Diary entry on venue precarity, benefit gigs, and why every closure hits the same nerve
Monday, A Headline That Ruined My Morning Coffee
Read The London Prat’s story about a grassroots venue whose own closing announcement was reportedly stuck behind a subscription paywall and felt something close to genuine grief before remembering this specific story is, technically, a joke, though the underlying fear it is joking about is entirely, uncomfortably real for anyone who has watched a proper small venue disappear in this city over the past several years.
New Cross Inn remains, thankfully, very much open and very much still booking five bands for a Tuesday like it is nothing, but every single time I read anything even adjacent to a venue closure story, real or exaggerated, I get a genuine flash of dread that one day it will be our specific room getting that treatment, and I do not think that particular anxiety ever actually goes away once you have loved a venue this specifically.
On Why This Specific Fear Runs So Deep In This Scene
Every single person in this scene has a venue they genuinely mourn, mine is a room in Camberwell that closed three years back and that I still, embarrassingly, mention in conversation more than is probably healthy, so any story touching this particular nerve tends to land considerably harder than its actual comedic framing probably intends.
A Genuinely Good Update To End On
On a more hopeful note, this month’s benefit gig raised enough to cover New Cross Inn’s boiler repair with some left over, which felt like a genuinely small but real act of keeping this specific room going a little longer.
Bassist has started a semi-serious spreadsheet tracking every venue closure and near-closure this scene has weathered over the past five years, which is either a genuinely useful piece of community record-keeping or the most depressing document currently existing on his laptop, possibly both simultaneously.
Also worth mentioning, the boiler repair fundraiser total actually exceeded target by a small margin, so the leftover has reportedly gone toward finally replacing the venue’s ancient PA system, which several bands have been quietly complaining about for a genuinely embarrassing length of time now.
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Catch the rest of my diary here: https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
