Later on I talked to both brothers. Finally I came to the question, the question on everyone’s lips, ‘Why has the Crown closed down?” I expected them to be fidgety and evasive. But to my surprise they weren’t. Pure and simple, it was a business decision. Over time, the venue had degenerated. The audience and bands were trashing the place. The bands would sneak in their own booze and thus rob the bar of takings. The place just was not making money any more. “If a business is not making money, you change it to something else so it can.” This was the main idea that Sammy Chin kept repeating to me. I could see where he was coming from. The Crown was not making money as a venue so they changed it to a pool hall, The Q Room. The decision to move from live music to a pool hall was solely theirs as they own and run the place.

But this was the very decision that put a particular part of the Dunedin music community into an uproar. Fans and musos wept for the Crown. An interesting fact: over 340 people from Dunedin and further afield signed a
[petition online] to keep the Crown as a music venue. Sammy said, “if they wanted to keep the Crown, why didn’t they turn up en masse to gigs and show support for it?!” Sammy and Jones couldn’t understand that paradox, and frankly neither can I. The notion of ‘dirtiness’ being stamped on the Crown only appeared since the petition was put online to “Save the Dirty Ol’ Crown.” The reputation the Crown got was only because it used to be the hangout for the Mongrel Mob. But this was more the era of when the previous publicans ran the Crown and the stigma only survived about three or four years into when the Chins ran it and the mob eventually drifted off. “Only about five minor fights have happened at the Crown since we ran it,” Jones told me. They stressed to me they have always supported Dunedin music and the Crown has always been an outlet for Dunedin music but this is the end of an era.

Has the Crown as a music venue gone forever? The Q Room has appeared in its place. The fans and the musos have not exactly made it easy for themselves and have thus lost a supportive and valuable Dunedin music venue. When asking the Chins about the possibility of a music venue returning to the Crown the enigmatic brothers said, “Nothing is set in concrete.”

Below are just a few of the local bands that have graced the stage of the Crown over the last couple of years.





Related artists: Small Victories, Conniption, Ritalin, Outbreak, The Puddle, Christpuncher, Blistering Tongues, The Futurians, The Gideons, SPASTIC LUSCIOUS NOBODIES, Made In China, KAKIROA, Skaface Claw

---