After opening a shop in 1980 called 'Eccentric Clothing' for fringe art & clothing, Kate Buck & five male friends (Lawton Ellery, John Desailly, Terence Shannon, Jim Buck, Paul Doogood) decided to open up an independent club in 1981 for art & live original music in Flinders Lane Melbourne CBD. It was separate to all of the other established venues that were around at the time and was called the 'Killayoni Club’. 

This group of young punk DIY creatives not only built a huge stage & painted it all beautifully, but with the assistance of Lawton Ellery and his home-made sound system, 'Dresden Sound', they also installed a mixing desk, speakers and video equipment. (Lawton also played electric violin and was the individual who discovered the empty Buffalo Club premises).

They got their tables & chairs etc. from hard rubbish & from window displays that were thrown into back alleys, and they nicked carpet in the middle of the night from the bank up the road, in order to lay carpet on their own floors. The sound was ok then, but they still needed spotlights to film the bands/performances etc. so they put white overalls on & took a ladder to the Myer shop window...climbed the ladder & unscrewed the lights without raising suspicion & took them back to the club. Ditto with Beta tapes.

However, a year later in 1983, just when they were getting a name & popularity for their club (in fact they had just been to court & the Liquor Licensing Commission had granted them a BYO license) some drunken patron lit a flame under the fire sprinklers & flooded the basement where the owners kept their stock of fur coats, resulting in the tenants of Killayoni Club being thrown out of the building.

Over its short tenure The Killayoni Club presented some truly psychedelic nights of film, sound and performance. 

The Following is an excerpt from Tim Hemensley's fanzine 'Punk Purge #5' from December 1982:

"The Killayoni Scene:  I thought I’d use this last page to remember a club called The Killayoni Club, one of the best non pub venues for new music (New Wave or Rock, not strictly commercial) in the last 3 years. When I was interviewed on the ‘Behind the Shelter Sheds’ (a program for kids on Radio 3CR what else could it be ?), I named the club as one of 2 places kids (under 15’s) could get to see live new wave or punk. A few months later the Killayoni Club was gone and the bands scattered to other places far and wide. 

The Killayoni Club was located in Flinders Lane and bands such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, Plays with Marionettes, 3 Toed Sloths, Daughters of Charity & Voix would be the right’s entertainment. The first time I went there was NYE 1981. Meeting Kathy Buck (manageress) at the door was a surprise (as I thought it was a Polish nightclub) and later on actually meeting the performers was something rare and something which probably hasn’t happened since the demise of the first wave of punk in this country in 1980. 

Let me point out that the club was not strictly a punk club. One of the bands who (to me anyway) represents the true Killayoni sound was 2D. They played very sixtiesish garage post punk rock, very heavy, very psychedelic (ie: garage psychedelia like late PRETTY THINGS, MASTERS APPRENTICES, SHADOWS OF KNIGHT, KINGSMEN etc..) very good. 

THE band of the club was The Incredibly Strange Creatures… who were thoroughly improvisational and seemed to alienate most of their audience rather than attract them (Kathy Buck lying on the stage screaming and Jim Buck monotonously saying "She Says/She Says/She Says/" while other musicians have arguments through Saxophones was hardly fun or a good night out). Punk was supposed to be anti-music-music but the person who said that would probably be choking on their words when they saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures…. 

Another band who sometimes appeared there was Three Toed Sloths consisting of Jim Buck on heavily distorted guitar & Terry Shannon on Bass with songs such as ‘ I’m gonna bust yer ass you son of a bitch’, Johnny Cash’s ‘Angel from Vegas’ and ‘ I wanna be a worm’ . Of course, no history of TKC would be complete without mentioning ROYAL FLUSH (plug!!) who played the club on ‘The Final Fling Killayoni Thing’ final night. Oh I don’t know what to say now !! alas, poor Killayoni, I knew it well!"