Meet the curious man behind the new live music venue in Surfers
The owner of a new bar in Surfers Paradise has an interesting background – he has a medical science degree, does some acting, runs a gun-making firm and once did a stint as Justin Bieber’s bodyguard
IF there is such a thing as a typical bar owner, it’s a fair bet that it is not Nathan Innes. It’s not because the 30-yearold Gold Coaster has never owned a bar before. Nor is it because he dabbles in a bit of acting.
And it is not because he has a degree in biomedical science from Bond University – or because he helps run locally-based security company Senni Group with his father Matt Innes.
It’s because Nathan Innes, who is opening late-night live music venue 19 Orchid Avenue next week, is probably the only Surfers Paradise club owner who happens to have a sideline business manufacturing weapons.
An offshoot of Senni Group, the Innes family’s Senni Arms Co. has a factory operation based in the Philippines and makes a mixture of handguns and some military style assault rifles.
Their website says Senni Arms Co. is a southeast Queensland private company: “We design and assemble handcrafted firearms from our manufacturing facility in the Philippines and supply to sporting, security, law enforcement, military and government markets.”
Nathan and his father Matt are quite open about their eyebrowraising business venture which Matt funded and started in 2007, saying it is a boutique operation.
Nathan says they make several hundred guns a year, all with appropriate and required documentation to ensure “basically our product isn’t falling into the hands of someone who has a US trading embargo on them”.
His father Matt adds: “If you are referring to bikies and all that sort of stuff … they don’t come near us and we don’t go near them.”
Nathan is quite proud of the fact the guns they create are designed by him and they make every single part of each firearm. He is an avid hunter and Senni has a community program supporting outback farmers to cull feral animals.
He is less forthcoming about how he and his father ended up doing this or having a security company that deals with events and close personal protection.
Asked about where his security and weapons background stemmed from, he says somewhat mysteriously “we’ll leave all that out”.
The company website says “Senni Group has been established as a partnership between a core group of former military and paramilitary personnel, a well-established Security Services Organisation and an established weapons dealership” to provide a “highly responsive, costeffective service to national and international client organisations”.
Up until recently it was doing the security for QT Gold Coast hotel and Stingray bar. Naturally, Senni will be looking after the security of Nathan’s bar venture (we’ll get to that soon).
Existing Senni contracts include looking after next weekend’s Mt Isa Rotary Rodeo, the Mt Isa Pub and the Mt Isa Mining Expo (MINEX) held back in May.
Nathan says they also do close personal protection for “high networth individuals” and the odd celebrity, revealing his most famous client was Justin Bieber back in late 2013. The pop singer was based on the Gold Coast for a couple of Brisbane concerts.
Nathan says he normally wouldn’t speak about private Senni clients but is okay discussing Bieber because paparazzi photographed the pair during a day surfing at Byron Bay “so it’s public anyway”.
Indeed it is. The photos ended up all over the tabloid press.
They show Bieber trying to surf while a heavily-tattooed and musclebound Nathan is in the water beside the star showing him what to do.
Of his time with Bieber, Nathan tells Coast Weekend: “He said to me ‘I want to surf, I want to surf, I’ve never been surfing’. I said ‘give me 20 minutes, I’ll get some boards’. We headed down the coast to Byron Bay.
“We went out there, had a whale of a time. We had a good chat, talking about all sorts of things. He loved it. It seemed to me like a moment for him when he could be a 19-year-old kid again.”
Nathan also remembers Bieber’s minders organised a wetsuit but he advised the singer if it was him he wouldn’t be wearing it: “(And) he still had his sunglasses on as we went out in the water – I was like ‘take your bloody sunglasses off’.”
Nathan says he doesn’t really like doing celebrity work because, like the Bieber gig, it’s too public, but he’s no stranger to showbiz.
He had a part as an extra in the recent shoot of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales movie and during a stint living in the UK appeared as ‘Nate the Australian’ in three episodes of reality TV show Made in Chelsea about 20–somethings living in London.
Nothing in his varied background screams hospo operator, I tell him - what the heck is he starting a bar for?
“Well, one reason for giving it a go,” he says “is seeing there wasn’t really anywhere here for people 30 and up to go for a drink. You have a Hilton hotel, the Soul tower, the Jewel development about to happen all here in Surfers but this strip area is still regarded as a place for teenagers. So I thought ‘well, what do I like to do when I go out?’ and that’s how we came up with the concept. It’s about live music, or a band rather than some DJ pushing play on an iPad.
“I don’t want to be around people wearing a Tapout t-shirt and a backwards hat. We are bringing a sense of style and class back to an area that unfortunately seems to have lost it.” ---------------------------------------The fact he has little hospitality experience outside of overseeing bouncers and working bar and eatery service jobs growing up isn’t lost on him. He’s hired local Rory Swane to
WE ARE BRINGING SOME STYLE AND CLASS BACK TO AN AREA THAT SEEMS TO HAVE LOST IT