There’s much to agree with in this piece by The Quietus’s Luke Turner on the closure of music venues in the UK.
In a climate where grassroots music venues are under pressure from multiple sides at once (decreasing ticket sales, decreasing bar takes, increasing costs, increasing noise complaints, particularly in city centres and often from residents in developements that were built long after the music venue opened), the typical defence of these venues is often an economic one.
You can probably guess how it runs: Ed Sheeran and Adele started off playing at the Dog & Duck, and now they’re global superstars contributing millions to the UK economy. Hence, we need to save the Dog & Duck lest there be no future Adeles and Ed Sheerans.
This isn’t exactly wrong. It’s just a very limited way of conceptualising the true value of live music and the spaces in which it occurs. Nonethless, the Music Venue Trust, an advocacy group for the grassroots live music industry, adopts this language of commerce and GDP – of career paths, ladders and ziggurats – when lobbying to government and local authorities, reasoning that it’s the only language they understand. You hear it, too, from fans, from venue owners and staff, even sometimes from musicians themselves.
In riposte, Turner argues that:
To focus on music venues as steps to be conquered on the way to a typical career is everything that is wrong with the commodification of art, especially in a time when that route is a slippery illusion.
He’s surely right. Ninety-nine per cent of the artists playing in any coffee house, pub, club, function room, church hall, village hall or any other ad hoc performance space you care to mention on any given night will never derive their entire income, or even a signifcant portion of it, from making music. But that’s not why they do it.
Music-making is a joyous experience, especially communally. Witnessing music being made up close can likewise be genuinely transformative. I’ve witnessed performances in front or 25 people that have moved me to tears, that have provided memories I’ll carry with me forever. Likewise, I’ve been in big rooms and festival crowds watching world-famous bands deliver sets that meant nothing to me and of which I remember almost nothing today. In music, audience size and quality of product are just not that directly correlated.
A society in which we have the leisure time and the economic means to create and the venues and opportunities to share that creation with others is simply better than one in which we don’t. Happier, healthier, more connected to each other. It is a moral good that such places exist. Part of me fears that when the only defence we can muster for their preservation is an economic one, we’ve already lost the argument.
songs from so deep 