Music

Corporate buy-outs, property developers, and even planned new transport links are threatening the closure of live venues like the Hammersmith Palais and the Astoria, joining beer-stained legends like the Marquee at the great gig in the sky.

But lovers of live music are organising instead of moaning and are renting alternative spaces like railway arches and factories and setting them up as live music venues. A few daring promoters are prepared to take a risk and give London’s music scene a kick up the arse – an arse that is rapidly becoming flabbier and more pinstriped as mergers and buy-outs flourish.
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With the Palais near-gone and the Astoria earmarked for ‘redevelopment’ into much-needed flats and offices, the planned joint buy-out of the Academy Music Group, which owns major venues across the capital and beyond, has been viewed with widespread pessimism by London’s wary punters. The bid by multinational super-promoters Livenation (aka Clear Channel) and Gaiety Investments (owned by Dennis Desmond of the Mean Fiddler Group, which runs the Astoria and the Forum) was referred to the Competition Commission, who felt a straight buy-out would have granted the new conglomerate a monopoly on live music in the capital. The official ruling is that the deal can only go ahead if the buyers sell off either the Hammersmith Apollo or Brixton Academy, and one of either the Shepherd’s Bush Empire or the Forum, raising fears that these venues could ultimately disappear if their purpose is not explicitly protected.

But promoter Seth Smith and his friends couldn’t care less about the corporate machinations in the centre of town. On an industrial estate in the northern wilds of the city, in glamorous Tottenham, where the sky meets the cheery grey of light industry, Smith has refurbished an old factory once used to knock out knock-off jeans and turned it into a new live music venue, called the Wherehouse.

Back in the the last century, squatted factories in Lea Bridge Road or Portobello cinemas and King’s Cross warehouses offered the matchless maverick thrill of the outlaw rave. But now promoters like Smith are renting out spaces like warehouses and factories and turning them into functioning, legal venues.

‘It was full of pigeon shit when we got it, and the roof was leaking,’ Smith wryly recounts. ‘I actually cried the day after I signed the lease; I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. But we got on it, sanded the floors and put walls in, built a stage and got the electrics sorted, and now we’re ready to run regular nights here.’