When the gig’s up, should we mourn our lost music venues?
On Thursday night last week, Sea Power played a headline gig at the Roundhouse in London, a Grade II-listed former engine shed. A beautiful space and an important centre for youth arts education, it’s one of live music’s success stories.
A week later, the band will play at Sheffield’s Leadmill, the centre of a bitter row after the venue’s landlords issued a notice of eviction. Arctic Monkeys, Pulp and the Kaiser Chiefs have all joined a campaign to save the Leadmill, in the vein of dozens of similar efforts over the years to save famous venues, from Manchester’s Haçienda to London’s Fabric nightclub and CBGBs in New York. Many smaller venues have shut after these battles failed. The Bull & Gate, where I first saw Sea Power play 20 years ago, was a pub just up the road from the Roundhouse, and is now closed, a fate shared by many rooms they’ve haunted during their long career.
After a battering from coronavirus, live music in the UK continues to struggle, with audiences wary of returning to crowded gigs, and grassroots venues taking on £90m of debt just to survive. A crowdfunding campaign by the Music Venue Trust has raised nearly £4.5m for 270 projects across the country.
It can often feel that the picture for live music in Britain is beyond bleak, but it’s more complex than it can at first appear: it’s not just the fault of the usual culprits such as greedy landlords, property developers and moaning neighbours.
The decline of regional touring reflects how, in an age of Netflix and gaming, live music now has to compete with far more demands on our cultural time and interest, not to mention wallets, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Old tour adverts show that bands would play numerous dates in one city, and visit
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