Save our venues

James Kennedy

The suspense has reached bursting point. You can feel the collective heart rates galloping like speedballing stallions as we wait… and wait. This room is essentially a bomb. A bomb that is soon to explode on the count of one, two, three and four.

A mass of bodies sway as one organism in fidgety anticipation as the pent-up turmoil inside each and every soul that’s been squeezed inside this monastic dungeon is about to be exorcised in a high-volume transcendental cleanse. Bring on the band already!

As always, I’ve got the best seat in the house – as does everyone, because there are no seats in this house and there are certainly no special seats. Nope, in this church, we stand. And we stand as one – as equals.

Tonight, both band and audience will be bound together in intimate, sweaty communion, the dividing lines between us removed as they should be – eye to eye, heart to heart, soul to soul – waiting for a delicious hit of that loud, loud medicine. And here it comes.

“One, two, three, four”

BOOM! The room erupts in a mass frenzy of euphoric, demented contortions. Primal release. Violence without the violence. Happy faces everywhere. Is it dancing? Therapy? Or a connection to a higher power? We may never know but it feels… good. A cardinal cure for the relentless drudgery and shackles of daily life.

For that moment, we’re human again, dancing around the fire, wailing at the wilderness and wondering at the stars. If only it didn’t have to end.

Culled

Yet, up and down the country, grass-roots music venues are being culled at a truly disturbing rate. Many of the venues where I honed my craft in my early days were considered iconic cultural landmarks – vital players in this country’s proud musical history.

Almost all of them are now gone and by the time you read this, many more will have befallen a similar fate. Travesty isn’t the word. Scandalous national disgrace would be more like it.

But here in the UK, music is what we do. We’re knocking out more bangers per capita than anywhere else on earth.

In any other industry, these venues would be classed as R & D departments. Research and development for the ‘products’ that will ultimately create a sh*tload of money for the broader economy and the taxman. And grass roots music venues are the literal engine of this country’s proud cultural standing.

Emergency programme

Lose them and it’s all over. As things get rapidly and terminally worse for our glorious local factories of rock, I strongly believe we need a nationwide emergency programme of assistance from the government just as we do with public libraries and community centres but it’s highly unlikely we’ll receive any help from our grinning emperors any time soon.

What, then, can be done? What will have to be done in order to stave off the pandemic of yuppification before it swallows up everything good and every town becomes an indistinguishable bore of hipster bars, sports bars and exorbitant arenas and stadiums hosting the same rotating menu of mega artists?

Many brilliant ideas already exist, such as putting a levy on all ticket sales at arenas and stadiums and investing that money back into grass roots venues.

Or another thing we can do is own the buildings. That’s right. This absolutely genius idea has been successfully pulled off by those heroes at the Music Venue Trust where you can become a micro-investor in the venue and, along with others, enable it to be run as a cooperative – either for profit or not. What cooler thing is there to say on a night out after someone says, ‘Where to next, guys?’ than… ‘Let’s go to my place.’

And one easy thing we can all start doing immediately is start showing up. There is so much at stake here that we all have a moral duty to treat gig-going as an act of cultural defiance – to stand as a resistance movement defending our sacred breeding grounds of sonic awesomeness.

Money men

It’s time for us to reclaim our music scene from the cold, undead hands of the money men and bring it roaring back to the streets – our streets. Music isn’t some elite spectator sport to be worshipped from afar; it’s forged in the fertile kitchens of our streets, our struggles, our stories and our sounds. Let us once again rejoice in our proud local musical history and keep it safe for the next generation of noise-makers, soul shakers and game-changers.

Because this isn’t just about supporting venues; it’s about supporting the very bedrock of our immense musical heritage, and each and every one of us must be a militant protector of that coveted grail. So I’ll see you down the front at next week’s triple bill with Cattle Smasher – and you’d better buy some merch.

Loud Medicine: Dispatches from the Music Industry Underworld by James Kennedy is published by Calon, and is available now in all good bookshops.