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The Beach House Beatles performing at a 2UW Surf Music night at Surf City, Kings Cross February 1964

By
Max Dupain
Courtesy
Horwitz Publications
State Library of New South Wales
[ON 558/Box 49/nos. 58-65]
(Mitchell Library)

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Breeding delinquents: Surf City 1963-1966
Subjects
Adolescence Beach Culture Entertainment and Spectacle Fashion Music Nightclubs Radio
Organisation
2UW Surf City
Buildings
Kings Cross Theatre
Places
Kings Cross

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Dupain, Max

Horwitz Publications

Publisher in Sydney that was founded in 1920 bu Israel and Ruth Horwitz.

State Library of New South Wales

Breeding delinquents: Surf City 1963-1966

The venue Surf City in the former Kings Cross Theatre on Darlinghurst Road was accused of ‘breeding delinquents’ soon after it opened in 1963. Despite its short lifetime, the venue is crucial to the musical history of Australia. For three years it served as the spiritual home of Australian beat music, giving rise to mainstream pop stars and underground cult heroes whose influence remains today.

Music

Entertainment and Spectacle

Nightclubs

Beach Culture

Radio

Fashion

Adolescence

Surf City

One of Sydney's biggest 'beat' music venues in the 1960s, located in the former Kings Cross Theatre that was demolished to make way for the underground railway station and the Crest Hotel.

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Kings Cross Theatre

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Cinema on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Streets at Kings Cross that opened in April 1916. Part of Frank Waddington's chain of picture houses, the cinema seated over 2000 and was described as 'particularly lavish'. A 'junior' nightclub called the Birdcage, run by radio compere Peter Bergin was open briefly in the venue in 1963 after the theatre closed, and soon replaced by John Harrigan's Surf City, that occupied the building from 1963 until 1966 when the building was demolished, to be replaced by the Crest Hotel.

Kings Cross

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In the nineteenth century one of Sydney's most prestigious suburbs, it became home to a vibrant bohemian community and later Sydney's red light district. Named for the intersection of Darlinghurst Road, William and Victoria Streets and once called Queens Cross, the area is now a neon lit mecca for tourists and Sydneysiders.

2UW

Radio station that was one of the first in the British Empire to broadcast 24 hours a day. Transferred to the FM band in 1994 as Mix 106.5.

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