Final encore for UK’s live music venues as noise rules lead to closures
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Version 0 of 1. For music fans of a certain age it must count as one of the greatest gigs in history. On 4 July 1976, at Sheffield’s Black Swan club, the Clash played live for the first time, supporting the Sex Pistols on a bill that also included the Buzzcocks. Over the years the Black Swan changed its name to the Sheffield Boardwalk, but its commitment to live music remained undiminished. Arctic Monkeys performed at the club, releasing a demo collection recorded at the venue called Beneath the Boardwalk. But the club is no more. It has joined many other famous venues, including Leicester’s Princess Charlotte, Leeds’ Duchess of York and Dudley’s JB’s, in shutting its doors. In central London, large-scale redevelopment projects have seen the closure of Madame Jo Jo’s and the Astoria and the relocation of the 12 Bar Club; Camden has witnessed the closure of the Purple Turtle and the Stillery. Several other Camden venues and Oxford Street’s 100 Club are said to be threatened. So, too, are a number of venues outside the capital, notably Southampton’s the Joiners, the Tunbridge Wells Forum, Exeter’s Cavern, Hull’s Adelphi and Manchester’s Band on the Wall. Reasons for the closures are manifold, but a common concern is the increasingly hostile environment for many venues. The pressure to build more housing has seen blocks of flats built next to clubs, causing a rise in noise-abatement notices that can cost thousands of pounds to contest. The alarming pace at which the venues are closing is now the subject of a report to be presented to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, this week by the Music Venue Trust, a body set up to defend the UK’s live music scene, which estimates that the number of live music venues in the capital has fallen from 430 to 245 since 2007. Mark Davyd, the trust’s founder and chief executive, said there had been a similar fall across the UK, threatening the diverse nature of Britain’s cultural landscape. “They are so inspirational,” he said. “They are places where people can get involved in culture as a first step. The whole point of a grassroots venue is that you’ve got a maverick running it who, for no apparent reason, is prepared to put on a guy dressed as a plant making white noise through a trumpet that everyone thinks is awful. These are incubators for other industries. They are places where the guy who becomes the lighting engineer at the Royal Opera House in 40 years’ time started out.” Related: Killjoy councils, student debt and stolen phones: the slow death of British clubs The trust will use its Venues Day on 20 October to call on the environment secretary to conduct an urgent review of noise abatement laws to balance the rights of clubs with those of nearby residents.“We are hoping that as we lay out clear and achievable plans in London, other local authorities will look at those and think, ‘Yes, the music venue is an important part of our local economy,’” Davyd said. The decline in live music threatens an industry worth an estimated £1.6bn a year to the UK, something that concerns one of the trust’s patrons, Frank Turner. “From an economic point of view, it’s a huge section of our cultural economy and it’s largely unsubsidised, which I think is personally a good thing,” said Turner, a singer-songwriter with more than 1,700 gigs under his belt. “The live music sector is not going cap in hand saying, ‘Please give us money.’ We are saying, ‘Please give us a legal fighting chance to exist without being crushed and shat on by developers.’” Other factors to blame for the demise of live venues include the declining disposable income of students and changes to licensing laws that have seen a saturation of live music venues in some areas, creating intense competition between clubs. Turner stressed that the campaign was not an exercise in nostalgia. “I visited [famous New York punk venue] CBGBs before it closed down and it was a shithole, to be honest … There is a natural turnover of small venues and I don’t think that’s something worth protesting against. “The thing about rock music is that there needs to be a place for people to experiment, people to get up on a stage and try things out. “The large successful acts of this world, Coldplay or Ed Sheeran or whoever, they didn’t pop fully formed into this world. These are skills and talents that have to be honed somewhere. If we’re careless about the places where this sort of culture can evolve, then it won’t exist. The only thing you will be left with at the top of the food chain is Simon Cowell.” |