A DJ spins tunes for club goers on a Sunday at Barrymore’s for the weekly retro ’80s night.
Barrymore’s Music Hall is set to boldly take the plunge into a new phase and change its longstanding identity from a live concert hall to a nightclub.
Starting next month, the hall will begin opening on Saturday nights and entice Ottawa’s nightclub crowd with new renovations, bottle service, popular DJ shows and sticking to a music set list of strictly top-40 and house music.
“You see the trends shifting,” says Barrymore’s manager Andrew Hamilton. “Right now, pop culture has taken on DJs in a big way, and we haven’t yet embraced that on the level and scale that we’re looking to do right now.”
The new entertainers have tough acts to follow. Over the past three decades, U2, Radiohead and R.E.M are just a few of the supernovas that have blown away the Barrymore’s crowd.
But a change in the hall’s ownership along with evolving customer demand have led to a sharp decline in live band shows over the past decade.
“We’ve tried to book acts in the past few years, but nobody was really coming,” says Hamilton. “You can’t have a bar offering something that doesn’t really exist anymore and nobody goes for.”
At first glance, Barrymore’s doesn’t appear to be the type of venue trying to redefine itself as Ottawa’s hottest nightclub.
Located on Bank Street near Gilmour, the tall, aging structure flaunts striking vertical white pilasters topped with fancy entablature making for a neoclassical building motif.
Inside, a lavish winding staircase brings patrons to a grand hall featuring a giant stage, chandeliers, mirrors on the walls and rising platforms that perch a spacious dance floor.
Barrymore’s opened as a Vaudeville theatre in 1914 and has been transformed several times over its history to a strip joint, disco bar, live concert hall and more recently, a club for retro ‘80s and ‘90s nights. Most of the tunes blasting out of the speakers, however, were modern hits and it was just a matter of time before the switch to a nightclub became official.
Former Barrymore’s owner Eugene Haslam, who worked at the hall in the late 1990s, says that while he’s not a fan of the venue turning away from live bands, the current management deserves to choose their identity since it's their own time and energy.
“Obviously, there are a lot of other places in Ottawa offering good music nowadays unlike the past where Barrymore’s was the mythical place for live music,” he says. “Music will find a place to be heard, it’s just unfortunate that one of the best places for it to be heard is languishing.”
Barrymore’s certainly hosted some special moments for concertgoers over the past four decades. Andy Gregg, 49, remembers stopping by the hall regularly to catch the big name or up-and-coming acts that didn’t typically make it to a medium-sized market such as Ottawa.
Gregg says he will never forget when Scottish musician Midge Ure played Barrymore’s in the mid-‘80s.
“At one point he came out with an acoustic rendition of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (a song he co-wrote with Bob Geldof),” he says. “The room went silent and everyone was engaged, and to have a moment like that at a club in Ottawa – it was really cool.”
Hamilton insists the changes will not transform what Barrymore’s is and what it stands for.
“It would be a travesty if we turned away from live acts,” Hamilton says. “But as for concerts, we’re not really going to do any of that anymore and instead focus on bringing in big DJs.”
He points out that although rock bands dominated the music charts two or three years ago, DJs such as David Guetta and Above and Beyond have taken over, and those are the touring entertainers that fuel the biggest and fastest response for tickets.
“People have been going into the Byward Market to cruise around at night,” Hamilton says. “But if we do this properly and we get the results that we think we can get by establishing ourselves as a club, we can help stimulate businesses and nightlife here in Centretown.”