422 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills

G’day, Charles Touma here and today I’m outside 422 Cleveland Street in Surry Hills to talk about a pretty amazing mix of stories attached to the history of this building. So initially a large piece of land, including this site and Cleveland Street, was granted to Edward Smith Hall in 1822. He subdivided his land and sold 1.5 acres to Ruben Uther, which included this block, which he then sold onto Wesleyan Church in 1877. In 1879, a Methodist Church was built here and remained until 1977, when the church became part of the Uniting Church. Now it’s not at all clear on how this happened, but at least two famous songs were recorded inside the church during the era when it was run in the 70s by artist, Peter Day.

In 1974, the major hit radio song, “The Newcastle Song”, sung by Bob Hudson, was recorded here in front of a live audience and dominated the radio airwaves in 1975. In 1977, AC/DC recorded the music video for their song, “Let There Be Rock”, here in the church. Lead singer, Bon Scott dressed as a priest, and the rest of the band dressed as altar boys. Scott broke his ankle during the filming, jumping from the lectern. Then in 1986, I should say, the church was bought for $205,000 by a lady who was known as Madame Lash. Now Gretel Pinniger, aka Madame Lash, had established quite a reputation as the dominatrix of Sydney’s wealthiest and famous during the 70s and 80s.

Her clients included Kerry Packer’s older brother, Clyde, and Financier Gordon Barton, as well as the Mr. Big of Sydney’s Underworld, Lenny McPherson. Kirk Gallery is what she called the building, running it as a nightclub and a community art space. She hosted many wild parties for the BDSM set, as well as live music here. There are plans to redevelop the site into a new arts space, along with a 30 room boarding house and cafe. Now I’ve been selling in Surry Hills for almost 20 years, and one of my most recent sales is 31 Prospect Street, a two-bedroom house on 60 square metres of land, which we ended up selling for $1,620,000. My name’s Charles Touma, my office on Thurlow Street is always open for you to come in and have a chat.