Ever thought about casting an ugly person for a movie? How do you tell someone they’re unattractive, but not quite hideous enough? What about searching for someone super ordinary? Picking gorgeous leads would be easy, they’re a dime a dozen. Finding beauty in the mundane? That’s tough.
This is the trick behind OK Motels, the Instagram account that recently morphed into a mini-music festival, after photographer Kate Berry turned her love for shooting average accom into location scouting for a good old-fashioned gig.
Kate’s pick for her first outing, the Charlton Motel in downtown Charlton, Victoria, is almost three hours from Melbourne. Too far for the day trippers of Daylesford, Charlton was plonked along the banks of the Avoca river, which is currently clapped out. Half the shops in the main street are closed or for sale. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon and the streets are all but empty. It’s beautiful.
We park at the local footy field, turned temporary campground for the weekend, pitch our tent and unwrap the goodies unearthed in op shops on the way – Back in Black on vinyl and a butter dish. “Never understood why people hold onto this old shit,” the guy who sold them to us said.
Walking to the motel, we drop into the East Charlton pub for a couple. There’s four locals at the bar and a group of obvious blow-ins, like us, around the pool table. “You guys here for the concert?” asks the publican. “Should be a good ’un.”
A gigantic bloke with white hair and a black pea coat introduces himself as Blue. He shows us how to work the video jukebox in the corner. “There’s metal on here,” he says, scrolling through to the page with Metallica. We smile and nod along as Blue plays hit after classic Aussie rock hit.
What do these guys do for a living? Farmers for sure, we reckon, just look at them. We ask Blue and of course he’s a nurse in the emergency ward. Just got off a 12-hour shift. We drain our beers and leave the rest of our assumptions behind to soak into the coasters.
We get to the gig and the security guard on the door is hilariously uptight. Inside, there’s a short line up for the meals and beer, a reminder this is a festival after all, regardless of the size. The difference here being Kate is walking around chatting to punters, picking up empty glasses, and checking on the food coming out of the bain-marie.
The Charlton Motel is straight out of central casting. The white walls, arched windows, and terracotta-coloured tin roof. The cactus garden out the front. The empty vases on the bar and old prints on the wall. Tropical Fuck Storm might be the headliners here, but there’s denying who the real star is.
This is the room where every local eighteenth birthday has gone down. Every footy presso. Every wedding reception. The low ceiling and booth seating the scene of furtive pashes, bouquets of flowers being caught, yard glasses being drained, and shoes being vomited on in the toilets out the back. There’s memories here in every brick, most of them from decades long gone. And TFS honoured the place by ripping through a corsage-wilting, cummerbund-bursting set, closing with their cover of Staying Alive – a floor-filler that would have been played here a thousand times, twisted into an experimental rock track and the perfect outro.
Watching the other bands, getting steadily drunk, it dawns on me how what’s happened with food and beer has finally reached festivals – people want to know where stuff comes from and who’s behind it. They want to know things are made by humans who actually give a shit. Industrial scale festivals, where every surface is pre-sold for marketing opportunities to multinational companies and you end up watch the bands on a big screen TV from afar – this is the opposite. At Ok Motels, you’re standing on the same sticky carpet as the bands, you bump into them coming out of the dunny, and you see them the next morning at the only café open for breakfast.
In a world where politicians want to make everything great again, making live music ok again is good. Having an ok weekend is the best.