Music venues generally suck

As you might be aware, I’ve been to a fair number of gigs in Birmingham over the last few years and with a few exceptions most of the venues in which said gigs take place are bloody awful. The exceptions tend to be rooms above pubs which is notable as its in a pub’s interest to be somewhat welcoming and to give you the feeling that you’d like to stay there. Venues which purely exist to enable live music to take place seem to forget this. The beer will be overpriced, the floor sticky, the seating non-existent, the temperature either freezing or boiling, the toilets beyond vile, the staff miserable, the sight-lines tricky and so on. The Academy is legendary for its awfulness, generally excused because it’s being knocked down soon so why bother, but the same applies to the other medium-sized venues such as the Barfly and Factory / Medicine Bar.

In some ways this is reasonable. After all we just want to see the bands and, if they’re good, they’ll transform the mediocre environment into something special. It’s notable that the best gig I’ve been to in Birmingham was seeing the Flaming Lips transform the Academy into a fantasy wonderland of glory. That’s no mean feat. And the excellence of last year’s Supersonic Festival was barely dented by the bars running out of draft beer on the Sunday. Yes, you read that right. Running out of draft beer. So as long as the acts are able to perform and the sound works, is it reasonable to worry about the little things?

Maybe I’m just getting old. I know I’ve tramped to gigs in the winter and all I’ve wanted when I got there was a cup of tea and a comfy chair. The 20-somethings seem to cope alright but, essential as they are, they’re not the majority audience these days for live music, especially when you bring in the heritage reunion stuff which, while I’m not a fan, is probably a huge financial draw on the live circuit these days. If the average age of the the gig go-er isn’t 30+ these days I’d be surprised.

Yes, there’s something essential about seeing a band play in a smelly pit. It feeds into the mythology of the event, making it seem that little bit more dangerous. And if you’re an occasional visitor to the live music world then that can be fun. But if you decide you’d like to see live music regularly that often means spending 5 hours in one of these places every week. Not an enticing notion. I don’t remember reading in the Big DIY Subculture Book that in order to be “real” it has to be horrible.

I heard a theory about why people in Birmingham don’t seem to go out to gigs and such as much as people in London do. The thinking went that in London most people, given the cost of rents, tend to live in dingy little flats often sharing with people they don’t necessarily like. Going out, therefore, is essential. In Birmingham people tend to live in houses with sofas and heating and the like. Once you get in from work it takes a lot to prise you off that sofa and into a cold, bare room where the beer is overpriced and the toilets are broken.

It can be done, of course. The Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath manages to be a fairly nice place to wait for the bands to start thanks to it having a fairly nice pub on the ground floor. The same goes for the Actress and Bishop and The Rainbow. Of course these venues tend towards the small size and are often in danger of falling foul of noise legislation. Meanwhile those that are large enough to draw the bigger names tend to be vile. I remember when I was “playing” at Gigbeth last year in the Institute (or whatever Barfly decide to call it now they’ve taken it over). Yes, I was tired and a little under the weather but I had this distinct feeling that I really didn’t want to be in that building. The vibe was wrong and it was something the acts had to fight against. Successfully, of course, but imagine how much better the music experience might have been if they’d be able to build on something positive?

Maybe when the Academy moves to their new premises on Bristol Street they’ll sort their act out and not simply open the doors on yet another overpriced barn with piss-poor facilities and start raising the bar of what’s acceptable in this city so the others will be forced to follow. I’m not holding my breath though.

In conclusion, then, and to try and be a little more constructive, if we want to build a vibrant live music scene in Birmingham then we need to build it on solid foundations. A huge part of those foundations, along with the promoters, bands and fans, are the venues. Right now the words subsidence, woodworm and rising damp spring to mind.