The Crystal Ballroom — Melbourne

The Crystal Ballroom at 368 Swanston Street in Melbourne's CBD was one of the key venues for the city's late-1970s post-punk scene — the room where the Boys Next Door, who became the Birthday Party, played some of their most important early shows alongside bands like the Primitive Calculators, the Ears, and other acts from Melbourne's ferociously creative underground. The Ballroom was an upper-floor venue with a distinctive sprung dancefloor, accessible from street level, that hosted both local acts and touring bands during a period when Melbourne's inner city was cheap, rough, and fertile ground for experimental music.

Rowland S. Howard joined the Boys Next Door in 1978, bringing a guitar style unlike anything the Melbourne scene had encountered — melodic but dissonant, lyrical but violent, clearly influenced by Velvet Underground and Television but already distinctly his own. With Howard in the lineup the Boys Next Door, and then the Birthday Party after their move to London in 1980, became one of the most significant post-punk bands in the world. The Melbourne venues where they developed — the Crystal Ballroom, the Seaview Ballroom in St Kilda, various inner-city pubs — were the laboratories for a sound that would eventually influence two decades of dark, intense guitar music worldwide.

The building on Swanston Street that housed the Crystal Ballroom has been redeveloped and the original venue no longer operates. The space is not marked as a music heritage site. Melbourne's inner-city post-punk geography — concentrated in the CBD, Carlton, Fitzroy, and St Kilda — has been substantially altered by development since the late 1970s, and most of the venues associated with that scene are gone. The Crystal Ballroom is remembered in the oral history of Australian music as one of the rooms where something genuinely new was being invented.