Han Kyung-rok of Crying Nut crowdsurfs during the closing show of Club Spot, Oct. 25, 2014. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar By Jon Dunbar This is the fifth part in a series intended to raise awareness of Korea's elusive live music scene and help more people find it.
Younger people might be surprised nowadays to hear that the area in front of western Seoul's Hongik University, known as Hongdae, was once ground zero for the entire country's live music scene and independent culture spirit. It used to be the place to get away from K-pop's omnipresent sensory overload. The area became a subcultural hotbed sometime around the early 1990s, and in the latter half of the decade, it was bursting at the seams with the (then-still-youthful) energy of live music.
There are still people around who remember these early days, and while they've grown old, some of them still haven't grown up. There are a lot of sad stories around the rise and fall of live music venues in Hongdae, but let's face it, it's not really a business that churns out success stories. 9.
Spangle Ever notice Taeyeong Apartment, the biggest apartment complex in the Hongdae area? Before redevelopment, that spot used to have a lot of culture. This is where Spangle opened its doors in 1996, replacing an earlier music bar called Double Deuce. Spangle was the house venue for some of the well-known first-generation modern rock bands, including Huckleberry Finn, Cocore, Deli Spice and My Aunt Mary.
According to one website, the legendary British guitarist Bernard Butler apparently showed up there in July 1999 during a stop on his way to Japan to play Fuji Rock Festival. After losing a bet in a card game, he agreed to perform there the next day. News spread fast, and by sunrise, people were already lining up outside the venue.
Spangle closed in 2000 and has been replaced with the high-rise apartment complex. Read More Hongdae community coping with drastic changes Graffiti dating back as far as the late 1990s is visible through a metal gate that once led to the first Skunk Hell, seen in an alley in western Seoul's Nogosan-dong, May 13, 2015. The graffiti has since been covered up.
8. Skunk Hell The main punk club of the 1990s was Club Drug, but as it increasingly closed its doors to new acts, another venue was needed. The call was answered by Won Jong-hee of the street punk band Rux, who opened Skunk Live Hall on the wrong side of the tracks (literally) in Nogosan-dong, near Sinchon neighborhood.
Various stories abound regarding how the name was changed to Skunk Hell. This tiny place was accessed via a narrow alley leading to basement stairs at the back of a building. It was "close to the size of a good-sized living room," according to an American high school student who ran away from his home in Yongsan Garrison in 2002 and lived there for a while.
Graffiti from that era still marked the alley entrance until it was removed only a few years ago. Skunk closed sometime before January 2004, when it moved into its second location, the former site of Club Drug in Sangsu-dong. Skunk now exists in its fourth location in Sindang-dong.
7. Blue Devil Not much information about Blue Devil seems to have survived to this day. I don't even know where it was located, although it appears the building is still standing — with no traces remaining of its cultural significance.
It was operated by Lee Hyun-sook, who was interested in psychedelic and avant-garde music. This venue discovered and incubated bands the likes of Jaurim, Ppippi Band and U&ME Blue. Its legacy carried on in two forms, one being Jaurim which is still active and renowned to this day, and also.
.. A DGBD sign is seen in the stairwell, Feb.
6, 2021, shortly after the venue's closure. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar 6. DGBD There was a bit of a game of musical chairs around the end of 2003 in the Hongdae music scene.
Club Drug, the most legendary venue of the area, exited the original Sangsu location and teamed up with Blue Devil, creating a new venue in a new location. This was to be called DGBD, an anagram of their names stuck together, and obviously intended to be reminiscent of the New York punk club CGBG. DGBD was superior to Drug, at least as a facility (no offense to the original Drug space, which has been fixed up incredibly well and is now called Bender).
The ceiling was extra high, with a catwalk and sound booth around the upper level, and it had an emergency exit and a licensed bar. After opening in 2004, DGBD survived all the way into the pandemic, closing sometime in late 2020. A new business moved in, and now the space is once again empty, possibly flooded.
Read More Live music venues going out of business one after another amid COVID-19 pandemic All that remains in Club Ta is posters and paint on the walls, Oct. 15, 2016, following the venue's closure. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar 5.
Club Ta Club Ta was an underrated venue. Located in a basement next door to the louder Club FF, it was owned by Jeon Sang-kyu of the band YNot? Club Ta opened in May 2006 and closed its doors a decade later in 2016, when the monthly rent reportedly doubled from 3.5 million won to 7 million won.
The space was then gutted and appears to have remained unoccupied ever since. So..
. congratulations to that landlord? Read More Hongdae indie spirit gutted Sato Yukie, right, and friends perform at Yogiga in Hapjeong-dong, July 23, 2012. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar 4.
Yogiga Another barren basement, Yogiga, was opened by Lee Han-joo around 2004. Lee, the founder of the Bulgasari monthly experimental music concert series, turned the place into a landmark for a unique corner of Hongdae's music scene. Yogiga has actually appeared in seven different spaces over its life, starting with Seogyo-dong near Hongik University Station for the first year.
Then, it moved to its best-known location in Hapjeong-dong. Later, it bounced around to Mangwon-dong in 2016, Yeonnam-dong in 2017 and Donggyo-dong in 2018. It's a classic example of a Hongdae gentrification refugee relocating to the rim of the region referred to as "Hongdae" while being pursued by gentrification forces and pushed further away from the center.
Lee mentioned a seventh location has since opened in southern Seoul's Sillim-dong, once again giving Bulgasari a home. Read More Bulgasari celebrates 20 years of experimental music in Seoul A crowd gathers on stage in Salon Badabie, Sept. 17, 2011, in front of a "Badabie Never Die" banner.
Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar 3. Salon Badabie I have warm memories of Badabie, and it may be due to the warm-feeling, wood-lined interior. It was opened in December 2004 by a poet who went by the penname Ujungdokbohaeng.
Badabie had a bit more of an open-door policy than other clubs and wasn't pigeonholed by genre; one week you could see acoustic folk, and the next week there could be crust punk. Around 2011, the owner, who was already struggling with rent, underwent brain surgery for cancer. The musicians of Hongdae, including many who had got their start in this hallowed basement venue, banded together to save Badabie and its owner with an 11-day festival titled "Badabie Never Die.
" The proceeds were used to pay rent, and Badabie's owner survived the surgery. The venue stayed open for a few more years, until at least 2014, before inevitably closing. Read More [Weekender] Saving Salon Badabie The former entrance to Club Spot shows that it has been turned into a K-pop luxury coin singing room, Feb.
6, 2021. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar 2. Club Spot Club Spot opened in December 2005, searching for its niche in the swiftly saturating Hongdae punk venue field.
One way it found this was by holding shows later, starting after other shows ended (Hongdae shows used to be notorious for starting and finishing early). It also offered free cocktail hours, I believe from 11 p.m.
to midnight, but for some probably obvious reason, my memory of this is incredibly hazy. Although it might be most easily characterized as pop-punk, it was not beholden to any one faction of the increasingly splintering punk and hardcore scene. Its original founder moved on to the much larger Club Prism, before opening Danginri Theater, Newsboy Burger Pub and now most recently Highball Club Nakasu.
After almost a decade, Club Spot closed in 2014, with its final show on Halloween weekend. A music video was made that night showing most if not all of the people in attendance. The space has since been converted into a K-pop coin noraebang.
Read More [FINDING THE SCENE 1] Seoul's top 10 live music venues [FINDING THE SCENE 2] Busan's top 6 favorite live music venues [FINDING THE SCENE 3] Daegu's top 5 favorite live music venues [FINDING THE SCENE 4] Live music venues all around Korea 1. Hippytokki This is the most recent closure, and because of that maybe still the most painful. This basement space had gone through several name changes, before becoming Goinmool and then Hippytokki.
It brought a little momentum to Hongdae's live scene, especially punk, during the difficult days of the pandemic. Once the light at the other end of the tunnel was visible, it closed. The place had a warm, colorful, inviting interior, and at least through pandemic restrictions it provided a lot of seating.
I also liked its location, near the subway station and a few doors down from Strange Fruit, a less-crowded part of the neighborhood. It may be gone, but it is survived by the Hippytokki Compilation Project, which is still listenable online, along with a couple other albums, at hippytokki.bandcamp.
com . Punk band 18Fevers practices inside Hippytokki, Oct. 9, 2021.
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