Cape Town has spent the best part of a decade watching its live rooms go dark. The Assembly, Mercury Live, the Raptor Room, The Waiting Room, the list of city-bowl venues that couldn’t make the maths work is long and well-rehearsed by now. Which is what makes the news out of 84 Shortmarket Street worth sitting with. The House of Machines isn’t closing. After thirteen years, it’s moving five metres across to a bigger space behind the big red door, with a send-off on 15 August the venue is calling “burning down this house.”
Thirteen years is an eternity for a small room in this city, which makes the better question how it stayed open long enough to need more space at all.
The room that was never for hire
Talk to Jak Tomas, who has played the room since the mid-2010s and now has run its programming for the last four years as musical director, and two answers come up fast. The first is money, or rather the refusal to let ticket sales decide everything. THoM pays its artists a set fee, propped up by long-standing sponsor relationships and a crowd that keeps turning up. “We and the artist don’t rely on ticket sales to keep all pockets full,” Tomas says. In a scene where most rooms hand the risk straight to the performer, that is close to radical, and it’s a large part of why the door has stayed open while others shut.
The second is curation. THoM was, in his words, “never a space for hire but a curated experience,” and he books it accordingly. Cover-bands get turned away. “THoM is a space for original music first,” he says, though he’ll happily take an interpretation of a well-known song as long as the artist tells their own story first. The bar for the bill is refreshingly old-fashioned: natural talent, real proficiency on voice and instrument, and a genre lane carved out by the directors before him that he guards fairly strictly. He’ll step outside it, but only when a booking adds an ingredient the room hasn’t tasted in a while.
That care has a physical texture. The stage sits on a Persian carpet, level with the crowd, close enough that Tomas describes “wild kinetic energy, that can only happen when you are literally playing eye-to-eye with your audience.” Then there is the line that has become part of the room’s folklore: “We have a carpet to catch your sweat.” Because it isn’t a ticketed listening room, artists sometimes have to win over people who wandered in for a cold one and a bite, and Tomas treats that as training rather than obstacle. It teaches you to hold a room.
It hasn’t always sounded the way it does now. THoM opened as a stripped-back acoustic spot, then loosened up as louder bands came knocking, and eventually spilled onto Shortmarket Street with parties that turned the building into a speaker. Tomas talks about that sound with real feeling, the music “vibrating against your chest, and the glass in your hand” while a person and their instrument do the rest. “That’s a visceral experience,” he says, and it’s the thing he keeps coming back to.
Something on every night of the week
The other thing worth crediting is consistency. From Tuesday to Saturday, every week, THoM has an act on. Wednesdays and Thursdays lean solo and duo; the weekend is where the bigger, sweatier energy lives.
The one to flag, though, is Tuesday. The Songwriters’ Showcase, THoM’s take on an open-mic night, was founded by former music director Andy Lund shortly after the room opened and has quietly become the best of its kind in Cape Town. It’s where established acts road-test new material and where nervous newcomers get their first proper taste of a live audience. It also works as Tomas’s scouting ground. Plenty of the artists he now spotlights later in the week were first spotted on a Tuesday, which means the showcase isn’t a warm-up act so much as a pipeline into the bill itself. If you want to understand how THoM actually develops talent rather than just booking it, that’s the night to watch.
So what do five extra metres buy? Tomas is playing it close to the chest. Pushed on what the new space makes possible, he offers “Pistachio with blocks of peppermint crisp chocolate” and not much else, though he’ll confirm the venue is “certainly elevating what we have been experiencing at THoM for 13 years.” Read into that what you like. More room for the louder bands the space grew into. A stage that can breathe. And, we’ll admit a slightly selfish thrill here, a proper run to the bathroom that no longer involves climbing over half the crowd mid-set. The logic Tomas does give away is plain enough: “We can do more because we have more to work with.”
For a room that started life as a quiet acoustic corner and grew into one of the city’s most dependable live stages, more to work with is rather the point.
The last night at 84 Shortmarket lands tonight, 15 August, one final hurrah with PHFAT and Metro Villa before the next chapter opens this summer. The final Songwriters’ Showcase runs on 18 August. Sign-up is from 19:00, first come, first play. If you’ve never made it down, this is the moment.
