All Together Now

We had a mad five minutes and decided to arrange the biggest grassroots festival in the world. Now all we need is you.

Everywhere at Once.

On the weekend of 26 to 28 June, more than four hundred grassroots music venues are going to open on the same three days and put on something like two and a half thousand different acts across well over a thousand shows. Guernsey to Orkney, Inverness to Penzance, Falmouth to Aberdeen, a boat in Canary Wharf, a back room in Stroud, all at the same time. It is the biggest single event we have ever attempted, to be honest it mighty be the single biggest event anyone has ever attempted in the grassroots sector, and it is, frankly, completely bonkers. A festival is hard enough in one place, with one set of toilets and one box office and one person to shout at when the sound flies away on the wind. We are doing it across hundreds of separate buildings at once, every one with its own team, its own promoter, its own licence, its own moody PA, its own specific method of making the lights come on, and somehow it all has to add up to a single weekend. Nobody in their right mind would build a festival this way, which, Music Venue Trust being the type of organisation it is, is why we have done it on purpose.

That purpose is not a sudden interest in a very particular type of officiously motivated sado-machoism. For more than a decade the day job at Music Venue Trust, the bit that starts when you open your inbox, has, sadly, been centred around bad news. Most mornings start with a venue in trouble, a landlord with lofty ambitions, a noise complaint, a rates bill that arrived like a hand grenade rolled into the room, a closure we cannot stop, a phone call from someone who has put fifteen years of their life into a room and is potentially about to lose it. In this game, you get need to get good at handling the bad news. We have built a team that can absorb it and keep moving, that can hold calmly in their heads the information that someone’s whole life’s work is falling apart on a Tuesday and still pick up the next crisis call on the Wednesday. But we should acknowledge that the relentless pressure of doing that, within our team, grinds you down in a way you mostly don’t talk about, and the reason there isn’t any point in moaning about it is because the sector itself runs on the same diet of grim gruel news. Every operator I know carries a low hum of dread about the brown envelope, the rent review, the weekend that simply will not sell. The whole story of grassroots music, for years, has been told in a series of slightly gloomy songs all in the same key which have been rejected by The Cure as being a little too depressing for their liking. Decline. Loss. Hang on if you can.

That story has played an important role in getting the nation’s attention, but it has left out much of the other thing that’s always there, sitting right next to the main course of festering grief, which is a tremendous side portion of hope and a lovely refreshing glass of passion and commitment. The venue that gets saved, the night that sells out against all sense, the kid at their first gig who has no idea they’ve just walked into the rest of their life, the promoter who should have quit but got that last burst of ticket sales and didn’t. Those positive things are just as real as the negative things, and they happen constantly but get buried under the obituaries because bad news is louder; dog bites man is not a story, man bites dog is a headline, as the old saying goes. Everywhere At Once is, to put it in the plainest term possible, one enormous ‘fuck you’ to all of those years of challenges and problems. It is the sector deciding, for one weekend, to stop being the thing that’s always whispered about as if it is dying and be the thing that’s shouting that it is, in fact, very, very much alive. And noisy. After ten years of being counted out, it’s a whole sector, venues, promoters, artists, crew, saying that loss and frustration is not our only story, and standing up at the same moment to be counted in. It’s a giant, deliberately ridiculous, over the top, slightly insane crescendo of hope, like the gong at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody or the orchestra going full tilt at the conclusion of Day in the Life.

We picked this particular weekend on purpose. The 26th to the 28th June would have been Glastonbury’s weekend in 2026, and Glastonbury is having its fallow year, so there’s a Glastonbury-shaped hole in the calendar where the country expects a big national music event and this year it didn’t have one. So now it’s got one. There’s a harder reason as well, so let’s be honest about that: Glastonbury weekend is normally one of the quietest weekends of the entire year in grassroots venues because everyone’s either at the farm or in front of the telly watching it. This year we want it to be the exact opposite, and create one of the busiest weekends of the year. Because for a lot of these venues one really busy weekend is the difference between trouble and getting back into the black. That is not a figure of speech, it’s their actual budget.

By now you’ll probably have seen some of the big names attached to the event, and all of them are playing proper grassroots rooms; Fatboy Slim, Becky Hill, Tinie Tempah, The Lathums, Toddla T, Rizzle Kicks, Royston Club, Divine Comedy, D Double E, Lucy Spraggan, Masterpeace, Gene and even proper full time legend Glenn Tilbrook on a theatre ship in east London. All wonderful, and all there for the right reasons. But this is just as much about King Ayisoba, Baylee Blu, Eve Buckley, Dave McCabe, Tom A Smith, Mark Armstrong Trio, Cruz, The Clause, Brooke Combe, Vlure, Master Peace, Joeyfat, P Money, Chris Helme, Omar, Miki Berenyi Trio, The Scribes, Bluetones, Walt Disco, Vermin King, and a couple of thousand other artists, many of whom you may not have heard of yet and at least some that you absolutely should hear about as soon as you can. IOt’s about jazz and blues and folk and classicalSome of them will be the names in the headlines in five years, and they will tell interviewers about the night they played the room that matters to them in their home town and something about that evening was the turning point. And there will be just as many artists who play this event, stick around for an outsider career that is alternative and underground, and will be happy with the freedom that gives them for the opportunity to be who they want to be. That is what these venues are for. The headliners are the ones who are recognising the spaces that they already came up through. Everyone else on the bill, whatever their future holds, is the reason we all believe that the venues have to still be there.

In all of what has happened so far to create this event, and believe me that is an astonishing amount, there is one remaining essential element that is missing. And unlike the Lottery logo, famously “it could be you”, we can be absolutely clear about the difference between this being a huge success and a valiant attempt to send a very new and positive message. That difference, gentle readers, is you.

So here is what you can do, and I’m going to be completely open that I am pretty much insisting that you do it, because why would you be reading this stuff if you don’t care about it, and the action you can take to support Everywhere at Once is the last remaining piece of this wild jigsaw, and its down to you and nobody else. I mean it, don’t wait for anyone else to do it, we need you to do it.

There is a map. Go to it now. On it you will find every show happening near you, and there will be shows near you, that is the whole idea of the thing. Pick one. Better still, pick three, one for each night. Pick the room you haven’t been to in a while, or the artist you’ve never heard of, or the music genre you have never thought about before. And then get a group of friends together, buy the tickets to those events, and go out and dance. Admission to these shows, when you think about all the thousands of people working to make it happen, is madly cheap. The music, the art, the whole night, is already there for you, just waiting for you to complete the puzzle by showing up and appreciating it. And then I want you to do one more thing; I want you to tell people about that map and ask them to do exactly the same thing. Post it, send it round, put it in the group chat that normally just argues about where to eat. Everyone is invited to this festival, there is no fence and no guest list.

I’m doing at least three shows myself. Tom A Smith at The George. Gene in Newport. And Fatboy Slim, in a venue I am not allowed to tell you about yet, which may turn out to be the maddest gig of the lot. If I can, I’ll sneak in a fourth and a fifth by just turning up to some of the daytime shows, because there are hundreds of those too, many of them free or so cheap as to be near enough free, the kind of thing you wander into on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and maybe, just maybe, you might remember for years. That is the festival working exactly as it should, exactly as we planned it, and exactly as you were meant to enjoy it.

I want to put the pressure on you a little bit on this Sunday morning, because my new “It Is You” isn’t just a concept or a slogan I dreamt up to try and be a smartarse about its proximity to “It Could Be You”. Together, the whole grassroots sector has booked the venues, the shows and the artists. We have put together the concept, got the National Lottery behind it, lined up the rooms and the promoters and thousands of musicians, and even created a map so you can see how incredibly huge this ambition is. That part is done. The one thing none of us involved so far in making this happen can do is buy the tickets and fill the rooms. Only the people who walk through the door can do that, so please make sure one of them is you.

The only reason to keep these venues open, the only reason any of this is worth the years of work, is the thing that happens when audiences fill them up; the night out, the band you’ll still be going on about in October, the people you went with, the gig that turns out years later to have been somebody’s first ever show. We can build the venue and book the act and point at the empty room and say, there, that’s where it could happen. But we can’t actually make the thing that is most special about these places happen. Only you can do that, by turning up and being in them.

So that’s your mission. Fill every room in the country. And if you want a funny reason to do it, here’s a final bit of data: If every grassroots music venue in the country actually filled up that weekend, Everywhere At Once would have a bigger total live audience than Glastonbury. Four hundred rooms, all full, on the weekend they’re normally at their emptiest. That is well within reach, and the only thing standing between us and it is whether enough people get off the sofa and support it.

Go to the map. Find your show. Take your mates. Spread the word.

It could be you? It is you. Let’s make it happen.