Double Whammy! opens its doors to patrons in just 24 hours - but there's still a lot to be done. Photo: Supplied / Lucy Macrae
On Saturday evening, Double Whammy! will be opening its doors to Tāmaki Makaurau gig-goers for the very first time.
But with just one day to go, it is going to take a lot of hustling to make the Karangahape Road venue's vision come to life: there are still walls to be painted, stages to be built, furniture to move and bar fridges thirsty for stock.
Will Double Whammy! be ready in time for its grand opening on Saturday night? Co-owner Lucy Macrae seems to think so - in fact, she is confident it will.
Whammy co-owner Lucy Macrae, right, with her band Dick Move. Photo: supplied
"It will definitely be ready in time for opening. We have a background in running music venues, not so much in renovations, so it's been a learning experience along the way, but we've called in so many favours.
"Our punk rock friends from back in the day are now painters and builders and sandblasters and lighting technicians, you name it, we've got every tradie on sight working around the clock, all staff are in cleaning and moving stuff and painting and varnishing. At the moment it looks like chaos, and it is, but it's that chaos just before it sort of all starts to come together.
"It's gonna be down to the wire, but we're feeling really confident and really excited like, what we've done in there, it's really transformed, and we're really proud of what it's gonna be."
Once the walls come down between Whammy Backroom and Wine Cellar's performance space, the highly-anticipated new music venue in St Kevin's Arcade will have capacity of 400-500 people.
The Wine Cellar's bar area will go through "a gentle refurbishment" before being unveiled as Public Bar.
It is an ambitious venture between two beloved Auckland venues. Macrae says the idea has been there for years, but the thought of making it a reality only occurred in May, after Wine Cellar owner Rohan Evans had just celebrated the venue's 20th anniversary.
"He just felt he'd done all he could with Wine Cellar ... so when he came to that decision and approached us, we were like, 'Yup, let's do it.'"
Edmund Cake and band performing at the Wine Cellar, which will become a part of Double Whammy! on Saturday night. Photo: Supplied / Joon Yang
The three months since making that call in May have been chaotic - both Macrae and Whammy co-owner Tom Anderson had prior commitments overseas they could not pull out of, so it was all hands on deck for the rest of the team.
"My band Dick Move had a European tour booked for mid-June and Tom was going to Italy a week or two after me to get married, and we had about six weeks of putting ideas in place and then we left the country, we had a great team on the ground doing everything they could, and they helped so much just doing bits and pieces while we were away."
The Wine Cellar celebrated its closing night show on Saturday 3 August, and staff took a well-deserved day off on Sunday. But since that Monday, it has been non-stop hustling ever since.
"At the moment we've got eight, nine, 10 people in, bringing down walls, varnishing things, sanding, painting ... it's in that chaotic stage where everything is left to do, but the preparation has all been done, so when I say it needs to be stage built and bars built and fridges put back together and stock put in, that's all to be done, but there's been so much prep behind that, that it's just a matter of pulling it together rather than having to do it all from scratch."
Double Whammy! gets a waterblast. Photo: Supplied / Lucy Macrae
On Saturday afternoon, staff will gather in the new Public Bar to toast and celebrate their achievements, before the doors to Double Whammy! open to ticket holders at 7pm.
"We're going to invite all the holders who have bought tickets to our first show at Double Whammy! and we're gonna have a mihi and a ribbon cutting ceremony, and really make a big deal about it, because it is a big deal, and it's a fresh new start."
A line-up of local acts will kick off at 8pm, starting with Na Noise and followed by Dbldbl, Dick Move, and Grecco Romank, before the FILTH crew close off the night.
All the old and new staff will be there, and there are still plenty of rooms and bars and jobs to go around. Macrae says Double Whammy! is for the community that has always been there.
"We're wanting to celebrate everyone who's been with us the last 10 years on that Whammy journey, we don't want this new space to be intimidating, it's still for the community, so that's what we're saying with that line-up, and it's an incredible line-up ... it's pretty special really."
And it has been a huge community effort to get Double Whammy! up and running.
"We've called in a lot of favours and we had a budget, we've stuck to it, but you're talking in the hundreds of thousands, that we have literally borrowed from our parents, used our savings, scraped together here and there.
"It didn't feel right asking [the community] for that money, instead we're asking for support, for people to come out to shows, to buy tickets, to buy drinks behind the bars. We really want that community space, although Double Whammy! is opening, and we've got shows announced, there's still so many more things that we are planning that are gonna bring in more members of our community and be weird and wacky and wonderful."
Double Whammy! will be ready in time for its opening show, but that does not mean the developments stop there, Macrae says.
"Apart from the programming developments, the beauty of not having an endless supply of money and doing it this way is, nothing is finite, we're gonna make changes, we're gonna see if that works and tweak that.
"We probably haven't quite finished painting a wall we want painted, so that can be done down the line as well, we'll have to upgrade some equipment which we will do in time."
