This gritty, straight-shooting rock’n’roll dive in Collingwood has an upstairs bandroom for up-and-coming acts, a leafy beer garden, and decently priced drinks.
A dive bar done well is many things. It’s a hideaway from the outside world, a neighbourhood go-to with a recurring set of regulars. It’s somewhere that’s lived-in, with character, that feels like it’s always been there – or at least has a few decades under its belt. You can sit at the bar solo without a second glance, and drinks tend to run cheap and unpretentious: a decent tap beer offering, a couple of wines, maybe a short cocktail list, if a physical menu exists at all. Collingwood’s Nighthawks nails all this and more, all while – on the surface at least – seemingly not trying very hard to do anything much at all.
The cosy joint rolled into Johnston Street in 2015, just metres from long-standing live music venues The Tote, The Gem and The Bendigo Hotel, later joined by other musically minded neighbours like rock’n’roll cocktail haunt Fee Fee’s Bar. Whether you look at it geographically, aesthetically or philosophically, Nighthawks sits at the heart of Melbourne’s indie music scene, with weekly gigs advertised through posters plastered across its walls. If you’re not seeing a show here, it’s highly likely you’re coming from one nearby.
Inside, you immediately get a sense of who runs the joint, the music they like and the places they’ve been. Owners Leah Henry and Marcus Davies have spent years collecting artworks, trinkets and other miscellaneous paraphernalia found on their travels, slowly adding to their collection of band stickers, records, boom boxes and the occasional old-school neon sign or taxidermy animal head until every inch of free space is covered, from the back bar to the walls in the loos. There’s even a vintage pinball machine out the back.
At one end of the bar is a framed poster of the 1981 thriller Nighthawks, but the venue isn’t named after the film. The inspiration came from American realist painter Edward Hopper’s mid-century masterpiece of the same name depicting a diner late at night, its brightly lit interior acting as a haven from the stark exterior streets and highlighting the paradoxical feeling of isolation that can come from modern city living. There’s nothing lonely about the IRL Nighthawks, though. It's a lively, rowdy space with nooks aplenty, from a handful of leather-clad booths running down one side of the front bar to the band-room upstairs and the greenery-rich beer garden where leopard print and leather-clad drinkers congregate among the fronds.
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