A Speech for the Annual Report 2025 Launch

That's right fact fans... just for once this column doesn't have an obscure song title as some sort of nerd test before you get to read it. Here's the speech I gave at the V&A Museum this week.

Read the MVT Annual Report HERE

Watch the Last Safe Space Podcast about the Annual Report HERE

Have you done those two things? OK, here we go…

Tuesday 20 January: The Raphael Rooms at the V&A Museum:

I want to start by being very honest.

The Annual Report we’ve just published is not comfortable reading, and it is not meant to be. It’s not a marketing document, it’s not a mood board, and it’s definitely not designed to flatter anyone in this room and say well done, job completed. It is a precise account of what is actually happening in grassroots music venues, based on real data from real places run by real people.

If you care about grassroots music, you need to read it. Not skim it. Not rely on a summary. Read it. Sit with it. Because it makes one thing painfully clear.

We have reached the absolute limit of what goodwill can possibly absorb.

For years, grassroots music venues have quietly carried problems that should never have been theirs to solve. Rising costs. Shifting policy. Regulatory confusion. Political drift. Industry indifference. And because they didn’t collapse overnight, everyone else has been able to pretend that the system more or less works.

Well, here’s the headline from this report: It does not work.

The part of this year’s report that really gets under my skin, the part I keep coming back to, is employment.

When venues were forced to cut jobs, they couldn’t get rid of executives because they don’t have any. They didn’t trim luxuries because there aren’t any to trim. With no other option, venues were forced into a corner and forced to make a terrible decision none of them wanted to. They had no choice but to cut the first rung of the ladder. The trainees. The junior sound engineers. The box office assistants. The casual staff learning how venues actually work.

Those people didn’t just lose jobs. They lost routes in.

And I know exactly who those people are, because I was one of them.

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I stood at the back of the 100 Club and watched a band play for the first time having paid to get in with my own money. That detail of paying to get in matters to me, because I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t connected. I didn’t belong there by any obvious right. I just wanted to be in the room.

As I looked round that room all those years ago I started asking questions. What’s the guy on stage playing? Who put this band on? Who is making those lights work? Where’s that sound coming from? Who got all these people here? Who’s that strange looking bloke on the door? Why has everyone got better hair than me? And as a result of that experience and asking those questions, I almost immediately started to pick up a series of freelance jobs supporting live music in live music venues. Not glamorous jobs. Not jobs with titles. Jobs where you turn up, do what needs doing, learn very quickly, and don’t make a fuss. Jobs that barely count as jobs at the time, except they absolutely do, because they are how you get in.

Those early roles weren’t just work. They were proof that I could actually do something people valued. Proof that there was a place for me in a world that hadn’t offered many obvious ones up to that point. I don’t have a raft of qualifications. I don’t have a degree in how to put a band on. I have practical experience of how you do it. Music didn’t just give me joy in a passive way as a consumer. It gave me a way in. Those first jobs told me I actually mattered.

We have absolutely no idea whether the people who lost those roles last year will find another way into the music industry. We don’t know what talent we’ve lost. We don’t know which future promoters, engineers, managers, venue operators or artists quietly slipped out of the ecosystem without anyone noticing. Who knows, maybe there won’t be another me to make this speech in thirty years’ time - something I am sure we would all feel a little bit relieved by.

That long term loss is invisible in the short term, and it is exactly why it is so dangerous.

This isn’t just about equality, fairness or opportunity, although those things should matter a lot to us. It’s about whether this industry still works ten years from now. Whether it still has people who understand how live music actually happens, because they learned it the only way it can be learned: by doing it, badly at first, in rooms and with people that will forgive you. I don’t know what would have happened to me if those chances hadn’t been there but I do know I wouldn’t be here. Which I am pretty sure some of you would regard as an improvement.

These 6000 job losses didn’t happen because grassroots venues failed.
It happened because people keep have been making poor decisions at a political, policy and structural level with the ridiculous expectation that the smallest, most fragile part of the live music ecosystem would be able to quietly absorb the consequences.

Well, Music Venue Trust is done with that now.

For ten years, Music Venue Trust has been compelled to focus on rescue. Keeping doors open. Preventing closures. Fighting planning battles. Plugging gaps. That work continues, because it has to. But survival alone is no longer enough, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

So hear this… 2026 is the year we change gear. And it should also be the year that the government and the industry seize the opportunity and change gear with us.

Before I talk about how, I want to say a few thank yous.

Thank you to the Music Venue Trust team, past and present. This work is relentless, often invisible, and frequently done under enormous personal pressure. You have carried this sector through the toughest of times with incredible passion and integrity when it would have been easier to walk away.

Thank you to Anna (Sabine) and Caroline (Dineage) who have joined us this evening, and the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, for listening properly, taking evidence seriously, and producing the groundbreaking 2024 report that laid out all the opportunities to do things differently. That work finally put grassroots music venues on the record as essential cultural infrastructure, and it really matters.

Thank you to the artists who stood up when we needed them. Who used their platforms, their audiences, and their credibility to say these rooms matter. You didn’t have to do that. You chose to. We intend to return that trust by delivering real change that grassroots venues, promoters and artists can feel and experience in 2026.

And, of course, most of all thank you to the venues themselves. The operators, the teams, the volunteers, the people unlocking doors night after night and somehow making it work even when the sums say they shouldn’t. This sector exists because you refuse to let it disappear.

So, what does this change actually look like? It looks like permanently Fixing Problems, Not Just Funding Them. And tonight, I am starting the process of telling you how Music Venue Trust is going to do that.

First, we are going to reduce costs permanently, not just help venues limp through another winter. Through our project Venue MOT, we’re going to be tackling operational inefficiencies that everyone knows exist, but nobody has time to fix when you’re firefighting. It’s boring work. It’s also the work that actually changes outcomes.

With Off The Grid, we’re going to work to bring energy costs down and then finally eliminate energy bills altogether, installing solar and battery systems that remove one of the biggest uncontrollable costs venues face. Not discounting them. Not subsidising them temporarily. Removing them from the equation. Our partners at Community Energy England are here tonight with our colleagues at Music Declares Emergency and we are deeply serious about creating a carbon neutral energy model that protects music venues from an out of control energy market.

Through Stay The Night and Feel at Home, we’re going to be creating artist accommodation and improving backstage facilities, working with our partners Volunteer It Yourself because touring is a human activity, not just a financial one, and pretending people should sleep in vans forever, or bunging cash at them so they can hand it over to increasingly greedy hotel companies is not a business model.

With our Raise The Standard project, we’re unlocking investment in sound, lighting, backline, microphones, the basics of what makes a show sound good and look good. Because better shows mean better experiences for everyone, and better experiences mean audiences come back. We are excited to have our partners Gear 4 Music, Marshall, Shure, D&B, Yamaha, Fender and others here with us tonight. Every artist deserves a well-equipped, fully functioning, workplace and we are going to make sure it is there for them.

Second, we are rebuilding the touring circuit into a modern, comprehensive network that delivers on the promise of access to excellent live music wherever you live.

In partnership with Save Our Scene and the Association of Independent Promoters, and working with Marshall, Jack Daniels and Most Wanted, our Liveline project will treat touring as a necessity, not a luxury. Covering venue costs. Reducing promoter risk. Guaranteeing artist fees. Reconnecting towns and cities that have been cut out of the live music map. And we aren’t waiting for anyone to tell us when we should get started on that mission; tonight I am announcing that in the first two weeks of this year we have already added 47 new shows across 28 towns and cities in partnership with This Feeling, AGMP, Save Our Scene, and working with multiple agencies, managers and artists. And it’s a shame the Secretary of State couldn’t be here tonight so that I could tell her that one of those acts is the fantastic Apostle, a band from her beloved Wigan that we will be supporting to play their debut show in Liverpool. Because talent doesn’t just come from big cities, it’s everywhere and we are going to find it and support it to achieve its full potential.

This is about restoring routes, not one-off heroics. We are going to work with venues, promoters, agents, artists and managers to deliver thousands of new shows in hundreds of under-used spaces. The UK is known around the world for having one of the best grassroots touring networks, and we are going to restore it to health, better than ever

Finally, we are strengthening the work that prevents closures before they happen. The Venue Support Team. Emergency Hardship Relief. Planning and licensing interventions. This work saves venues every single week, and it remains essential. But now it sits alongside a major change in attitude.

We are not just going to stop things getting worse. We are going to actively make them better.

We are able to do this work because of Grassroots Contributions and the Grassroots Levy. Millions of pounds is starting to come online to support grassroots music venues, promoters, and artists. More will follow. This is a new, permanent, funding source that has the potential to revolutionise the grassroots ecosystem. And I want to say this clearly to the people who can deliver that in the room; the music industry has a very clear choice.

There is a window now. A real one. Voluntary action on the Grassroots Levy either works, or it doesn’t, but that’s not a permanent state of inaction. A grassroots levy must deliver by June 2026. If it does, we build a permanent investment system for the foundations of our industry. If it doesn’t, statutory legislation is not just inevitable, it would be justified. And I’m in the right mood, so let’s not pretend that the obstacle is anything other than what it is. SJM, Kilimanjaro, AEG…. These companies are delivering. Live Nation, you know, and the whole industry knows, you are not. If the voluntary levy fails, it will not be the fault of the companies who have already embraced it, or of Music Venue Trust, or of the government, or of any will to do it on behalf of individuals, artists, managers, agents, audiences or anyone else. It will be a direct consequence of the overwhelmingly dominant force in the arena and stadium market deciding not to deliver a voluntary levy. That’s your choice Live Nation and everyone in the industry hopes and believes you can make the right one. (see footnote below for an update!)

And just when some of you were about to breathe a sigh of relief that you seem to have got away without anything to do… let’s turn to the government.

We have had the CMS Select Committee report for over 18 months now. There are specific actions in it that must be taken, and they are not vague.

The Government must stop taxing venues before they make profit. The issues around Business Rates must be resolved immediately. Government should not be in the business of taxing research and development at these venues. And that means no VAT on grassroots music tickets.

Agent of Change must go into law, not guidance. Stop listening to lobbyists from developers trying to cut costs and build rubbish housing. Do the right thing for venues and for future residents

The Government must act immediately on these devastating job losses and come forward with a programme of apprenticeships and training in grassroots music venues. We must reopen those routes into our industry. For all the people like me out there who will get left behind if we do not.

That’s just three examples, but here’s the thing. There are dozens of things this government could be doing, and they actually need to read this report, listen to their MPs, advisors and their teams who are fully across this issue and are simply not getting the traction and attention they deserve. My message is blunt: Stop mucking about. Stop making speeches that don’t actually move things forward. Just get things done.

These are not radical demands. They are the minimum required for a sector this important. A sector the government itself made a central plank of its Creative Industries Sector Plan and described as ‘the essential research and development spaces at the heart of the UK music industry’.

So here’s what I want you all to do as we turn this corner and look ahead to a brighter future for the grassroots music sector. Read the report. Share it. Send it to your MP, your MS, your MSP, and ask them what they are going to do about it.

Because…

People who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of the people doing it.

Music Venue Trust is moving forward in 2026 and beyond. We are not asking if this can be done. We are doing it.

The only remaining question, for everyone in this room and beyond, is whether you are going to do it with us.

FOOTNOTE!

As you can see, on Tuesday in this speech I had a bit of a public go at Live Nation.

The point I was making was one of frustration; that all other parts of the arena and stadium ecosystem were trying as hard as they can to deliver a voluntary levy, fully aware that not only is it the right thing to do, it’s also imperative that we get it done or we will, whatever anyone says, inevitably end up with a statutory levy and statutory regulation. I am fundamentally opposed to state-sanctioned rock and roll at a personal level, and there are multiple serious challenges to the outcome of any statutory levy which I’ve written about multiple times on my Substack - how long it would take, how do you ensure the nations benefit, who administers it, what it get used for in a climate where public funding actively discriminates in favour of high arts being just four examples.

I was therefore delighted by the news on Thursday that the Harry Styles shows at Wembley, promoted by Live Nation, do contain the £1 contribution. These are some of the biggest UK shows of next year, and it sends a real message about how possible it is that they are part of this scheme. I fully understand how that came about, and I appreciate the hard work that went into getting it done by everyone involved, especially the management, agent, and artist. But if you’re going to be public about your frustration with a lack of progress, you should be equally public about your appreciation of definite progress. So here you go… an opinion you rarely get to read or hear anyone say out loud:

There are some really good people in Live Nation’s Farringdon office, and all power to them. I hope their voices continue to be heard in the company, because without Live Nation the voluntary levy can’t work. That’s the fact I said in that speech, and it remains true even with this brilliant news. With Live Nation taking part, we can start to make a real difference to grassroots music venues, promoters, artists and festivals. Immediately. And without the government messing about in our business which anyone who has ever promoted a show knows would be a sodding nightmare.