BOVINE SEX CLUB 20TH ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL KICKOFF with the FLATLINERS, SAINT ALVIA CARTEL and others at Bovine (542 Queen West), Saturday (February 12). $15. bovinesexclub.com.
The majority of Toronto bars don’t last two years, yet remarkably the Bovine Sex Club is about to celebrate its 20th birthday. Even more impressive is that it’s weathered economic downturns and an ever-changing music scene without wavering from its firmly established grimy hard rock image.
Queen West has changed so dramatically over the past two decades that the club feels almost like a time capsule. Owner Darryl Fine says it wasn’t originally intended to be an oasis for the tattooed and leather-clad.
“It ended up getting trendy really fast, and not with the mainstream people we were expecting,” recalls Fine as he puts the finishing touches on the lineup for the Bovine’s month-long anniversary festival.
“We didn’t know it would go the way that it did. I mean, if you think of yourself as cool, you probably aren’t.”
When Fine opened the bar with his original partners, Chris Sheppard and Wesley Thuro, they were building on their experience running the legendary underground all-ages club 23 Hop. It didn’t become a rock-focused live venue until unusual circumstances demanded changes.
“For the first three years we were pretty much like any modern hipster DJ bar,” says Fine. “The street changed around 1996 and got really rough. A lot of motorcycle gang action, people wearing their colours. The booze cans tended to be controlled by criminals.
“It got all heavy on Queen Street, and our remedy was a live music program. We started booking glam punk bands like the Sinisters, which creeped out the tough guys and started cycling new faces into the bar.”
They pulled off this reinvention without alienating their regular clientele, a pattern they’ve repeated ever since. There’s a delicate balance to maintaining the gritty Bovine feel and embracing new trends, which they manage by hosting everything from burlesque to funk to electro in addition to the punk, glam, rockabilly and metal bands we’ve come to expect.
The approach has kept a steady stream of new young faces coming in without making the place too unfamiliar or unwelcoming to the rockers who’ve been there since the beginning (and who still claim it as their home away from home).
Somewhat counterintuitively, Fine has kept the live-venue aspect of the Bovine secondary to the bar itself. Guest list spots are always set aside for the regulars, and it’s one of the few venues in the city that patrons will hit without bothering to find out who’s playing that night.
That doesn’t mean that Fine hasn’t put a lot of thought into the 20th anniversary celebrations. The month kicks off Saturday (February 12) with a Warped Tour party featuring the Flatliners and Saint Alvia Cartel and continues next week with new wave legend Carole Pope (February 17), Alexisonfire offshoot Black Lungs (February 18) and Bovine fixture the Sinisters (February 19).
Highlights in the coming weeks include Toronto hard rock heroes C’mon (February 25), rockabilly icon Robert Gordon (February 26) and two gigs by John Kastner’s pre-Doughboys punk band the Asexuals (March 4 and 5).
benjaminb@nowtoronto.com
