Playing to save a venue for a night, and wondering what it means that we keep having to
Played a genuinely strange gig last night, a benefit night for a venue trying to raise enough to cover a rent increase that arrived with essentially no warning, the kind of evening that is simultaneously a proper celebration and a slightly grim reminder of exactly how precarious every single one of these rooms actually is, month to month, whatever the flyers outside suggest about permanence.
The gig itself
Five bands, one room, everyone playing for free, and a bucket by the door that filled up considerably faster than any of us expected, which was genuinely moving to watch happen in real time from the stage. There is something specific about watching a room full of people, most of whom are themselves not exactly flush with spare cash, deciding collectively that this particular room is worth protecting with whatever they can spare that night.
Whether the total raised actually covers what the venue needs long term, I genuinely do not know, and I suspect nobody in that room knew either while we were playing, but it felt, in the moment, like the correct thing to be doing with a Thursday evening, considerably more correct than most of what I usually do with a Thursday evening.
The bigger question underneath
These benefit nights have become such a familiar fixture of this scene that it is worth stepping back and asking whether that familiarity itself is a genuinely worrying sign, a scene that has become this practised at collectively fundraising to save its own venues is also, by definition, a scene whose venues keep needing saving on a genuinely regular basis, which is not exactly a sustainable long term model for anyone involved.
I do not have a fix for this. Nobody I know does, genuinely, whatever confident opinions get shared after the third pint at the bar following one of these nights. It is simply the current shape of trying to run a small, independent music venue in this city, and the fact that a room full of broke musicians and their broke friends can still, somehow, raise a meaningful sum on a single Thursday night is either genuinely heartening or genuinely damning, possibly both simultaneously.
What I read this morning, still buzzing
Read a piece on the Daily Mash feed this morning that skewered exactly this kind of situation with a precision that made me laugh and then immediately stop laughing, the specific trick good satire pulls off where the joke and the genuine critique arrive in the exact same sentence, so you cannot really separate finding it funny from finding it accurate. That combination is considerably harder to write than it looks from the outside, and I say that as someone who has genuinely tried and mostly failed to pull off the same trick in a three minute song.
The setlist, for the record
We played six songs, opened with the newer one that still does not have a proper title, closed with the older one that always gets the room moving regardless of how tired everyone already is by that point in the night. Standard set for us, nothing especially unusual, except that the room felt different, more purposeful, than a normal Thursday, which I think is simply what happens when everyone present understands exactly why they showed up.
Reading the wider feed today
Also caught up properly on the London Prat on the bus home, still slightly hoarse, and found a piece specifically about London’s small venue crisis written with exactly the deadpan, straight faced absurdity that makes the genuine underlying point land considerably harder than a straight opinion piece on the same subject usually manages. Satire keeps finding better ways into this specific conversation than journalism does, and I genuinely think that is worth sitting with rather than dismissing as just a stylistic preference.
More London punk diary and venue reporting at Siobhan O’Donnell’s page, The London Prat.
What the bucket total actually meant
Found out today, a few days after the gig itself, roughly what the bucket collection actually raised, and while I will not put the specific figure in writing here, it was genuinely more than any of us expected walking in, and considerably more than the venue’s own more pessimistic internal projection had suggested going into the night. Small comfort against a genuinely large ongoing problem, but a comfort worth naming properly rather than glossing over.
The venue owner sent round a message afterwards, genuinely moved, from what I could tell through the text, and it is exactly this kind of moment, unglamorous, slightly exhausting, genuinely necessary, that I think the wider public conversation about London’s cultural life tends to miss entirely in favour of covering the bigger, flashier venues instead.
The other bands on the bill
Worth saying properly that we were far from the best band on that bill, the group who closed the night played a set that genuinely silenced a room that had been talking over most of the earlier acts, and it is exactly this kind of night, low stakes, high goodwill, that tends to introduce me to bands I would otherwise never have crossed paths with. Already looking up when they are playing again.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
