The Esplanade Hotel (The Espy) — St Kilda, Melbourne

The Esplanade Hotel — universally known as the Espy — is the most important live music venue in Melbourne's history and a central site in Nick Cave's story. The Birthday Party played here repeatedly in their late-1970s and early-1980s incarnation, and the venue's long front bar and upstairs band room hosted virtually every significant Australian rock act of the past fifty years. Cave and his collaborators — Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew — were regulars both as performers and as audience members in the St Kilda scene that surrounded the hotel.

St Kilda in the late 1970s was Melbourne's bohemian quarter — cheap, coastal, populated by artists, junkies, sex workers, and musicians drawn by low rents and the Espy's gravitational pull. The Birthday Party's confrontational, post-punk noise was formed in this environment. When they left for London and then Berlin in 1980, they carried the Espy's ethos with them — a refusal to accommodate, a preference for intensity over comfort. The venue was a training ground for Australian music at its most uncompromising.

The Esplanade Hotel has been through multiple renovations and near-demolitions over the decades, each time surviving through public campaigns. It reopened in 2019 after a major restoration that preserved the front bar's character while upgrading the facilities. It remains an active live music venue at 11 The Esplanade, overlooking Port Phillip Bay, and is one of Melbourne's essential experiences.