After over a decade as the bluest building in the West End, Hindley Street live music venue Jive has been given a vivid new facelift courtesy of Adelaide artist Lisa King.

Unveiled this week, the former theatre’s once very blue façade been replaced by one of King’s rich, eye-catching mural designs. As Jive owner Tam Boakes, a new paint job for the venue has been a long time coming.

“I’ve always wanted to since I first stood in that building,” she laughs. “Inside and out, the entire building was just covered in that blue. The inside was changed right away but the outside was just a bit harder; it’s just been [a matter of] trying to find an artist, timelines and getting everything falling into place.”

Hindley Street’s newest resident

Following a call out last year for artists to jazz up the building’s front display panels, the project grew more ambitious once Boakes got in touch with the Adelaide City Council‘s public art program, which has been helping business owners enlist local artistic talent to add some more colour to our streets. Council staff put Boakes in touch with a range of local artists, with King deemed the perfect match.

“Tam had seen my work at Hotel Minima on O’Connell Street,” King explains. “She thought I could navigate the building because it’s so complex.”

“There’s so many different shapes going on with the wall,” she says. “It was quite hard, I think I ended up doing 20 different versions of the design until I had it right. There are so many intrusive shapes and only one spot where the girl could actually sit on the wall.”

“You don’t notice until you go to put something distinct on there,” Boakes concurs. “You kind of look at it as a blank space and then go ‘hang on, that’s not flat!’”

All the geometry!

King had to fight the elements to complete the pastel-heavy “indie” and “80s” inspired design, as winter delivered a few last minute surprises. “It was actually quite weird,” she says. “I was there for about four weeks, but basically worked weekends because the weather was horrendous. There was rain and it was really windy.”

The finished project is just the latest development in a continuing relationship between Jive and Adelaide’s artistic community, with the interior brought to life by The Beards‘ go-to artist Chris Edser and walls in the rear carpark covered in commissioned work by Toy Soldiers. For Boakes, showcasing local art alongside music is a no brainer.

“They go hand in hand, ‘artist’ is so broad to me it’s not just musicians it’s everything,” she says.

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