High Ground is a new program of events coming to Fitzroy venues the Punters Club, the Evelyn and the Night Cat this winter.
Nathan Farrell moved to Melbourne seven years ago. These days he barely leaves Fitzroy.
As the co-owner of music management and venue programming agency Calibre, Farrell spends most of his time hopping between The Night Cat, The Evelyn and the Punters Club, three venues on the Calibre books.
High Ground
- The Night Cat, The Evelyn and Punters Club, Fitzroy
- May to August 2025
- High Ground: In Motion takes place 18 July across all three venues
- Tickets here
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The trio of Inner North hotspots is at the centre of Calibre’s new winter event series, High Ground. The inaugural High Ground runs from late May into August, and the lineup includes a stack of local and international acts from a wide variety of genres.
“We wanted to come up with something that celebrated the proximity of these three iconic spaces,” Farrell says.
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The program is full of surprise winter treats. There’s Detroit post-punks Protomartyr, New York noise rock experimentalists YHWH Nailgun, LA soul and R&B performer Jenevieve, and Japanese avant-gardists Violent Magic Orchestra, as well as Frankston’s Merseybeat revivalists The Gnomes, grungy folk songwriter Milly Strange, and DJs Eden Burns, Milo Eastwood, Disco Mediterranea, plus many more.
“We’ve got DJ Assault at the Evelyn which is going to be fucking wild,” Farrell says, referring to the Detroit ghettotech legend. “He sold out Night Cat last time, so that is a big underplay. We’ve also got Mildlife doing a show at Night Cat, which is a big underplay for them as well.”
The program centrepiece is the three-venue, single day music festival High Ground: In Motion, which is happening on 18 July and features many of Calibre’s favourite live acts and DJs, including Skeleten, Public Figures, Setwun & The Soulstranauts, Sleepazoid, Rain Dogs, Horatio and XIAO XIAO.
“In Motion is something we wanted to put a lot of care into to really celebrate the unique position we’re in and the privilege we have of working with three really different spaces in such close proximity that you could almost throw a blanket over them,” Farrell says. “There’s all these different things, different scenes, different nights, all going on at once, with Fitzroy being the backdrop of it – and making sure you get a slice of pizza at Lambs in between one and the other.”
The event name is an instruction: they want to see people hopping between the three venues throughout the night and bringing life to Brunswick and Johnston Streets.
“We wanted to have that idea of just moving around the neighbourhood and enjoying it and bouncing from one to another and seeing how on one night, everything can be seemingly so disparate, but also quite connected because it all is happening around the corner of one another,” Farrell says.
When programming In Motion, the Calibre team were careful to avoid pigeonholing any of the venues from a genre perspective.
“You don’t want people to go, ‘Actually, all the stuff that I want to see is at the Night Cat, I’m going to camp there for the night.’ That’s not the purpose of the night,” Farrell says. “We wanted to go, all right, maybe you really want to see Public Figures, you want to see Rain Dogs, but we want to make sure, A, they’re on at different times, and B, there’s enough space between them so you can move around and experience the neighbourhood.”
The three venues play distinct roles within the broader Melbourne music scene. The Punters Club is 250-capacity and entry is always free. The Evelyn hosts ticketed events with a capacity of 300. The Night Cat is 600-capacity and ticketed.
There’s one act on the In Motion lineup that Farrell has witnessed ascend through the three venues in a relatively short space of time: the live jazz and house duo No News.
“It’s so good to have them on this lineup because they epitomise exactly what we hope to achieve in booking these three really iconic spaces,” he says. “I first saw them doing a Monday night at Punters Club for free and that was exceptional. Then we booked them in for a Wednesday night residency at the Ev, which went off, and then we booked them for Saturday night and they sold out the Night Cat.
“That’s kind of what we’re here for – we want to be that runway.”
The Calibre team plan to get keep growing High Ground in winters to come, but the emphasis will always be on the local community and the spaces that give Fitzroy its unique character.
“I’ve been trusted with some really special cultural spaces and it’s warming, but it’s also a profound responsibility,” Farrell says. “It’s not everywhere in the country or the world where you can have three venues like this within a two-minute stroll of one another.
“It’s a community and there’s something special in the streets that has made it so. And I think with something like High Ground, we want to highlight that and highlight how special this is.”
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This article was made in partnership with CLBR.
