Historians will also insist in locating the club at This is misleading too. Yes, they have the right mailing address. But the ’Boo could never be truly described as being architecturally settled. Shape-shifting over the years, it added new bars and subtracted old doors when needed.

A good idea of just how unsettled — and unsettling — the BamBoo was in its prime can be sampled on Thursday at the Lula Lounge release party for the Sattalites’ first CD in 10 years.

The ’Boo hosted its share of stars over the years, from The Parachute Club to David Byrne. But it came closest to having a house band when the Sattalites were onstage for one indelible weekend or another, the space packed with drinkers, diners and dancers all navigating the never-aligned floors in what felt like a rickety treehouse lost in a tropical rainforest.

“We did great by them and they did great by us,” remembers Fergus Hambleton, Sattalites’ lead singer and one of its many multi-instrumentalists. “There was a great creative thing going on in Toronto then. There was A Space, General Idea and Coach House Press. It was stimulating.”

Along with Parachute Club’s Billy Bryans, the Sattalites performed at “the Boo-Hoo,” the title given the club’s closing night on Oct. 31, 2002.

The Sattalites: The Best of Canadian Reggae revisits a unique and unheralded slice of the city’s musical history when reggae’s exuberant bump, grope and grind was embraced by the less limber white mainstream society. Yet where else but here could a reggae unit be fronted by a guy named Fergus?

It was inevitable that the Sattalites’ “best of” CD launch morphed into a BamBoo remembrance.

“The idea was brewing for some time and when we knew we were doing this show we thought it would be nice to combine the two,” says Hambleton.

For her part, former BamBoo co-owner Patti Habib plans to conjure up memories “by bringing some BamBoo posters and original decor,” she says. BamBoo house artist Barbara Klunder is curating a ’Boo-themed art show.

(Co-owner Richard O’Brien died in 2007.)

“Richard also liked to use the BamBoo as an art gallery,” says Klunder, a prolific artist and designer with a recent show at the David Kaye Gallery.

Klunder also illustrated The BamBoo Cooks! cookbook. “I gave the place its corporate look, which I found by looking at all my books about African art,” Klunder says. “I’d take some (image) of Africa and fun it up. If I got a laugh out of Richard I knew I had hit the bell because he knew what he wanted and what he didn’t.”

Here, Klunder points to the deeper link between the Sattalites and the BamBoo. Both grooved, yet both meant business. The Habib-O’Brien combo was as shrewd as it was combative, cagy enough to keep its business savvy under wraps. “The club felt almost like a community centre,” Klunder remembers.

The Sattalites likewise soon came to understand that the reggae recording business was far less loosey goosey than was popularly believed. The remastered tracks for Best of Canadian Reggae “sound as good as they do because we were able to get into a lot of good studios at the time,” Hambleton says, particularly those in Jamaica used for four of the CD’s 15 tracks covering 1984 to 2004.

“In Jamaica, we’d arrive at the studio at 11 a.m. and do a tune in two takes. We’d break, have a little lunch, then record the next track, and then we were out of there,” he adds. “Contrary to the rumours and myths about Jamaican musicians at the time — smoking weed and all that — these guys were professional.”