The Cook no more - it's now called Dive: Dunedin music venue changes name

Mike McLeod says the venue is entering a new era. Photo / Otago Daily Times

It will always have a place in Dunedin's cultural history, but The Cook is The Cook no more.

Mike McLeod, operator of the venerated music venue, confirmed he has changed its name in the wake of a global backlash against systemic racism and white privilege.

"It's called Dive," he said this afternoon.

McLeod once fought to keep the name of the venue, situated upstairs at the Captain Cook Hotel.

But as public statues around the world are being vandalised or removed as a protest against systematic racism, the venue is entering a new era.

"I've had the conversation before," McLeod said. "I've definitely thought about it before, before these things came up.

"And my only real [consideration] was like The Cook has been a music venue in Dunedin that was probably more famous in the '70s and '80s in a time when Dunedin music - the Dunedin sound - was quite an important cultural thing.

"If you talk to people about the Dunedin sound and the Flying Nun bands, The Cook was a venue that gets mentioned as one of the classic venues to play at.

"And I hadn't really thought about the colonial association. I always just thought about it in that sort of continuation of the cultural lineage of what that place was."

On Tuesday, McLeod was unsure what the venue would be called, but this afternoon the Facebook page was updated to Dive - Music Venue.

It posted a 2010 Playboy Magazine definition of a dive-bar, a favourite type of bar for McLeod when he visits the United States.

"A church for down-and-outers and those who romanticise them, a rare place where high and low rub elbows - bums and poets, thieves and slumming celebrities. It's a place that wears its history proudly."

Dive will host its first show under its new name this weekend.