The rate to which club closures are happening in the U.K. is rising exponentially. One of the more recent victim of this was The Moon in Cardiff, which is a venue I’ve played multiple times with my bands and enjoyed developing my craft as a performing musician there.
As far as I can see, there are two main problems that are resulting in the club closures, both of which are killer blows.
The first is the changing landscape in the culture. Lefsetz argued that we should let them close. This is because there are less bands breaking through and that the focus on developing music is done via solo artists and the internet. Artists will build their profiles there, make the record first and then the shows come later if you so happen to get something that has enough momentum to open up further opportunities.
He further made this argument by saying that alongside the changing medium of artist output is the changing ways in which an audience consumes music, again due to online connections, streaming and the sheer fact that a lot of people aren’t interested in going to clubs to hear original music. People do not want to have their conversation drowned out by a band where there is no guarantee on the quality. Consumer habits have changed and it’s not only online music platforms that clubs are competing with, it’s all media and streaming platforms, and that’s before anyone leaves the door to go to a restaurant let alone a cinema, which so happens to be another industry that is struggling.
Now whilst I agree with Lefsetz’s reasoning, I can’t get behind the whole idea of just letting clubs close, and that’s because I have seen enough people who love being in these grassroots community, supporting music on the ground and the joy it can bring to these people, even if it is the tiniest fraction of the population. Club owners put themselves on the line and risk bankruptcy to keep their spaces alive. When promoters and venues do the work, you can get sold out shows, I’ve been on both sides of it, as a promoter and as a concert goer. I just finished a show in Swansea yesterday where the owner had three consecutive sold out events!
Which leads me to the second problem, which I think is the more fatal one.
The total lack of support for grassroots venues from the powers that be.
When I walked past The Moon after it’s closure. There was the same litter printed twice and stuck on the door that was rather aggressive in its tone about the handover of assets.
Government is to blame. Landlords are to blame as is the occasional idiot resident who decides to move close to a venue and complain about the noise, and then ends up with far too much power.
We are in a perpetual economic crisis, given a tedious never ending slow recovery from 2008, a failed austerity programme that has squeezed our public services to breaking point, the populist stupidity of Brexit, a pandemic and then a subsequent cost of living crisis. All of which has preoccupied governments but when it comes to cutting back, normally arts is the one of the initial targets.
Talk about a myopic vision.
‘You don’t know what you got til it’s gone’.
We will hear the same thing. That there is no money. We are tired of hearing that there is no money. There is the money, but it’s withheld in an ever increasing case of income inequality, but heck Labour cannot even make slight tweaks to taxation of the wealthy without being labelled as communists. How indoctrinated are we all to think that this level of greed should so be so legitimised?
Arts and culture and it’s impact on the beneficial impact it has on communities is totally taken for granted. I teach young people who use music as a means to connect with people and given the correlation between time spent online and the decrease in young people’s mental wellbeing, why aren’t we getting behind the idea that an easy fix would be to support places that can bring people together in person? People were crying to do this again after the lockdowns.
Then there’s the artist development side of things. Sure, solo acts are having a good time of it at the moment, especially those who can harness online tools with flare, but things happen in cycles and it will be before long that people will want bands to be more prominent again. But how are we going to facilitate this when there are no venues available for them to play and develop their craft?
The Beatles spent tens of thousands of hours playing in clubs in Hamburg and people forget that this was a huge part of what allowed the Beatles to become the Beatles.
Many would have no doubt seen the list of grassroots venues that Oasis played in their earlier days and how many of them no longer exist. Given the dynamic pricing kerfuffle, talk about forgetting your roots, but the Gallagher brothers are so far gone that they could not care less, otherwise they would have said something about it by now.
You can at least credit some higher profiles like Johnny Greenwood for being outspoken about this.
If Arts and Culture cannot be given a chance via funding, or tax reliefs it will continue to die. However, if we fall into the trap of playing victim and spending our energy complaining, it will continue to die. So it comes down to finding ways to influence change, which the likes of Music Venue Trust is starting to do, or looking at multidisciplinary spaces and being innovative about what spaces can become a venue.
It’s going to come down to people on the ground with a bit of skillset and innovation to galvanise change.
So what can we do?
Maybe bands can start playing on the high streets. And when people complain about the noise, tell them to get behind reopening our venues!
