Gabba Hey! Is the Best DIY Venue in Ottawa

All photos courtesy of James Park

Gabba Hey! is special. A huge, wide open warehouse space in Ottawa's City Centre, it's a staple underground music, arts, & community in the city. As an artist, I've been lucky enough to have watched its birth and growth up until this point, and look forward with a full heart on what's to come for the venue & shop, a spot one might not at first think would belong to the "sleepy" capital. Treat yourself to a show sometime and catch the huge shadows dance on the wall. I spoke to Luke, my best friend & owner of Gabba Hey! about his love of music, what the space is to him, and how it came to be.

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Noisey: When did you become interested in being involved in music & arts in
Ottawa?
Luke: I've always loved music. The radio was always on when I was growing up. Oldies 1310 or Energy 1200 before school and CBC in the evenings. Listening to so much AM radio is probably why I like low-fi sounding music now. I also have a brother and sister that are a few years older that were both into music, so I got lucky hearing what they were into as teenagers. I listened to equal amounts NWA, Misfists and C + C Music Factory when I was 11. I loved 2 Live Crew, Kid N Play, Guns & Roses and Paul Simon. It was pretty great.

By 13, I was a shitty little rocker kid. A buddy of mine and I got banned from using any of the equipment in shop class. One day he brought a copy of Nirvana's Bleach to the scrap wood room where we had to sort pieces of wood as punishment. I think the first local show I went to was a Furnace Face show at Porterhall on the Carleton U campus. I don't even remember the other bands. I just remember how amazing the atmosphere was, there were tons of unusual young people and music that was so much more interesting than what I was hearing on Muchmusic. I started playing bass when I was 16 or 17 and have been involved in local, underground music, in one way or another, ever since.

Was a DIY approach one that you consciously took?
I had been reading fanzines like MRR, listening to CKCU and watching movies like Decline Of Western Civilization for a couple years before I started playing music so I've been aware of the idea of DIY for my entire adult life. I was really into the skate and pop punk seen in the early 90s. I went to every show I could go to and eventually I became friends with some of the promoters. Once I was playing in a band, we started putting on our own shows. Every band I've ever been in has started out by releasing our own stuff and booking pretty much all of our own shows/tours. I don’t think the idea of waiting around for someone to show up and do things for us ever occurred to me… It was always just a matter of figuring out what we had to do and then doing it. None of the things I wanted to do ever seemed particularly unachievable to me. They still don’t. So yeah, when I was planning Gabba Hey!, it was 100% going to cater to people with more DIY sensibilities.

What was your vision for Gabba Hey!? Do you feel it's become what you'd hoped?
Gabba Hey! is a record shop and venue inside my 'day' job at Capital Rehearsal Studios. I started the rehearsal studio in 2007 in an office building in downtown Ottawa. The original location wasn’t exactly the best place to throw underground punk shows. We did a few but the Commissionaire posted at the front door wasn't the best way to welcome the weirdos.

When I started looking for a new location I knew I wanted to be able to do more events and then found the perfect space for everything I need in the current location. Unfortunately, as is often the case, things with building the new location took way longer than I had hoped so we didn’t start doing shows here for almost a year after moving. I opened the store about a year and a half ago and we mostly stock local and touring Canadian releases but there's also an excellent DIY zine wall, lots of amazing art comics and a great pin and patch selection. There have been a ton of amazing shows here for the past two years but we're sort of going through another round of renovations right now and I've had to postpone shows until the new year. I've been trying to focus on more community oriented stuff. We've had DIY craft sales, movie premieres, video shoots etc etc. Bruised Tongue has an office here and Debaser is moving in soon. Ottawa Rockcamp for Girls has been happening at the studio for the past 8yrs in a row. There's a new initiative I'm doing with the City of Ottawa offering pay-what-you-can introductory live sound training to women. Those sorts of things are really important to me and I plan to do a lot more in the coming years. Since the very beginning, the studio and Gabba Hey! has changed and improved. I hope that never stops. All that said, it is a small business and there are always going to be ups and downs. I'm not overly concerned about getting rich so it shouldn't be a problem.

Was there a venue in Ottawa that you went to frequently growing up that impacted what you've made Gabba Hey! today?
There wasn't really one venue in particular. I did go to a bunch of shows at places like Porterhall, the Legion, SAW gallery (which is where we do most of the OXW events) and once I found out about it, 5 Arlington. There were dive bars like Liquid Monkey and The Pit that would have AA early shows and 19+ late shows. It was more about the promoters doing the shows really. My friend Murielle Varhelyi ran a promotion company called Swish Productions and did tons of AA shows anywhere she could for a long time. Shawn Scallen, who ran 5 Arlington, has been promoting punk shows forever. He used to do a phone in show listing service called 234-PUNX. You'd call it and he'd have recorded as many listings as he could fit on a cassette answering machine and then at the end would ask if anyone had a new answering machine cuz they would always be about to break. People who have lived with the internet have no idea how much harder things used to be. He also started punkottawa.com and now runs Spectrasonic. Ottawa, whether they know it or not, owes him and a very small handful of people a lot for keeping the DIY music scene going the last 30 years.

What has been your favorite show at the venue?
I just got a print of a poster for a Strange Attractor, Soupcans and Hagface show that happened here last fall. That was a really rad show. Three amazing bands. Great party. I'm usually doing sound at the shows and making sure nothing is on fire so I sometimes only get to take it in for a few minutes in between everything else… I'm more concerned that everyone is safe and having a good time. That's what matters most to me.

Caylie makes music as Boyhood. Read about her here.

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