An uneasy quiet is starting to settle on the UK, particularly at night. People still go out; millions of us still seem to have a deep fondness for nocturnal company, hedonism and noise. But this fundamental part of our culture may well be slipping away, for one very stark reason: the accelerated closure of clubs and music venues.
Earlier this year, the Music Venue Trust (MVT), which exists to help and nurture grassroots establishments with an average capacity of about 300 people, published its latest annual report. In the course of 2023, it had registered the loss of 125 such venues, which had either gone out of business or stopped hosting gigs. The issues that tied everything together centred on soaring rents and energy costs, the economic slipstream of the Covid crisis, and the apparently mounting issue of disputes about noise abatement kicked off by people living in city centres, which were common factors all over the country. By way of illustrating their spread, the case studies in the report included venues in Liverpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Bath.
The latter city, it still pains me to write, has just lost a much-loved place called Moles, which took its name from a performance space that was literally and metaphorically underground. This was where, as a 20-year-old freelance music writer, I did my first big interview, with a long-lost band whose name now seems crushingly apt. They were a gnarly, Velvet Underground-esque quartet called The Perfect Disaster. Thirty-odd years after I nervously quizzed them in the venue’s back room and watched them play to a crowd of 200 before the obligatory indie disco, the MVT put Moles’ tragic demise down to “a huge increase in trade costs in the past 18 months, combined with a reduction in footfall in response to the cost of living crisis”.
The bigger story of music venues’ demise actually goes back much further. I first wrote about it in 2013 – and since then, the live music market seems to have split into two contrasting halves. Ticket prices for performances in stadiums and arenas are soaring, and vast new venues are planned for such cities as Cardiff, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sunderland and Dundee. But the kind of places where you can stand mere feet away from the performers, and catch a band or singer when they are just starting out, are being squeezed as never before.
What distinguishes live venues from clubs is often unclear, but the latter are in an even more dire predicament. In August last year, it was reported that the UK had lost a third of its clubs in just three years – something once again linked to the pandemic, but also tied to how cities are changing, and a cultural snobbery and hostility that goes back decades. As if to prove it, last week’s budget included help for theatres and orchestras, but the dancefloors that have defined large chunks of the UK’s recent cultural history were apparently still beyond the pale.
What we are losing here is partly about the seedbeds of an industry that remains one of the UK’s more successful exporters. Some people in the mainstream music business seem to think that alighting on the Next Big Thing in a club or venue is now a hopelessly old-fashioned notion, and that talent is more likely to be found on Instagram or TikTok. There is a grain of truth in that, but it doesn’t detract from how playing in front of small audiences can teach musicians the art of stagecraft, and allow them to find out who they are.
Ed Sheeran once played Moles, the Cockpit in Leeds (which shut in 2014) and Birmingham’s still-thriving Hare and Hounds. Seven long years before she swept this year’s Brit awards, the brilliant singer and songwriter Raye did her first headline performance at XOYO, a club and music venue in the Old Street area of central London. This year’s most touted band are the Last Dinner Party, who were inspired to get together by a scene centred on the Windmill, a 150-capacity place in south London; they have also played at Moles, as well as at small venues in Bristol, Brighton, Southampton and Manchester.
Fundamentally, though, this story is about everyday life, and what non-famous people do with the hours we set aside for pleasure. Trying to enjoy music in an arena, in my experience, is mostly a very unsatisfactory endeavour: a few bands and singers have the necessary self-projection skills, but far too many can’t cope with such cavernous surroundings. But for the audience, a night out in such a space goes with the modern grain of leisure time being pre-booked, precisely allocated and delivered with no glitches: you spend a small fortune on your e-ticket, turn up at the appointed time and get exactly what you expected.
The best nights spent at clubs and grassroots venues, by contrast, are often about chance occurrences. An unknown band could be crap, or brimming with genius. If they tick the second box and you go and see them again, you might be at the heart of a burgeoning community of early fans. In front of a small venue’s stage or in the whirl of a dancefloor, conversations might lead to new friendships. In both cases, there is something about the close proximity of other human beings that often brings us out of ourselves, and into experiences we didn’t know we were going to have.
Do enough people still have an interest in any of that? Impossible living costs, not least among people under 40, have definitely made hitherto cheap nights out prohibitively expensive. But there might also be much deeper shifts at work. I sometimes wonder whether we are in danger of accepting a kind of social life designed by tech-centred minds that want everything to be scheduled, controlled and, to use a particularly horrible modern word, manageable.
Alcohol is increasingly unfashionable. So, it seems, are recreational drugs. For those who can afford it, the glorious cacophony of city living must be quietened in line with the demands of work. Better to swipe our way to new relationships than find them by accident. On and on it goes: 21st-century heaven, perhaps, is a £180 Taylor Swift ticket followed by a good night’s sleep.
Some of the economic aspects of our increasing night-time silence might be easily dealt with: the MVT says that tickets for shows in stadiums and arenas ought to be subject to a levy that would help the kind of small, independently run venues that might nurture tomorrow’s stars. The case for that is surely unanswerable. Whether or not we have a culture that understands all the messy joy and magic of those spaces is a much more troubling question.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 11 March 2024. An earlier version said that the capacity of the Windmill in south London was 450, when it should have said 150.
