Who's on?

How venues remain good

Sep 03, 2021

This week, Connah Roberts reads an academic article and tries to compare it to some UK venues, landing on an argument to what makes artists and venues authentic.

What are music venues for in the wider context of the place and industry they function within? What’s the cultural difference between small scale DIY spaces and monolithic clubs? More importantly, how do they stay relevant?

Image: Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, Jazzmen 1961

Thinking of music venues I have enjoyed in the past it is very much the things you don’t notice that are the key to making them good. Like in a good restaurant, you really notice the waiters, the food is the right temperature, the lighting makes eating visible, and the sound allows you to hear yourself speak. In a good music venue similar principles apply. The bouncers need to be friendly and fair, the entry fee not ridiculous and drinks not overpriced, the toilets and bar accessible without too big of a queue, and the sound good. These things aren’t noticed when done well. It’s only when it takes an age to use the bathroom, too long to get a drink and be ripped off for it, or the sound being not quite right in certain spots, is when you do notice. This is why superclubs like Printworks and WHP are ones I can’t relax in. However, not much of that is a problem for smaller venues throughout the UK.

Sam Whiting recently published a study on smaller music venues in Australia, analysing their various forms of capital. Using Bourdieu’s critique of culture, it provides an interesting insight into what makes smaller venues unique. As an overview, the work looks at the interesting duel between keeping the space running financially while maintaining its authenticity. What the work argues is booking agents are the fundamental key to providing these spaces with both its capital and cultural nicheness within a given locality. The booking agent should be aware of the space and reputation of the space in order to make it work. The economic value of the amount of attendees interested in visiting the space and artists being booked. While also keeping the cultural capital of those playing correct enough for its audience in order to draw a crowd. They therefore then need to have the right social connections to be able to book said artists.

There might only be a handful of venues today, and throughout history, that have focussed on ensuring both financial and cultural factors influencing the experience and bookings work hand-in-hand. Pre-pandemic venues already had it tough achieving and maintaining both capital and authenticity. What makes the venues operating today successful in this? Speaking in an interview, the owners of Brilliant Corners, Amit and Aneesh Patel, talk about spaces themselves needing to pay attention to the finer details. In their opinion, how good the sound system is. Brilliant Corners in a way has always been self-sufficient with a fairly pricey restaurant which does bring a more affluent, maybe slightly unfamiliar, crowd. Not every space has this luxury. One credit to the space itself, however, is its complete darkness allowing a homogenisation of who is on the dancefloor with no cultural capital on display other than the dancing itself (even that is barely visible). Moving beyond Whiting’s argument of the booking agent holding the key to niche success, so too must the experience of the venue itself. In some ways becoming a site of speculation with an unknown aspect. Regardless of who is on and what night, an intrigue by the experience of the space goes back to the initial outlining of getting the smaller things right – sound, price, lights – in order for the experience to be about the experience without any pessimism.

When thinking about the economic aspect of small spaces, three drinks in Cafe Oto might come to £11 and they provide discounts for unwaged and low income earners, Brilliant Corners is free to enter, TWH again has a cheap bar, Soup Kitchen, Wire and Kitchen Street, all similar too. What this calls into question moreover, which needs further analysis outside of this article, is the focus on how such intermediary spaces paying full attention to the economic experience of entering a space, treat visitors not as ones to be exploited but ones to be cherished.

There are other aspects to both who plays and why which makes a space what it is. Some smaller venues might now be the height of a performer's métier. A section within the paper looks at this idea of being ‘disinterested’. A belief in being disinterested in economic exploitation, as highlighted above but also, Whiting found, booking agents having a disinterest in a musician being a careerist in order to keep the spaces authentic. A main question here is where the line is drawn between music careers being authentic or careers being a form of economic extraction, and how do we define the two?

There’s going to be another spectacle soon, away from music, but something which reminded me of the musician who this blog is in honour of. Sally Rooney is about to release her third novel on the 7 September. It has already been adored in the press. A week before its release, the author described wanting to shun giving up facts about one’s life while also giving an interview in The Guardian, before then giving a public talk at the Southbank. Relating it to what has been discussed – about venues seeking musicians with authenticity and vice versa in order to provide other forms of cultural capital – you can only think of artists who have rebuffed the live performance itself. Mark Hollis, for example, never played live after releasing Talk Talk’s two greatest albums and a solo LP; then there is Burial who has never performed; MF Doom sending imposters; The Caretaker drinking whiskey. Therefore, it’s wholly arguable that authenticity lies in anonymity and this then gives further questions and readings on how we live our daily lives online, what we hold back and keep private, what we don’t. How these musicians created a sense of authenticity by simply not engaging in certain aspects of the industry. We could go on. For venues though, as Whiting points out, they continually need to balance inclusivity and exclusivity, and the best ones are aware of who not to back and what to get right.

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ICYMI: More from Laughing Stock

Edition 16: Rich Walker on The Club satisfing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Edition 15 - Connah Roberts on fashion and music and butter

Edition 14 - Sam Hartford on anachronistic music in films

Edition 13 - Our Half Year Review 2021

Edition 12 - Will Palmer on lesser know football references in music

Edition 11 - Rich Walker on boring anniversary pieces

Edition 10 - Connah Roberts on culture wars, and Kes

Edition 9 - Rich Walker on trains, music, music on trains, and HS2

Edition 8 - Connah Roberts channeling Adiran Chiles on Karaoke

Edition 7 - Rich Walker on nihilism in music