Nighthawks

Nighthawks is a limited-capacity live-music bar in Collingwood, Melbourne, with gigs staged upstairs above its Johnston Street drinking room. A numeric capacity remains unpublished; the scale is clearly intimate, with event listings flagging limited capacity and local guides describing live music upstairs. Its distinguishing feature is the split-level experience: arrive through a long timber bar and booths, then head upstairs for a close-range show. The venue presents bands, DJs and songwriter events under one roof.

Built as a bar with a room upstairs

Nighthawks came from hospitality pair Leah Henry and Marcus Davies, whose first bar drew on two reference points: ageing American dive bars and tiny Japanese owner-led rooms. Davies planned and built the Art Deco-leaning fit-out across nearly 18 months, working without designers or architects. Broadsheet’s 2026 profile gives the founders and build story, although it publishes no opening year or former building use. That handmade approach remains the useful piece of venue history for a gig-goer: the bar was shaped as a place for lingering before and after a set, instead of as a purpose-built concert hall.

A City of Yarra planning report records music and patron noise from Nighthawks during an assessment on March 10, 2023, when the venue was below full patron capacity. It is a small but concrete marker of an active live room within Collingwood’s dense late-night precinct. By July 2026, the official diary included a four-band bill led by Backlit and experimental post-metal group The World At A Glance, with sludge, doom, screamo and hardcore in the event description.

The room today

Expect a bar-first layout: a long timber counter, cosy booths, a pool-table area and a small beer garden downstairs, with live music upstairs. The calendar crosses indie, rock, punk, hardcore, metal, folk-leaning songwriter bills and electronic or DJ programming; it favours emerging local acts, launches, residencies and self-booked multi-band nights. Sightlines and sound sit in an enclosed, limited-capacity upstairs setting, so the appeal is proximity and atmosphere. Downstairs offers space to regroup between sets, while the upstairs room keeps the performance focus tight.