“I found this old book – I used to do all the bookings in it and I’ve written down all the people I’d rung, all these old names cropping up, it’s so long ago, 27, 26 years ago. All these people are still around. Scott Gordon was at the top of his game and he was our go-to MC for the whole performance week doing standup, he was bloody hilarious. There used to be this great trio, Trevor, Rob Laurie and Drew Fairley known as The Singing Men and they performed one night there. We got a bit of heckling at times, we had some pretty wild nights there. The room was quite a narrow space, a bit of a tunnel. We wanted to do a kind of Gothic thing and we asked Prik Harness (Michael Simic and Geoff Hinchcliffe) to do some fire eating and I remember that Geoff did this thing where he blew flames and it went right down the room and there was this tunnel of flames. How no-one got their heads burnt, I don’t know! It was totally off the wall, things like that would happen, no OH&S, I don’t think the place even had a fire extinguisher, you know what I mean? We were just winging it totally and luckily nothing went haywire.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

Image: The Singing Men – Trevor Brown, Drew Fairley and Rob Laurie – The Star Cafe 1991. A still from footage by Tom Spence, provided by John Bonner.