Music

As you can see in this issue, London has a wealth of excellent venues – but all the talk this year has been concerned with those we’ve lost. In the last 12 months, the legendary Hammersmith Palais, much-loved arts cavern the Spitz and the only-reopened-ten-minutes-ago Proud Galleries have all closed for redevelopement. The Astoria will be next, and the Electric Ballroom is set to be sacrificed for Camden Town tube’s expansion. All these spaces held a special place in the hearts of music fans (or in the case of the Astoria were at least convenient for those who work in town). Fans, promoters and bands are understandably worried.
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As property values continue to escalate, the temptation for landlords to sell to developers must be irresistible. Music venues take a lot of work to turn a profit, requiring regular inspections, licences, the hiring and inevitable firing of numerous front-of-house staff alongside managers, booking agents and the rest . Many Londoners – at least, those who can’t afford a luxury flat in W1 – are nervous about the increase in high-price apartment blocks with the requisite inbuilt shop units (the rents on which are so expensive that they attract chain stores who can afford to absorb losses while the franchise beds in). Not because we’re mung bean-chomping anti-consumers but because we’re aware that what we give up won’t be easily replaced. And what’s being lost is not just places for bands you’ve never heard of of to play, but publicly accessible buildings as intrinsic to London’s identity as pavement rage.

The effect of a shrinking pool of venues is to stop people going out. Research carried out among London’s classical fans, typically (if erroneously) thought of as over-represented in terms of space and programming, has shown that as the number of venues in the capital has declined, so has the total audience for classical music. This means that rather than simply going elsewhere, punters have elected to stay at home and watch ‘Fuck Off, I’m A Hairy Woman’.

A similar haemorrhage of performance spaces has occurred in New York. As Patti Smith tells Time Out, venue loss is not just a symptom but a cause of cultural desiccation. Smith was the last artist to perform at CBGBs before it closed in October last year. The club, which began life as a bolthole for country music in downtown NYC (yeah, good thinking, hicks), was the crucible for the new wave sound which defined New York pop in the late ’70s. Without it, there would be no Blondie, no Talking Heads, no Ramones, and as a result, no Strokes.

‘CBGBs to me is a symptom of one of the tragedies of our modern world,’ says Smith. ‘And that is the affluence and the corporatisation of our cities. Advertising, money, condominiums… I’m sure you see it where you live. New York City was always such a great place when I was younger because it was so cheap and a little dangerous. You could get a little bookstore job, live in the East Village, meet a whole bunch of other artists and poets, create a scene and feel like you were doing something. Now it’s become so affluent and expensive. It’s not just in New York City, it’s everywhere. I was in Istanbul and kids are saying: “Yeah this is a cool area but the developers are moving in.”’

Right now, London is in a more ambivalent situation. The smaller end of the market is well catered for, with new venues opening with comforting regularity. Two of Time Out’s favourites – Kilburn’s beautifully appointed Luminaire and Dalston’s Bardens Boudoir – were established within the last five years, and both are curated with a loving ear for music that’s exciting and new. Even the 02, despite its less than stellar history and a retail-centred entrance more suited to Mammon international airport, makes for a surprisingly decent large-scale venue.

The loss of historic venues is more a cause for concern when seen as part of a process which is homogenising lesser-starred neighbourhoods popular with the arty set, generally because of relatively cheap rents and an ‘edgy’ (ie filthy) ‘vibe’. The campaign to save the Spitz, supported by Time Out, was doomed from the start. The Spitz was a cross between Warhol’s Factory and Santa’s grotto to those who frequented it. It was one of the few places where you could check out a happening new combo one night and an anti-rave with cooked meats hanging from the ceiling the next. Despite being one of the few places you’d see David Bowie actually enjoying himself on his visits to London, it could never make enough money to prove its worth as a long-term tenant in such hot property. Indeed, and with bitter irony, the vibrant arts scene celebrated, supported and facilitated by the Spitz is one of the main reasons its location became so trendy in the first place.

Ghost of venues past, Patti Smith, has a dire warning on this subject. ‘To me, globalisation should mean AIDS drugs are available to everyone and that no one is starving. But globalisation is not that at all. It’s becoming that the world is just one big playground for people with new affluence, and a lot of it is made up because it’s built on credit cards. It’s not really built on a real working-class sensibility where people work hard. I can live with the equal exploration of the arts, but this equalisation of the world for the middle classes, the upper-middle classes. In NYC, I don’t have any place left to play any more, all my band has moved out except me. Every place we’ve ever practised, they’re finished; I have no community.’

Even the most cash-hearted capitalist must realise that there are potential financial ramifications in this. Aside from the estimated £5 billion contribution which music and related industries makes to the UK economy, there would be potential damage to other sectors such as tourism. In an era when Visit Britain is part-funding the Music Tourist Board (www.myspace.com/artfulmtb), solely to promote London’s image abroad as a rock ’n’ roll kinda town, surely we should be adding ‘ensure preservation of basement space for grindie raves’ to the building code.

However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Efforts are being made to ensure that London’s live scene will still flourish. The Arts Council has so far invested £4.2m (plus a further £600,000 per year) into the newly renovated Roundhouse, which has not only regenerated one of the capital’s landmark venues, but also proved as popular with bands as it has with fans.

An Arts Council spokesperson told Time Out that, ‘while it is a shame that venerable institutions such as Hammersmith Palais and the Astoria are having to close, we’re also experiencing the results of ten years of sustained government investment in the arts and, through Lottery funding, have seen the opening of some fantastic new venues in the capital including the Roundhouse and LSO St Lukes. Our investment in music in London in the last year includes more than £15m of revenue funding to a range of music organisations and venues. This is before we also add in our funding to the Royal Opera House, the English National Opera, and the newly refurbished Southbank Centre.’

Admittedly, this investment is dwarfed by the sums diverted from Lottery funds for the 2012 Olympics but it proves that there is some official commitment to preserving, and capitalising on, London’s musical heritage. Arts Council-funded projects – from Bethnal Green’s Rich Mix cinema-performance space to the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham – are as geographically diverse as they are musically but, given our uncanny mistrust of anything perceived as ‘state sponsored’, whether they’ll be the testing ground for the next Arctic Monkeys, or ever be as emotionally resonant as the Dublin Castle, remains to be seen. Still, at least the future of the city’s nightlife isn’t entirely in the hands of Balfour Beatty.