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Everyone knows it’s been a tough gig for indie venues lately. On top of ill-advised redevelopment plans, noise complaints and rent increases, venues have had to weather a global pandemic in order to stay alive – and sadly, many didn’t. 2023 decided to wedge the knife further by hiking gas prices, raising ticket prices and making touring a bitch. 

If there’s anyone who’ll rage, rage against the dying of the light, it’s Steve Lamacq. Throughout the 90s, he proselytised the religion of Britpop on BBC Radio 1 in his amiable Essex accent, and scorned sinners who produced terrible albums as part of the NME editorial team. For over forty years, Lamacq has attended thousands and thousands of gigs across the country, and understands the importance of his position to help save indie venues. 

“We should be doing everything we can to tell the stories of venues around the country, which are the backbone of a lot of the music scenes,” he says. “I think sadly, the year ahead could be an even bigger challenge to some small venues to even cope.” 

Independent Venue Week is part of a wider campaign to save our venues from financial disarray, but it also helps that it enables Lamacq’s lifelong gig addiction. “It’s one of the perks of the job, because I’ve always loved going to gigs,” he explains. “To be able to go to a gig every night for work is something of a treat for me. I love travelling around the country and going to concerts, different places, talking to different people wherever you go.” 

For the eighth year running, Lamacq will be touring and broadcasting from various beloved indie venues in the UK. Acts such as Sprints, Grove, Young Fathers, The Murder Capital, and Suede will join Lamacq in conversation before performing to lucky fans. Getting involved, he says, is both an opportunity to see amazing bands and to support indie venues on the precipice of closure. 

“I feel honour-bound, having been given so much myself by all the amazing nights, bands, artists I’ve seen in these venues over the course of the last forty years. I feel it’s always our duty to get out there and fly the flag for them. Independent Venue Week is a great way of doing that because in some places, even at this point in the year, it could be make or break for some small venues unless we get audiences through the door and make sure the cash flow is adequate enough to keep the venues alive.” 

In a cost-of-living crisis that’s already leaving pockets empty, where is this money going to come from? Though bodies like the Arts Council might be obvious targets, Lamacq believes the onus lies elsewhere. 

"You can’t walk straight from a rehearsal room straight out onto the stage at the O2 Arena. Where is the art going to come from if these venues aren’t there?"

“I think there’s a bigger debate now to be had about whether the major record labels and big festival and gig promoters should also maybe put their hands in their pocket to help the people who provide them with the music, which makes them the money,” he says. “You can’t walk straight from a rehearsal room straight out onto the stage at the O2 Arena. Where is the art going to come from if these venues aren’t there?”

“That would help us see some light at the end of the tunnel and would make for a better and more interesting music scene at the same time. It’s not just about keeping the doors of the venues open: there’s so much more we could do with these five, six hundred venues around the country in terms of making them better places for people to go. If we can make people aware of that, we can make everything just a bit better.”

Venues are important for bringing together creative communities, especially in smaller towns; something Lamacq knows all too well. Moving to Harlow for college as a youngster meant his life revolved around The Square, a pub with a venue upstairs: “It shaped the person I am and who I wanted to be.” 

Sadly, this also means he’s familiar with the consequences of taking it away. “It’s always been my thought process that without venues, there’s nothing to drive a music scene,” he tells me. “When a town has a music venue, more artists get to be seen and heard, which means in turn more bands fall, which means more interest in music. It’s an upward cycle.”

“If you take the venue away, there’s nothing to gather around. Ever since The Square shut, there isn’t a music scene in the same form that was when there was a venue there.” 

Many of the venues Lamacq will be visiting this year on tour are in similar positions: Ramsgate Music Hall, for example. “You can already see there’s a little scene beginning to grow around as lots of people have met via the venue. It’s a place where you can creatively form and share ideas.”

“Ramsgate is a tiny little venue, but all of a sudden you’ve got a tiny little venue on your doorstep and you don’t have to travel into London or down to Margate. It's just brilliant that people can have a night out where they can just wander down the road and see the interesting touring groups to go and local bands to play. It’s just such a lovely little venue.”

Some venues, like Stereo in Glasgow and the Ramsgate Music Hall, are destinations Lamacq has yet to go to see a gig. “I went to a birthday party there, which was great, but I’ve never had the chance to actually see a band,” he says about Ramsgate. 

“Long may little venues exist.”

“There’s a fantastic dressing room beneath which is beneath the stage. Sometimes bands will come along, fill the stage with dry ice, and then come up through the trap door. When the dry ice clears, there’s the band. But it’s a lovely, welcoming, little place. It’s going to be brilliant.”

Of course, Lamacq has an intimate history with other venues this year, such as the Norwich Arts Centre. Indie historians will recognise this as the site of the famous Manic Street Preachers incident. Richey Edwards, then rhythm guitarist and lyricist for the Manic Street Preachers, had been heckled with accusations of being a ‘plastic punk’. Backstage, he approached Lamacq for a chat, and quietly carved ‘4 REAL’ into his arm with a razorblade.

According to Lamacq, Edwards tried to call afterwards, which he missed. He tells me it’s “one of my great regrets in life”: “I’d written up the review and I was just emerging from a state of shock over the course of the day, still trying to make sense of what happened. Me and a couple of others, we’d gone to the pub, unfortunately, when he’d left his message.”

“As much as I think he wanted to make the point to me, I think he was also making a broader statement – a very committed statement. He believed in that band, more than anything else. It was part apology, part restating why he had to go to those ends to do what he did, because he felt he was standing up for the band. He didn’t say that, but it feels like he just wanted to reiterate: ‘it’s not exactly just about you, it’s about what anyone might think of our group. But if it was upsetting, I apologise.’”

You’d think going back to the Norwich Arts Centre would be traumatising, but the journalist doesn’t feel particularly apprehensive about returning this year: “There’s lots of other memories – nothing as dramatic as Richey, but other memories that I have which remind me of the place.”

“I went to see a band called The Megacity there. Rather than driving onto the next day’s gig, I just slept in the car park at the centre,” he recalls. “It was in the middle of the night, I got turfed out of the car by two policemen who thought I was a vagrant who tried breaking into the car, tried to have a chip, and having to explain to them it was my car, standing there freezing cold in a T-shirt having been rudely awakened.”

This year, it’s not just the indie venues threatened with closure, either: the BBC recently announced cuts to local radio stations, leaving programmes like BBC Introducing hanging in the balance. It led to industry-wide backlash, and though he’s unsure of what the outcome might be, Lamacq is similarly displeased: “For all the presenters who are basically on a crusade for their local scenes, this is very disappointing and sad.”

“I just hope the spirit of the thing lives on, and that if this goes ahead, there will be other ways of championing local music by the stations. It’s more frustrating, I suppose, because Introducing is part of the bigger picture that’s been sucked into a restructuring of local radio, whereas in its own way, it’s its own separate being, and that’s how people need to see it when they come to make decisions about what to do with that.” 

“The fact that so many people have finally stood up at this point and gone, ‘do you understand what an important role BBC Introducing plays?’, I’m hoping will at least make the people who are doing the forward planning stop and think. Because if one good thing comes out of this, it’s the fact that hopefully people at the BBC will get more of an insight into why these programmes have become the hub of global music communities around the country.”

2023 will be a heavy year for everyone in the industry this year. We’re stuck in a precarious economy that’s suffocating the entire music scene. We’ve got a stuffy multimillionaire for a PM, who believes musicians should retrain instead of, you know, just supporting the arts sector. 

Independent Venue Week is a way to celebrate the hundreds of venues that have provided us with incredible nights out and countless memories we’ll tell our future grandchildren. Or, as Lamacq puts it: “Long may little venues exist.”

Steve Lamacq will be celebrating Independent Venue Week on BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Sounds from Monday 30^th January - Friday 3rd February, 4pm-7pm.

Grab your copy of the Gigwise print magazine here.

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