Frankie’s Pizza by the Slice
This day, exactly 1 year ago, I was given access to my most beloved bar in Sydney - Frankie's Pizza by the Slice,
7 days before it shut down for good.
So I rented an incredible camera to turn some photos into prints and shot on my own for 9 hours.
Being in the place for that time with no one else was utterly bizarre. I took about 2000 photos, documenting everything I could see via the camera.
The bar, the pizzeria, the crazy music posters, the scribblings on the walls, the details that no one saw whilst the place was packed with bodies and loud music, the hidden whiskey bar, the copious bar paraphernalia. I was surrounded by the smell of their incredible pizza mixed with the stale stench of beer, which was still fresh in the air as it had only closed 4 hours earlier at 4am the same morning.
Frankie's was open from 4pm to 4am, 7 days per week. So it thumped nonstop, all year round.
It was a surreal experience. I could sense the ghost-like presence of all the absent, devoted fans and loyal followers. There was an incredible stillness to the place. It felt like, in those 8 hours, the bar got a chance to breathe. I felt honoured to be there alone after everyone else had left, the music had been turned off, and the heaving bodies had left.
“Sydney has a bad habit of squashing the cultural institutions that give life to the city’s underground. In late 2022, Frankie’s Pizza buckled to the seemingly unstoppable power of Sydney’s infrastructure boom. As the original rock’n’roll late-night dive bar, with pizza by the slice in the front, live bands out the back, and a whole lotta lunacy in the Fun Room, Frankie’s will surely go down as one of the all-time great, hard rock institutions. Here’s how it started. May the party never end.”
— excerpt from issue 2 of Swill, written by frankie’s owners,
Grab a copy of Swill today to read the whole thing!
