking - it just takes
me back there. It's the weirdest thing - I can't listen to that song and not go right back to that
time. The music was so integral - still is, you know, and the Toucan gave me my taste for music.
It’s why I'm a music lover - I was surrounded by my people and that music reminds me of who
they were. And who I was.”
I couldn’t talk to Maya about the Toucan without getting into what she and her crew were
wearing. From where I stood, the looks they pulled together were all about showing up in
something that had currency and power - a language, an identity. Traded between friends, racked
from op-shop change rooms, chopped up and remixed an hour before heading out - clothing as
both armour and a declaration of intent.
“You know, for us it always started at Justin Sparrow’s place in Kent Town on Saturday
afternoon. That was the ritual. We’d pile in with a suitcase full of clothes and just start trying
things on”, she says. “I had this Chanel t-shirt - totally fake. Lucy with the long white socks.
Docs or Ripples. Probably both, and we swapped them with each other - depending on what look
we were going for.”
She lights up at the thought of them as makeshift ateliers.
“We made bubble skirts. I made a rah-rah skirt once - I was loving myself sick. We’d hit Vinnies,
army disposal stores. We’d cut them up and make something fucking amazing.”
She’s on a roll, riffing on how happy she was just hanging out with friends and drinking.
“Oh my god - the preloading! We'd rock up to Justin’s with a bottle of something. Lucy and I
would split a bottle between us, easy. Just that feeling of sharing a bottle of spirits with your best
mate when you’re sixteen...”
She gives me a look - equal parts ‘never again’ and ‘fuck, I miss it.’
“I just think about how lucky we were. We were naive, but there was a spirit of looking out for
each other.”
There are some stories about the Toucan that are only half-told. The myth is all about the music
and late-night dance floor transcendence, dollar drinks and making out to a backing track of The
Screaming Tribesmen and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. But talk to someone like Maya and you
realise there was another side - a much darker side especially for the young women who came up
in those rooms. The fun and the sense of freedom was real, but it came at a cost. Nights at the
Toucan could be euphoric, but for a lot of women it came with sleaziness, danger, and the kind of
casual predation that was just well, accepted.
I ask her what she remembers about the Toucan’s owners.
“Disgusting humans,” she says flatly. “Absolutely vile. They would threaten us, you know - let's
see your ID or we're going to feel you up - stuff like that. Disgusting, right? That’s how it was.
And I reckon any other girl you talk to from back then will say the same. It’s gross now, and it
was gross then, but you just… dealt with it. We shouldn’t have had to. But that’s how it worked.”
It’s a grim truth, what Maya just laid down - ugly, all too familiar and somehow shrugged off
then and now. We sit with it for a beat.
Last question. What would’ve happened if she hadn’t found the Toucan?
For a moment it looks like she’s just run her fingers over an old scar.
“Honestly? I don't know. What I do know is at fourteen I was dying a slow death - I mean, is this
really what my life is going to be? I don’t want to marry a boy from Rostrevor College who I met
at dance class. Never did. All power to the people who did, but it was never for me. I always felt
‘outside’ and on the margins. But funnily enough, I was kinda ok with it.”
After we wrap up, Maya sends me some old photos. One of them captures everything we’ve been
talking about. A black and white shot of eight elegantly fucked-up wildcards draped over a
staircase banister, primed and ready for a night that’s about to blow wide open. Arms flung over
shoulders, heads pressed close, hair teased, makeup on point. Every one of them young and
gorgeous and burning so, so bright.
At the heart of this beautiful mess, a boy. Tall and rail thin, all limbs and angles, soft eyes
half-shut, cheekbones that could rack lines.
Justin Sparrow still carries the vestiges of boyhood in that photo, but you can already see it - a
quiet defiance and the faint echo of a hunger to be somewhere where no one wants to fix him.
Some thirty-five years on, that softness is still there, but it’s settled into something stronger -
more graceful, grounded, and unshakeable. As we sit down to chat, he starts by telling me what it
meant to grow up as a queer kid in a small country town, and how - in the Toucan - he found a
place where nobody asked him to be anyone but himself.
“Going to the Toucan was the beginning of me learning to accept myself,” he says. “Difference
wasn’t just tolerated there - it was celebrated and applauded. That meant a lot, because I’d
always felt like an outsider. I had this fear of being found out - Am I gay? Is it a phase? God, I
hope it’s a phase. But I walked into that place and saw all these strange, fabulous people being
exactly who they were and that really helped me accept who I was as a gay person.”
There was no Toucan in Maitland. No refuge for the weird kids. No smoky rooms pumping with
music and furtive slow-burn glances. Just a small country town on the Yorke Peninsula where
being different came at a cost, and kids like Justin paid it early.
“I was really unhappy in Maitland,” he says. “I was a young gay boy - maybe - I wasn’t even
sure yet. But I’d already been through a bit of bullying and exclusion. Probably because of the
gay stuff, but maybe just because I was different.”
So he begged for a way out. “I asked Mum and Dad to send me to school in Adelaide. They
could see how miserable I was. That was really hard for them financially, but they agreed.”
He landed at Rostrevor College, a stiff-collared Catholic boys' school in the Adelaide foothills. “I
was shy. I was quiet. Petrified, really.”
He stayed with close family friends. They ran a strict Christian household. It was a tight,
disciplined life, but in its own way, it worked. With nowhere to go and not much else to do,
Justin buried himself in his books and ended up smashing it at school.
“I wasn’t good at sport, so that ruled me out of the footy group. But in Year 11, Darren Westall
kind of saved me. He came up and said, ‘Come hang out with us.’ That was huge. For me he was
the cool kid with his finger on the pulse. He was my introduction to the Toucan.”
After finishing school, Justin went straight into full-time work at his dad’s accounting firm. By
seventeen, he was out of home with his own place.
I tell him I still remember it - how he was one of the first people I knew living out of home.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop. It just exploded with fun and so that's when I started to go to
the Toucan all the time. So that would have been late ‘86 I guess.”
Justin’s place in Kent Town became a sort of clubhouse for a bunch of kids still living with their
parents.
“It was a party every weekend and it was amazing because I was still a kid and had no adult
supervision. I look back at that and think, fuck I was lucky to be able to live there - to have a
place that was a gathering spot.”
That's when I met Maya and a whole heap of those other girls. That was my journey from wide
eyed shy country boy at Rostrevor - so scared of everything - to moving out on my own and then
having the absolute time of my life.”
Justin found himself drawn back to the Toucan night after night.
“It was a total social explosion - the first time getting drunk and partying and being in nightclubs.
The Toucan was so special. The door lady Chrissy was always like “Come in darlings!” even
though we were underage. She always let us in without paying because she knew we were poor
young kids.
I was in awe - just like, Oh my god, this is amazing! I felt like the small town boy from the
Bronski Beat song. I was like Shit! I'm living here, this is my dream. I absolutely loved it.”
The shy kid from Maitland was gone. In his place, a swan in eyeliner, dancing under strobe
lights, finally at home in his own skin.
“I got really inspired by the whole gothic look. I was a Country Road jumper wearing boy, but
after I started going to the Toucan, suddenly I'm wearing op shop clothes. My favourite was this
black military jacket that went to the waist with red lapels. I wore that every weekend - people
were probably so sick of it. I dyed my hair blue-black. A girlfriend that I came out to taught me
how to put on foundation and eyeliner. I had these patent leather Ripples from Sym Choon.
Every dollar was spent on shoes from Sym Choon.”
Well, maybe not every dollar.
“On payday I would buy a new shirt from Aerial in Rundle Mall. I remember it was $45 for a
shirt - a third of my pay! But I had to get a new shirt. I was on $120 a week back then. I felt
really rich.”
With his new look locked in, all Justin needed now was a soundtrack.
“My taste skewed pop, if you can call it that,” he says. “To this day Pet Shop Boys, New Order,
Depeche Mode - they’re my top three. Shows you how much the Toucan influenced me.”
True to form, Justin came prepared with a list - a carefully curated love letter to the Toucan’s
dance floor.
“You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive, Venus by Bananarama, Mel and Kim’s Respectable. The
opening bars of Nu Shooz’ I Can’t Wait? I remember hearing that for the first time and thinking
What are these amazing new sounds?
I ask him to take me back there - back to that dance floor, the heartbeat of the place. What did it
feel like - dancing to the music that lit him up, surrounded by friends who saw him, knew him,
and loved him?
“It was the best time of my life. Everything was bright and sparkly and brand new. I was
surrounded by fabulously made up people dancing to incredible music. Being in that crowd - it
was amazing. These people are amazing! I'm in this place surrounded by people just getting
trashed and having the best time.
I met the first guy I kissed there. That place gave me the courage to come out to my girlfriend -
as in my female friend, not girlfriend. She was so supportive. That was the start of my journey.
Such an amazing period of time and the Toucan had a lot to do with making me feel comfortable
and accepted. I'm not this freak that’s going to hell. I’m actually normal. This is normal.”
As our conversation starts to wind down, I ask him to imagine that he’s back at the Toucan. He
sees a young, shy Justin Sparrow waiting patiently to be served. What would he say to that kid?
How does that conversation go?
He pauses, and for a moment those soft eyes are back. He takes his time. When he answers, it’s
careful and kind. His words of tender assurance are from someone who’s made peace with the
past.
“I'd give him a hug and say,
‘Just go for it. Have the best time. Don't worry about what others
think. It's all going to be good. You're going to be great. You're going to be happy.’”
Turns out that in the Toucan, that shy, nervous kid from Maitland found something he’d been
searching for all along.
Himself.
For me the Toucan wasn’t just a nightclub. The time I spent there led to a near total obliteration
of my identity, my ego and the carefully laid out plans for a future I never agreed to. It was an
escape hatch. A portal to a place where I could shed the skin of everything that came before -
church youth groups, awkward parties in carpeted rumpus rooms, the crushing banality of
suburban Adelaide in the late ‘80s. Everything I thought I knew got incinerated by those strobe
lights and the low rumble of a bassline that rearranged my internal organs. It rewired me. I didn’t
just go there to drink and dance. I went there to become someone else. Or maybe to become
exactly who I was all along - before parents, school and that stultifying little town tried to pound
it out of me.
For us weird kids, the arty kids, the ones who never shut up about records and wanted to set fire
to our life, the Toucan was our church. We came in like pilgrims - unsure, searching for
salvation, still clumsy and awkward in our own bodies, not yet knowing how to wear ourselves
right. But in that dark and unholy mayhem we found communion. An altar wreathed in smoke,
the choir howling through busted PA speakers, the sacrament bestowed in shots of tequila and
12-inch remixes. We were anointed with sweat and distortion, baptised beneath blacklight,
reborn in the breakbeats and the fuzz. Whatever gods we believed in back then spoke to us on
that dance floor.
But let’s not get too romantic about it all. It was far from perfect. It’s easy for me to spin this into
mythology. Us boys, we got off lightly. Straight, white, middle-class kids riding in on our
clueless adolescent rebellion stallions, insulated by the very privilege we were railing against. We
are free, we would tell ourselves. Yeah, well - we were. But that freedom wasn’t enjoyed by
everyone. We could call it freedom because we weren’t the ones paying for it. The girls were.
They had to dance with one eye open, had to navigate the hands, the looks, the sleaze from the
so-called adults running the place. There were predators in the room, and everyone knew it. That
part gets left out of the myth, but it shouldn’t because it’s the truth. It’s part of the Toucan story
and should always be part of the story. Maybe we don’t always tell it like it was but it’s there,
pulsing underneath all the nostalgia like a warning siren that still gets ignored. A young woman’s
freedom came with fine print and obscene disclaimers. For us boys, a free pass with every fake
ID.
And then there was the music. God, the music. It cracked us open. Before the Toucan I was all
about guitars - punk, garage, rockandfuckingroll - anything with leather, long hair and longer
solos. But hearing hip-hop and electro blister and thump through those speakers for the first time,
feeling that bottomless bass shake the floor, shake my soul? That reconfigured something deep
inside me.
RIP DJ Ian Bell. The unsung hero of our teenage education - the evangelical professor of that
late-night classroom. He didn’t just drop science - he handed us a roadmap. And if you were
smart, or curious, or high enough, you followed that map. He stitched it all together - fuzzed-out
60s nuggets, the aussie psych rock revivalists, the deep cuts, the cult favourites - explosive
garage, soul and hip-hop. He was saying to us Listen up, kids! This is where it all came from.
And we did. He showed us the contours - the topography - and left it to us to chart our own way
forward. From James Brown to Public Enemy, The Monkees to The Stems, The Sonics to The
Scientists, The Shangri-Las to Blondie and the Ramones, the Ohio Players to De La Soul, the
MC5 and the Stooges to Radio Birdman, the Lime Spiders and The Exploding White Mice. A
lineage of wild, snarling, beautifully imperfect noise that suddenly all started to make sense.
By early ’91 it was over. The Toucan was sold, the decor refreshed, and it became something
different - something slick and soulless. It limped along for a while under a few different names
but everyone had moved on. The music changed, the drugs changed, the city changed. House and
techno had migrated out of the gay clubs to become something more mainstream. Other venues -
Le Rox, the Metro and later the Synagogue - stepped in to take the Toucan’s place.
But the damage was done. We’d been exposed - to music, to each other, to the idea that
something bigger was out there. Some held their guitars tight and played sets in crowded beer
gardens and front bars. Others bought matching Technics 1200s, a mixer and a mic, brains and
bodies infected by a kick-drum contagion contracted right there on the Toucan's dance floor.
Some of us bailed out. Moved to Melbourne, to London, Sydney, Tokyo - anywhere that didn’t
smell like the same four blocks of Adelaide’s west end. Maybe we were chasing something. Or
still running - same thing, really. Did the Toucan plant that seed? That itch to get out, find
something bigger, chase the freedom we felt in that grimy little club? I don’t know. Maybe.
But here’s the truth - some of us are still chasing that feeling. Not just to escape who we once
were - but how we felt that night we first walked into that sticky, dimly-lit shithole and realised
our people were already there. And they were dancing. That moment when the delayed,
shimmery guitar intro to She Sells Sanctuary rises up through the dry ice and the drums kick in
as the strobe lights explode into a billion shards and everything is white light and shadow and
sex and death and you lock eyes with a girl dressed like a ‘60s TV vampire, all red lipstick and
velvet and cigarette smoke, and right there - in that moment - it hits you.
Maybe you're not alone in this fucked-up world after all.
So perhaps that’s what we’ve been chasing ever since, that first hit of belonging. Of being seen.
Of being strange and celebrated instead of just strange. We were the misfits - the kids who sat on
the edge of everything. Too odd, too curious, too into records no one else cared about and clothes
that didn’t fit someone else’s dress code. Somehow we all found our way to the same place. We
got to be exactly who we were or who we wanted to be. We could dance like maniacs to the
music we loved, wear clothes we wanted to wear without fear of being picked on or treated like
some kind of carny freak. The Toucan was messy, it was flawed and a little broken - fuck, so
were we. But for the first time in our lives, no one was asking us to change a thing.
Happy Hour At The Crematorium
Adam Smith
An unreliable, half-remembered love letter to a place that raised us, sometimes wrecked us, and
gave us everything we didn’t know we needed. A jagged ode to Adelaide’s filthiest church of sin
and salvation. Welcome to the Toucan.
***
What I remember most about those nights is the crush to get in. A few hundred sixteen-year olds,
half-cut and jammed together in a shit show of cigarette smoke and poor impulse control. No
line, no order - just a wild, feral surge of horny teenagers clawing at the door, heads twisted with
nicotine and the sweet, dumb thrill of getting away with it all.
When the doors finally swung open, the simmering mania cranked up to full fucking boil.
Security staff with rat’s tails and neck tatts tried to bring order to the chaos. A tough ask, holding
back a tsunami of the inbred offspring of Adelaide’s aristocracy, high on pilfered liquor cabinet
booze and inherited privilege. Spooner girls decked out in Country Road and Lacoste. Sweaty,
flush-faced boys in boat shoes, beige moleskins hugging their half-mongrels, untucked stripey
‘going out’ shirts. Blue bloods with popped collars. A full entitlement of rich young fogeys.
For me those nights started with a quick detour to the Feathers Hotel at the top of Greenhill
Road. After stashing my P plates, I’d roll through in my ‘62 Beetle and roll out a couple minutes
later with a couple of six-packs for me and my best mate John. We'd pull into a side street a few
blocks from the venue and neck drinks in the back seat, fogging the windows with our excess
adrenaline. Talking shit and plotting. Which dickheads to avoid, which girls - if everything
aligned and the pheromones hit just right - we might make out with.
Sometimes JD - another mate of ours from school - would join us. We’d smoke and riff on
starting a band, the kind that would burn the world down and build something new from the
ashes with sound and power and great haircuts.
The backseat pregame was often the best part of the night. No pressure or posturing. Just a
self-contained teenage riot of energy and potential.
We aimed to arrive just after the doors opened, mostly to avoid the worst of the aggro - the cocky
meatheads looking to impress their mates by shoving us skinny alt-rock kids into bike racks.
The venue was the faded Burnside Town Hall. Built in the 1920s, it boasted a sprung wooden
dance floor and wraparound balcony purposely designed, it seemed, for barely consensual
underage grappling.
A couple of girthy lunkheads from our school had come up with the idea for these nights. I knew
both of these chodes and didn’t care for either of them. But despite the occasional schoolyard
beef, they did usher me in a couple times when entry was at a premium.
They called it ‘Seniors’.
A DJ from SA-FM would spin a few sets of top 40 hits and adolescent bangers. ‘Don’t Change’
by INXS. ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits. ‘Addicted to Love’ by the louche, slightly creepy
Robert Palmer. Bryan Adams sang about his first real six-string in ‘Summer of ‘69’ - a
guaranteed floor-filler.
Most nights featured a local cover band knocking out similar hits of the day. JD and I would lap
this shit up. As a newbie bass player, my eyes were locked on chord shapes and amp settings and
how the bass player carried it all off. Slung low and played with a pick? Punk as fuck. Strapped
on too high? A fucking disgrace.
Seniors was frequented pretty much exclusively by that private school, straight, white cadre of
Young Liberals, destined for a career in law, divorce and court-ordered rehab.
But before long a new type of kid started rolling through. Public school punks and goths from
Marryatville, Glenunga, Adelaide High. These kids bludged school to rifle through op shops,
shoplift tall cans of Silhouette Black and copies of The Face. They had records by The Cure, The
Jesus and Mary Chain and The Smiths. Their parents probably let them smoke weed at home.
Some had even started bands - real bands that played gigs. They took Medislims, slam danced
and set off fire extinguishers in the hall. The girls were tough, sexy and terrifying. They could’ve
easily beat us up if they wanted to.
When the house lights came on, everyone spilled out to the carpark. Usually I would fuck off
pretty quick, keen to sidestep the crackling potential of random violence from blue-ball fuckwits.
But one night, at the edge of the crowd, I got talking to a girl in a leather jacket, ripped jeans and
Ripples. She was leaning up against a car, smoking - tipsy and catastrophically magnetic.
“So, what are you doing now?” she asked, her pout hit somewhere between an invitation and a
warning.
“Nothing much. Heading home I guess”.
I had a midnight curfew and a mum who waited up until she heard a key in the door.
“Shame,” she breathed calm and close. “We’re going to the Toucan. You wanna come?”
***
That was the last night I wasted any more time at Seniors. I was headed somewhere else. A place
where cute girls in biker jackets and ripped jeans drank and danced and broke hearts. A place
that smelled like piss, hairspray and bad fun.
Officially? The Tou-Can-Tou. But everyone I knew just called it the Toucan.
It was a glittering shithole. A glamorous dive bar. A clubhouse for teenage delinquents,
reprobates and androgynous dilettantes. The barstaff didn’t give a fuck how old you were, what
school you went to, or if your parents were waiting up. It was grimy and disintegrating. It was
fucking glorious. And for a while there, it was ours.
After moving from its original digs in Hyde Park, this version of the Toucan resurfaced at 181
Hindley Street, deep in Adelaide’s west end badlands - a twilight zone of sex shops, yiros joints
and broken glass glittered car parks. After dark, it turned into a feral playground for packs of
pissed-up suburban warriors - cunts wired on truckie dust and testosterone, fists cocked, looking
for teeth to loosen, eyes to blacken.
That end of town hummed with menace. And right in the middle of it was the Toucan - a citadel
of debonair junkies, fabulous burnouts and teenage joyriders. Crossing that threshold for the first
time felt like stepping out of a John Hughes movie straight into the pages of a DIY punk fanzine.
Like some of us, it was damaged, beautiful and barely holding itself together.
A ticket booth jammed right inside the door, the main bar stretched along the front wall to the
right. Up the back and to the left, a DJ booth. Above the main stage was a mural that should’ve
made sense, but somehow didn’t. A trio of cartoon toucans frozen mid-jam - checkerboard suit
jackets, stovepipes, wayfarers and bucket hats. Deranged mascots for The Young And The
Wasted.
A dance floor took up the remaining space on the lower level. Off to the left, the toilets -
graff-scrawled crypts that smelled like someone OD’d in there weeks ago and was still haunting
the joint.
Two sets of rickety stairs at either end of the main room led up to a second level. A smaller bar
with a balcony view of the broken angels in the shadows below. A beer garden was bolted onto
the side, the perfect soundstage for tear-stained teenage soap operas.
Kids from all over the city turned out. Goths, punks, mods, queers, rockabillies, B-boys, new
romantics - assorted weirdos and miscreants from every corner of Adelaide’s subcultural
zeitgeist.
The girls that lit me up were heartbreakers straight out of a Tim Burton fever dream - hair like
melted vinyl records, fishnets, tartan minis and Docs, lips crime-scene red. I was underage and
underwater in this lair of beautiful monsters.
On one of my first nights there, I pushed through the crowd as Sigue Sigue Sputnik strafed the
dance floor with their electro sex lasers - heart pinballing around my ribcage as I tried to spot
someone - anyone - I knew. At the upstairs bar, I waited. Tried to act nonchalant, like I was one
of the regulars. Halfway through ordering something illegal, I felt fingernails slip under my shirt
and rake all the way down my back.
I turned to face two Dita Von Teese doppelgängers. Stereo catwomen. Red lips, green eyes.
Identical beauty spots seductive pinpricks of danger on flawless alabaster skin. One leaned in
close, close enough for breath and perfume and menace.
“Honey, I’d love to take you home. Cut you up. Keep you in my freezer”.
Turned on and absolutely fucking petrified, I quietly choked on my own soul.
But I was in.
This wasn’t some high school dance. This wasn’t a safe suburban night at home watching Hey
Hey It's Saturday! - this was something else. Something exotic, erotic and utterly intoxicating.
It was a dump. A temple. A fuck-you riot of patent leather, secondhand smoke and perfect
eyeliner.
But it was ours. Our CBGBs. Our Crystal Ballroom. Our Danceteria.
Our Toucan.
***
I first met Michael Pulsford - the artist formerly known as Mahat - in those filthy Toucan toilets
sometime around August ‘87. I knew him as the detonating drummer for goth/punk teen
supergroup ‘Rats In The Walls’ and man about town. We were both in op shop suits, rakish ties,
synchronised shoulder-length blonde hair. Clocking our matching looks, he introduced himself,
grinned and announced ‘Alright then - from now on we’re gonna be mates’. And just like that,
we were. Still are. Over the decades, I’ve had the honour of making some glorious noise
alongside him in a few killer bands. He's one of the greats - on stage or off.
I wanted to know how the Toucan first got its hooks into him - not just the music, but the messy,
sleazy, outlaw majesty of the place.
“Sometime in Year 12 at Adelaide High - before we started ‘Rats in the Walls’ - I remember
seeing my mate Kristoff scrawl something in a school book that said ‘Gothic Death’. I thought,
fuck me - that’s a really great name for a band. So me, Kristoff, and our mate Shane threw
together this really raw, really spare Cramps-y, early Bad Seeds sort of thing.”
Gothic Death played two gigs. The first, a lunchtime show in the school hall. Their second and
final gig was at the Toucan.
“I barely remember the set. I do remember Kristoff being nervous because he’d written this
really nasty song about a woman he’d been seeing. He tried to mumble the words, but of course,
a mate of ours went up to her afterwards and was like, ‘Did you hear that song? That was about
you.’ She was like, ‘Fucking hell. What a bastard!”
He told me how he used to sneak out after his parents had gone to bed. Climb out the window,
walk across the South Parklands past the beats and men fucking in the bushes.
“It got pretty sketchy sometimes. I’d stumble back in at 3 a.m., reeking of tobacco and whatever
else. I smoked a lot back then because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.”
As we talked more, he went on to describe how looking back on it, the Toucan could only have
existed in a small city like Adelaide.
“It wasn’t just about the dance floor - though that was important. Adelaide was just too small for
dedicated clubs for each specific subculture. So the Toucan was this weird, shared space where a
bunch of different tribes overlapped. You got exposed to music you might not have otherwise.”
Mike didn’t realise how rare this was until he left Adelaide and met people from other cities
where scenes stayed on their own turf and didn’t interact so much.
“In Melbourne you had the Punters Club, an indie band venue, where you could go seven nights
a week and see live music. But you're not going to hear Run DMC or Dead or Alive.”
For Mike, being exposed to a bunch of different music meant having to wait for your moment of
dance floor glory - the tracks you’d be willing to be seen dancing to. Some people didn’t care -
yeah, whatever. It's all fun. But others were more factional. The B-boys skulking in the corner,
waiting for Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’ or any of the early Def Jam joints. The goths
murderously biding their time, waiting for Siouxsie and The Banshees, the Sisters of Mercy, The
Cure.
“It created this kind of cross-pollination. In bigger cities with bigger scenes, you could stay in
your own lane forever. In the Toucan, you didn’t really have a choice.”
That was the beauty of it, Mike reckons. No one group was big enough to take over the room.
“There were definitely subcultures back then, and people picked sides. But at the Toucan, there
just wasn’t the numbers for anyone to go, ‘Oi, fuck off! This is our place’, you know? You had to
get along - it was this weird unspoken truce. And that’s what made it so good.”
***
Kristoff Barrington is sitting in the front seat of his car, laughing his arse off. For the next hour
he spills stories about the Toucan and all the busted-up glory of being young and not giving a
fuck.
At the Toucan, it was hard to miss this human landmark. I remember a girlfriend of mine once
saying Just meet me at Kristoff like he was some kind of teenage lighthouse, holding steady in
the midst of the mayhem.
We were never super tight. We had mutuals and knew each other enough for a quick nod or a
chat about bands, guitars - whatever. But even then, I could tell Kristoff had something. He had a
knack for bringing the drama to low-stakes moments and turning them into something epic.
So this whole thing feels less like an interview, more like cracking a beer with a mate you didn’t
know you missed.
I have to ask about that infamous Gothic Death gig at the Toucan.
“I was shitting myself - just so nervous. My oldest brother, David, slips me a pill and goes, ‘Take
this, you’ll be fine.’ It didn’t help at all. Made everything worse! I got even more paranoid.
We had this pretty offensive song about a certain girl. I didn’t even know she was there. So we
finish the set, and next thing she’s right in front of me. Bang! Slaps me across the face. Not my
finest moment. But at that age, I didn’t have a clue. I just thought it was punk.”
So winding it back a bit, I ask what a typical night out looked like for fifteen year old Kristoff
before he found the Toucan?
“Parks, mostly,” he says. “Bottle of Wipeout, a flagon of whatever. Sometimes house parties if
someone’s parents were away. I remember one in North Adelaide... got absolutely blind. Next
thing I know, I wake up and there’s cops everywhere, clearing the place out. They chuck me in
the back of a paddy wagon with four or five others. But those idiots left the doors open while
they were chasing more people - so I bolted. Ran across town, straight into the Toucan.”
He talks about sneaking out late, constructing a fake body under the sheets - not too neat, not too
rigid, just crumpled enough to pass a tired mum’s midnight cellblock check.
From covering tracks to dancing to them, I ask if he remembers what got him on the Toucan’s
dance floor.
“There was one that went ‘Take a ride on the Sugar Train… Take a ride on the Sugar Train.’ As
soon as that song came on, my best mate and I would run to the dance floor - didn’t matter where
we were. It was our signal - Okay, I'll meet you as soon as that song starts. Same with Soft Cell’s
‘Tainted Love’. I wasn’t much of a dancer, though - more of your stand-around-drinking type.”
When I ask if the Toucan gave him a musical education, Kristoff doesn’t hesitate.
“No two ways about it. I mean it wasn’t just the songs we got exposed to - it was the people.
You’d meet someone, hit it off, and next thing they’re handing you a tape, or telling you about a
gig. Your tastes just got blown wide open. Your friendship circle too. It taught me how to deal
with women for sure.”
For a lot of us, the Toucan was a crash course in how to be a semi-functioning adult. We learned
how to act - or not - in a club.
Kristoff agrees.
“We had to learn how to interact with each other. It was really positive in that respect.”
He pauses, fires up a durry, and lands on something simple and true.
“I mean, Adelaide back then? It was a big country town. Not much for young people to do. I
don’t know what it’s like these days, but back then the Toucan gave us a place to be ourselves. I
was wearing capes and velvet jackets and shit. Not a lot of venues were rolling out the red carpet
for that kind of look, you know?”
For alternative Adelaide kids in the late ‘80s, standing out sometimes meant standing in the
firing line.
“But fuck it. Whatever. You didn’t even think about it. You’d be surrounded by bogans looking
to start some shit, but it didn’t matter. That’s the confidence of youth, right? ‘This is me,
motherfucker. Deal with it.’”
As he talks, I can’t help but picture Kristoff on a bus headed for the Toucan - curls lacquered,
pointy boots up on the seat, cape spilling into the aisle. As dead-eyed suburban fuckheads lob
insults at him, this magnificent gothic peacock, this dark overlord of the Circle Line just sits
there - too cool to care, too strange to kill. This is me, motherfucker.
I ask how those years changed him. What was the difference between the Kristoff Barrington
who walked into the Toucan for the first time, and the one who walked out?
He leans back in his seat, thinks it over.
“It’s like when you take acid - it cracks something open in your brain. You don’t know it at the
time because you’re just living it. But it shaped the rest of my life. I still don’t dress normal. My
taste in music’s broad, probably alternative - though I hate all those labels.”
I know exactly what he means.
“Yeah, it was a perspective shift. A life-changer, really. I’ve never really stopped to think about
it, but yeah - that place played a big part. I mean, I married a girl who used to go to the Toucan.”
I laugh - so did I.
“Well now it’s sounding a bit incestuous,” he grins. “But yeah. What a great club. It had its flaws
- sleazy owners and all that - but it was ours.”
We talk about how it feels when you bump into someone from those days. It’s like a secret
handshake. A flash of recognition, a certain look. No one really talks about it much, but you can
tell - it meant something. It still does.
As we start to wrap up, I ask Kristoff if he could meet his 1987 self, what would he say? Any
advice?
He pauses just long enough to take a drag on his dart.
“I’d tell him to have a good time - but recognise when you need to pull up a bit. I partied too
long, probably should’ve hit the brakes a bit earlier. Other than that? Maybe don’t stress so
much.
But I think we’d get along. We’d talk about Nick Cave. And not worrying about what other
people think. You do when you’re young - you care a bit too much. But then one day you wake
up and you don’t give a shit anymore. And man, that’s a beautiful thing.”
***
I can’t think about the Toucan without picturing Maya Mitra. The whole Toucan scene wasn’t
something Maya joined - it happened around her. I don’t think there was a single night back then
when Queen Maya wasn’t in the house. Tall, striking, cool as fuck and always in some cunty
little outfit that made the rest of us feel like we were playing catch-up to a style memo she had
posted months earlier.
I spoke with Maya for the first time in thirty-five years. We dug through the wreckage of those
half-remembered nights - chased down ghosts that had snuck out of bedroom windows - the
ghosts of songs that got under our skin, bled into our bones and rewired us on a cosmic,
molecular level. We unearthed memories that have stuck to us, whether we wanted them to or
not.
“I don’t even remember how I ended up there,” she says. “I reckon it might have been Sophie
Petit or Lucy Markey. At the time I was living this hellish existence in an all-girls Catholic
school - too tall, too brown, too poor, no dad - it was endless. Then one day Sophie was like,
‘Fuck this. Let’s go to the Toucan. Tonight’. Next thing, I’m sneaking out my window on
Thursday night for dollar drinks, fourteen years old. That’s how it started."
She laughs at the absurdity of it all. "I'd come home before dawn, wash my makeup off, get a
couple of hours sleep and go to school."
I ask if she remembers her first night at the Toucan.
"No, not really. All I remember is that it felt like I had found my people."
Was she nervous walking in? Scared?
"I don’t think I ever felt scared. The only time I ever felt nervous was when Katie Snarksis or
Trish Berger would throw drinks on you and walk off if you looked at a boy they liked. But it
was all cool - I don't remember ever having a beef with anyone. I don't remember fights breaking
out or anything like that.”
And then there was the music. The thing everyone talks about with the same kind of ache - the
soundtrack to those euphoric, sweetly seditious nights, all built around the rush of getting away
with it for a few stolen hours.
What were the big tracks for her?
“The Cult,” she says, no hesitation. “Anything by The Smiths, Nick Cave, Joy Division - peak
gothic, ‘depressed Maya’ mode. My god - ‘She Sells Sanctuary’? I can’t hear that song and not
think of the Toucan. ‘Blue Monday’ is another one like that.”
She’s got more.
“Even now, if I hear ‘How Soon Is Now?’ there's something that hits me on a cellular level. I
will sit in my car listening to that as loud as I can. My windows are literally shaking - it just takes
me back there. It's the weirdest thing - I can't listen to that song and not go right back to that
time. The music was so integral - still is, you know, and the Toucan gave me my taste for music.
It’s why I'm a music lover - I was surrounded by my people and that music reminds me of who
they were. And who I was.”
I couldn’t talk to Maya about the Toucan without getting into what she and her crew were
wearing. From where I stood, the looks they pulled together were all about showing up in
something that had currency and power - a language, an identity. Traded between friends, racked
from op-shop change rooms, chopped up and remixed an hour before heading out - clothing as
both armour and a declaration of intent.
“You know, for us it always started at Justin Sparrow’s place in Kent Town on Saturday
afternoon. That was the ritual. We’d pile in with a suitcase full of clothes and just start trying
things on”, she says. “I had this Chanel t-shirt - totally fake. Lucy with the long white socks.
Docs or Ripples. Probably both, and we swapped them with each other - depending on what look
we were going for.”
She lights up at the thought of them as makeshift ateliers.
“We made bubble skirts. I made a rah-rah skirt once - I was loving myself sick. We’d hit Vinnies,
army disposal stores. We’d cut them up and make something fucking amazing.”
She’s on a roll, riffing on how happy she was just hanging out with friends and drinking.
“Oh my god - the preloading! We'd rock up to Justin’s with a bottle of something. Lucy and I
would split a bottle between us, easy. Just that feeling of sharing a bottle of spirits with your best
mate when you’re sixteen...”
She gives me a look - equal parts ‘never again’ and ‘fuck, I miss it.’
“I just think about how lucky we were. We were naive, but there was a spirit of looking out for
each other.”
There are some stories about the Toucan that are only half-told. The myth is all about the music
and late-night dance floor transcendence, dollar drinks and making out to a backing track of The
Screaming Tribesmen and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. But talk to someone like Maya and you
realise there was another side - a much darker side especially for the young women who came up
in those rooms. The fun and the sense of freedom was real, but it came at a cost. Nights at the
Toucan could be euphoric, but for a lot of women it came with sleaziness, danger, and the kind of
casual predation that was just well, accepted.
I ask her what she remembers about the Toucan’s owners.
“Disgusting humans,” she says flatly. “Absolutely vile. They would threaten us, you know - let's
see your ID or we're going to feel you up - stuff like that. Disgusting, right? That’s how it was.
And I reckon any other girl you talk to from back then will say the same. It’s gross now, and it
was gross then, but you just… dealt with it. We shouldn’t have had to. But that’s how it worked.”
It’s a grim truth, what Maya just laid down - ugly, all too familiar and somehow shrugged off
then and now. We sit with it for a beat.
Last question. What would’ve happened if she hadn’t found the Toucan?
For a moment it looks like she’s just run her fingers over an old scar.
“Honestly? I don't know. What I do know is at fourteen I was dying a slow death - I mean, is this
really what my life is going to be? I don’t want to marry a boy from Rostrevor College who I met
at dance class. Never did. All power to the people who did, but it was never for me. I always felt
‘outside’ and on the margins. But funnily enough, I was kinda ok with it.”
After we wrap up, Maya sends me some old photos. One of them captures everything we’ve been
talking about. A black and white shot of eight elegantly fucked-up wildcards draped over a
staircase banister, primed and ready for a night that’s about to blow wide open. Arms flung over
shoulders, heads pressed close, hair teased, makeup on point. Every one of them young and
gorgeous and burning so, so bright.
At the heart of this beautiful mess, a boy. Tall and rail thin, all limbs and angles, soft eyes
half-shut, cheekbones that could rack lines.
***
Justin Sparrow still carries the vestiges of boyhood in that photo, but you can already see it - a
quiet defiance and the faint echo of a hunger to be somewhere where no one wants to fix him.
Some thirty-five years on, that softness is still there, but it’s settled into something stronger -
more graceful, grounded, and unshakeable. As we sit down to chat, he starts by telling me what it
meant to grow up as a queer kid in a small country town, and how - in the Toucan - he found a
place where nobody asked him to be anyone but himself.
“Going to the Toucan was the beginning of me learning to accept myself,” he says. “Difference
wasn’t just tolerated there - it was celebrated and applauded. That meant a lot, because I’d
always felt like an outsider. I had this fear of being found out - Am I gay? Is it a phase? God, I
hope it’s a phase. But I walked into that place and saw all these strange, fabulous people being
exactly who they were and that really helped me accept who I was as a gay person.”
There was no Toucan in Maitland. No refuge for the weird kids. No smoky rooms pumping with
music and furtive slow-burn glances. Just a small country town on the Yorke Peninsula where
being different came at a cost, and kids like Justin paid it early.
“I was really unhappy in Maitland,” he says. “I was a young gay boy - maybe - I wasn’t even
sure yet. But I’d already been through a bit of bullying and exclusion. Probably because of the
gay stuff, but maybe just because I was different.”
So he begged for a way out. “I asked Mum and Dad to send me to school in Adelaide. They
could see how miserable I was. That was really hard for them financially, but they agreed.”
He landed at Rostrevor College, a stiff-collared Catholic boys' school in the Adelaide foothills. “I
was shy. I was quiet. Petrified, really.”
He stayed with close family friends. They ran a strict Christian household. It was a tight,
disciplined life, but in its own way, it worked. With nowhere to go and not much else to do,
Justin buried himself in his books and ended up smashing it at school.
“I wasn’t good at sport, so that ruled me out of the footy group. But in Year 11, Darren Westall
kind of saved me. He came up and said, ‘Come hang out with us.’ That was huge. For me he was
the cool kid with his finger on the pulse. He was my introduction to the Toucan.”
After finishing school, Justin went straight into full-time work at his dad’s accounting firm. By
seventeen, he was out of home with his own place.
I tell him I still remember it - how he was one of the first people I knew living out of home.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop. It just exploded with fun and so that's when I started to go to
the Toucan all the time. So that would have been late ‘86 I guess.”
Justin’s place in Kent Town became a sort of clubhouse for a bunch of kids still living with their
parents.
“It was a party every weekend and it was amazing because I was still a kid and had no adult
supervision. I look back at that and think, fuck I was lucky to be able to live there - to have a
place that was a gathering spot.”
That's when I met Maya and a whole heap of those other girls. That was my journey from wide
eyed shy country boy at Rostrevor - so scared of everything - to moving out on my own and then
having the absolute time of my life.”
Justin found himself drawn back to the Toucan night after night.
“It was a total social explosion - the first time getting drunk and partying and being in nightclubs.
The Toucan was so special. The door lady Chrissy was always like “Come in darlings!” even
though we were underage. She always let us in without paying because she knew we were poor
young kids.
I was in awe - just like, Oh my god, this is amazing! I felt like the small town boy from the
Bronski Beat song. I was like Shit! I'm living here, this is my dream. I absolutely loved it.”
The shy kid from Maitland was gone. In his place, a swan in eyeliner, dancing under strobe
lights, finally at home in his own skin.
“I got really inspired by the whole gothic look. I was a Country Road jumper wearing boy, but
after I started going to the Toucan, suddenly I'm wearing op shop clothes. My favourite was this
black military jacket that went to the waist with red lapels. I wore that every weekend - people
were probably so sick of it. I dyed my hair blue-black. A girlfriend that I came out to taught me
how to put on foundation and eyeliner. I had these patent leather Ripples from Sym Choon.
Every dollar was spent on shoes from Sym Choon.”
Well, maybe not every dollar.
“On payday I would buy a new shirt from Aerial in Rundle Mall. I remember it was $45 for a
shirt - a third of my pay! But I had to get a new shirt. I was on $120 a week back then. I felt
really rich.”
With his new look locked in, all Justin needed now was a soundtrack.
“My taste skewed pop, if you can call it that,” he says. “To this day Pet Shop Boys, New Order,
Depeche Mode - they’re my top three. Shows you how much the Toucan influenced me.”
True to form, Justin came prepared with a list - a carefully curated love letter to the Toucan’s
dance floor.
“You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive, Venus by Bananarama, Mel and Kim’s Respectable. The
opening bars of Nu Shooz’ I Can’t Wait? I remember hearing that for the first time and thinking
What are these amazing new sounds?
I ask him to take me back there - back to that dance floor, the heartbeat of the place. What did it
feel like - dancing to the music that lit him up, surrounded by friends who saw him, knew him,
and loved him?
“It was the best time of my life. Everything was bright and sparkly and brand new. I was
surrounded by fabulously made up people dancing to incredible music. Being in that crowd - it
was amazing. These people are amazing! I'm in this place surrounded by people just getting
trashed and having the best time.
I met the first guy I kissed there. That place gave me the courage to come out to my girlfriend -
as in my female friend, not girlfriend. She was so supportive. That was the start of my journey.
Such an amazing period of time and the Toucan had a lot to do with making me feel comfortable
and accepted. I'm not this freak that’s going to hell. I’m actually normal. This is normal.”
As our conversation starts to wind down, I ask him to imagine that he’s back at the Toucan. He
sees a young, shy Justin Sparrow waiting patiently to be served. What would he say to that kid?
How does that conversation go?
He pauses, and for a moment those soft eyes are back. He takes his time. When he answers, it’s
careful and kind. His words of tender assurance are from someone who’s made peace with the
past.
“I'd give him a hug and say,
‘Just go for it. Have the best time. Don't worry about what others
think. It's all going to be good. You're going to be great. You're going to be happy.’”
Turns out that in the Toucan, that shy, nervous kid from Maitland found something he’d been
searching for all along.
Himself.
***
For me the Toucan wasn’t just a nightclub. The time I spent there led to a near total obliteration
of my identity, my ego and the carefully laid out plans for a future I never agreed to. It was an
escape hatch. A portal to a place where I could shed the skin of everything that came before -
church youth groups, awkward parties in carpeted rumpus rooms, the crushing banality of
suburban Adelaide in the late ‘80s. Everything I thought I knew got incinerated by those strobe
lights and the low rumble of a bassline that rearranged my internal organs. It rewired me. I didn’t
just go there to drink and dance. I went there to become someone else. Or maybe to become
exactly who I was all along - before parents, school and that stultifying little town tried to pound
it out of me.
For us weird kids, the arty kids, the ones who never shut up about records and wanted to set fire
to our life, the Toucan was our church. We came in like pilgrims - unsure, searching for
salvation, still clumsy and awkward in our own bodies, not yet knowing how to wear ourselves
right. But in that dark and unholy mayhem we found communion. An altar wreathed in smoke,
the choir howling through busted PA speakers, the sacrament bestowed in shots of tequila and
12-inch remixes. We were anointed with sweat and distortion, baptised beneath blacklight,
reborn in the breakbeats and the fuzz. Whatever gods we believed in back then spoke to us on
that dance floor.
But let’s not get too romantic about it all. It was far from perfect. It’s easy for me to spin this into
mythology. Us boys, we got off lightly. Straight, white, middle-class kids riding in on our
clueless adolescent rebellion stallions, insulated by the very privilege we were railing against. We
are free, we would tell ourselves. Yeah, well - we were. But that freedom wasn’t enjoyed by
everyone. We could call it freedom because we weren’t the ones paying for it. The girls were.
They had to dance with one eye open, had to navigate the hands, the looks, the sleaze from the
so-called adults running the place. There were predators in the room, and everyone knew it. That
part gets left out of the myth, but it shouldn’t because it’s the truth. It’s part of the Toucan story
and should always be part of the story. Maybe we don’t always tell it like it was but it’s there,
pulsing underneath all the nostalgia like a warning siren that still gets ignored. A young woman’s
freedom came with fine print and obscene disclaimers. For us boys, a free pass with every fake
ID.
And then there was the music. God, the music. It cracked us open. Before the Toucan I was all
about guitars - punk, garage, rockandfuckingroll - anything with leather, long hair and longer
solos. But hearing hip-hop and electro blister and thump through those speakers for the first time,
feeling that bottomless bass shake the floor, shake my soul? That reconfigured something deep
inside me.
RIP DJ Ian Bell. The unsung hero of our teenage education - the evangelical professor of that
late-night classroom. He didn’t just drop science - he handed us a roadmap. And if you were
smart, or curious, or high enough, you followed that map. He stitched it all together - fuzzed-out
60s nuggets, the aussie psych rock revivalists, the deep cuts, the cult favourites - explosive
garage, soul and hip-hop. He was saying to us Listen up, kids! This is where it all came from.
And we did. He showed us the contours - the topography - and left it to us to chart our own way
forward. From James Brown to Public Enemy, The Monkees to The Stems, The Sonics to The
Scientists, The Shangri-Las to Blondie and the Ramones, the Ohio Players to De La Soul, the
MC5 and the Stooges to Radio Birdman, the Lime Spiders and The Exploding White Mice. A
lineage of wild, snarling, beautifully imperfect noise that suddenly all started to make sense.
By early ’91 it was over. The Toucan was sold, the decor refreshed, and it became something
different - something slick and soulless. It limped along for a while under a few different names
but everyone had moved on. The music changed, the drugs changed, the city changed. House and
techno had migrated out of the gay clubs to become something more mainstream. Other venues -
Le Rox, the Metro and later the Synagogue - stepped in to take the Toucan’s place.
But the damage was done. We’d been exposed - to music, to each other, to the idea that
something bigger was out there. Some held their guitars tight and played sets in crowded beer
gardens and front bars. Others bought matching Technics 1200s, a mixer and a mic, brains and
bodies infected by a kick-drum contagion contracted right there on the Toucan's dance floor.
Some of us bailed out. Moved to Melbourne, to London, Sydney, Tokyo - anywhere that didn’t
smell like the same four blocks of Adelaide’s west end. Maybe we were chasing something. Or
still running - same thing, really. Did the Toucan plant that seed? That itch to get out, find
something bigger, chase the freedom we felt in that grimy little club? I don’t know. Maybe.
But here’s the truth - some of us are still chasing that feeling. Not just to escape who we once
were - but how we felt that night we first walked into that sticky, dimly-lit shithole and realised
our people were already there. And they were dancing. That moment when the delayed,
shimmery guitar intro to She Sells Sanctuary rises up through the dry ice and the drums kick in
as the strobe lights explode into a billion shards and everything is white light and shadow and
sex and death and you lock eyes with a girl dressed like a ‘60s TV vampire, all red lipstick and
velvet and cigarette smoke, and right there - in that moment - it hits you.
Maybe you're not alone in this fucked-up world after all.
So perhaps that’s what we’ve been chasing ever since, that first hit of belonging. Of being seen.
Of being strange and celebrated instead of just strange. We were the misfits - the kids who sat on
the edge of everything. Too odd, too curious, too into records no one else cared about and clothes
that didn’t fit someone else’s dress code. Somehow we all found our way to the same place. We
got to be exactly who we were or who we wanted to be. We could dance like maniacs to the
music we loved, wear clothes we wanted to wear without fear of being picked on or treated like
some kind of carny freak. The Toucan was messy, it was flawed and a little broken - fuck, so
were we. But for the first time in our lives, no one was asking us to change a thing.
***