Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 28
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 28: They Paved Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
In memoriam… Windsor Old Trout 1995, London Marquee 1996, Leeds Duchess of York 2000, Chelmsford Army & Navy 2002, Birmingham Jug of Ale 2008, Leicester Princess Charlotte 2010, Newport TJs 2010
Sometime in 1997, a very small group of people who had stupidly, and against all the best financial advice available, found they had taken charge of one of the UK’s local live music venues accidentally discovered themselves invited to the eighth edition of the International Live Music Conference. The ostensible purpose of their attendance was to see whether the event, which had established itself as a gathering place for some of the biggest live music industry companies in the world, should be incorporating elements of the whole ecosystem that created and developed music. A fairly inconclusive panel was hosted to discuss what value there was in them being there, some positive words were said, and then everyone retired to the bar.
After a few lip loosening rounds, conversation quickly turned to the closure of the Windsor Old Trout. This now little recalled or remembered music venue had occupied the back room of a pub in a town not exactly known for his long history of rock and roll. It had, nonetheless, been quite a shock when it had closed down, as it was part of a well worn path of gigs that just about every band had played. Places like the Old Trout were so synonymous with the gig circuit, such an accepted and expected rite of passage for your fledgling rock star, that it seemed almost incomprehensible that it could have closed. It wasn’t so much that we didn’t know that music venues could close down, they had been doing that for years. It was more that this one had closed and there was no prospect of reopening it, or of the team that was running it finding anywhere else in Windsor that might permit them to open a new one. It wasn’t just that the Old Trout was gone, it was that Windsor was lost. New bands couldn’t play Windsor any more.
Discussion turned to the fate of the Marquee, one of the most famous music venues in the world, that had lost its original home on Wardour Street, flickered briefly in a new location on Charing Cross Road, then disappeared completely the previous year. There is a very famous black and white poster, featuring a young Pete Townsend with his arm aloft, about to bring it crashing down into the strings of his Rickenbacker to make what the artwork declares will be Maximum R&B. The place promising to offer that noise was now closed, seemingly permanently gone from the map of London, leaving only a blue plaque stuck to the outside of a restaurant for curious tourists to gawp at.
Everyone pulled grim faces and agreed that these two closures were unfortunate, and they were pleased to be in a position where it could not happen to them. As we parted ways at some unholy hour of the morning on that day in 1997, suitably beveraged and lubricated, we made a firm promise to do it all again next year. Maybe, we all agreed, somebody should do something about these closures and make the point that music venues actually mattered. ‘It couldn’t happen to us’ was the agreed theme of the conversation, but maybe we should have some sort of group that met occasionally to discuss why they had closed and make sure people knew that they really shouldn’t have.
It was a small group, probably no more than twenty people in total, representing maybe sixteen or seventeen venues spread across England and with one Welsh operator that had wandered over to London to see what the event was all about. Within the next fifteen years, all but three of the venues represented at that gathering would be permanently closed and removed from the touring map. As you read this now, only two are left. The fact it took another eleven years for the third one to close is reflective of what happened at the end of that fifteen years which finally began to change things.
We never had that second panel at the ILMC, or that second gathering, but we had each others’ telephone numbers and every so often a message would go around in shocked and stunned tones announcing the closure of another venue. The Duchess of York became a Hugo Boss. The Army & Navy sputtered in and out of operation and then vanished. The Jug of Ale, The Princess Charlotte, TJ’s all went and were not replaced. These were the bedrock of a tour. Like my own beloved Holy Toilet, the Tunbridge Wells Forum, these were the venues where Oasis had broken in 1994, places where hundreds of thousands of music fans, maybe even millions, spent their weekends encountering the next chart conquering acts, the ones who got away, the ones who were never going to get there, and the ones who never wanted to go anywhere else. They were disappearing and no one seemed to know or care about it.
On 14 January 2009, the Astoria closed its doors for the last time, having been subject to a compulsory purchase order for the Crossrail development. It’s worth noting that no other part of London’s cultural infrastructure, no opera house, no theatre, no museum, no library, no arts centre, none of the publicly funded ‘real’ arts facilities suffered a similar fate. The case to keep the Royal Opera House safe from the need to improve London’s transport mechanism is so deeply understood that there was never any prospect of it being removed or its boundary infringed upon in any way in the pursuit of travel progress. When it came to making the case for the importance of the Astoria, the pinnacle of our cultural ambitions, there were no calls to protect it, or ensure it came back, made in parliament. No Lords spoke out against it, no senior figures representing the arts with letters behind their names came racing forward to explain how vital it was. Artists and music fans were outraged. The people who are supposed to represent us couldn’t care less.
I had spent a lot of time in the Marquee in the 1980s, sitting patiently through some of its more questionable booking decisions because it was just in such a convenient location for a night out. Get to The Ship for 5pm, argue with an NME or Melody Maker journalist about the terrible review they’d written of a band you loved, hop down the road to check out the line up at the Marquee, then up the road to the St Moritz, round the corner to the 100 Club, down Charing Cross Road to the 12 Bar, over the street to the Borderline, then select the best place to end the night and see who might let you sleep on the floor until the milk train home.
By the late 1990s, that little circuit had collapsed in on itself, partly as entry prices became less affordable and partly through a gradual trickle of closures, but it had been replaced by the magnetic attraction of the dual venues housed in the Astoria. I missed the Marquee, I still miss it to be honest, but I’d pretty much taken up permanent residency in the new venue which across twenty years had, in various forms of ownership and formats, established itself as the epicentre of London’s live music scene. I’d created memories there, seen my favourite acts there, found a life partner there, even stood outside it with my children explaining that one day I’d make sure they were on the guest list and could go and sit in the seat where their parents got together. And now that was all gone, to be replaced at some unknown point in the future by a soulless, corporate, towering homage to the vacuous pursuit of money. London, it seemed, detested the inconvenience of a thriving cultural scene. British music might be famous across the world, but it was apparently hated in its own capital city for the noise it created and the awful people who would insist on flocking to see it. Not the sort of thing we want to encourage at all, so let’s knock it down and replace it with something much more financially viable. A group of avaricious developers had heard Come Dancing by The Kinks and apparently believed it to be an instruction manual.
I took each of the closures of venues across the country fairly personally. In many cases, these venues were run by my friends, people I had got to know through shared aims, dreams and ambitions. They were an unusual bunch. I don’t know if you might have picked up from the previous chapters what sort of person it is that opens a music venue, but let’s just say that this story you’ve been reading is unique to me, but not necessarily unusual. Let’s be nice and not say that all the venues were run by freaks and weirdos, let’s go with the much less judgmental word Mavericks. You don’t open a music venue because you’re a fine and upstanding member of the local community who has made an informed choice between a home for musicians to ply their craft and perhaps a nice shop selling hand made pottery. You open one because you’re bored of stealing pallets out of the back of a B&Q and you want to stay up until 4am building human pyramids with people who have chosen to live in a transit van together. Seeing those people lose the places they loved had been hard, It felt unfair and unreasonable, but it seemed somehow distant and disjointed. It didn’t feel planned, like a constructed and coordinated attack on who we were or what we believed in.
But the one I took most personally of all, the one that would set me off in the new direction that eventually causes you to be reading this book, the venue closure that results in you reading these words which try to explain how the hell this all happened and ended up with me being wherever it is I am and doing whatever it is I do, was the closure of the Astoria. That might seem counter-intuitive, because whatever it is that we mean by the phrase grassroots music venue, it plainly isn’t the dual space, 1800 capacity, purpose built theatre which was home to the Keith Moon bar and the balcony where I had tried to impress The One and tried to impress on The Internationally Famous Photographer that an antipodean beauty was taking an interest in him.
Despite its size, the closure of The Astoria was a watershed moment for me, and for many other people, because it made us realise something. All the other closures had seemed like singular events; unfortunate individual occurrences that it would have been good if they had been avoided but, you know, what can you do? Such a shame, hope it doesn’t keep happening. But It’s not like there was a bigger change going on, any kind of unnoticed deliberate restructuring of our society. One where perhaps the sort of things me and everyone I knew liked to do were being erased and eliminated in a drive towards making every square foot of land in every place in the country into an eagerly grabbed investment opportunity for some faceless offshore banking house. You’d obviously have to be some sort of wild conspiracy nut to think that.
It still took me a little more time to become that nut. I was distracted having a jolly time around the world with The Pinker Tones, still developing ever wilder ideas about what music could do if you put guitars into the hands of people in hospitals, still worrying about how to pay the bills at The Forum. But finally, some day in early 2013, I staggered out of Shuttleworth’s late one night, where a group consisting of The One, The Magician, The Internationally Famous Photographer, The Lanky Fop and various other characters had spent a pleasant evening reminiscing about the fate of live music and bemoaning the lack of a gig across the road to go to. I wandered the 300 metres up the road and stood across from the wreckage of the Astoria, now reduced to rubble and hidden behind boards assuring London of its bright future, and I finally asked myself a question:
Whose city is this?
The choices we make, the things we like and don’t like, the friends and enemies we make, what we choose to do, what we buy, all these things shape the places we live. You can change the space around you by those decisions. That’s a reciprocal relationship, because we are equally shaped by the places we live. There’s whole books you can read about how architecture can impact on your feelings of well-being and you should certainly read at least one, but this book isn’t one of them. My concern, the thing that caused me to ask that question, is what happens when that relationship becomes unbalanced? What happens when everyone I know, everyone whose opinion I trust and believe in, says that The Astoria should be there and someone takes it away? What happens to their ability to make decisions and to shape the place around them?
A place like The Astoria wasn’t just the bricks and mortar in it. When it closed down, it didn’t only result in the loss of the spot in the balcony where I’d first put my arm around The One and she hadn’t noticed. It created jobs for thousands of people, both inside the building and in the shops, bars, pubs and restaurants around it. It was a thriving hub of creativity and economic activity, supported by million of people who had chosen to make the enjoyment of live music part of their lives. Someone had taken all that away. And the question I couldn’t get out of my head, the one I took home as a drunken half thought that I couldn’t shake the next morning, was who had made that decision and what gave them the right to do that? There had been a campaign to stop the closure, that had been ignored. There’d been petitions, they’d been ignored. Ken Livingstone had made the sort of half arsed statement about how much live music meant to London that reads very well in the Evening Standard, then climbed in a crane and swung a wrecking ball at the bricks and mortar that was a home to it.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Who does this place belong to? Does it belong to us, the people who live in it and shape it, or does it actually belong to someone else I don’t know? Do they even live here? Because whoever those people are, it seems like they don’t actually care about the city we call home, and they don’t care about us, they just want to reshape the places we live in to maximise their own wealth. And beyond that, who gave them consent to do that and why is that person listening to them and not to us?
As I always do, because I’d done a good job of making sure I have someone in my life that tells me not to be an idiot, I asked The One if I was stupid to ask these questions. And for a change, and keep in mind that I think odd things like this and run them passed her for an objective opinion at least once a week, she said no. She’d been thinking exactly the same thing. It took maybe six months from standing looking at the rubble on Charing Cross Road, half a year of conversations, to understand that many, many other people had been asking themselves the same thing. If they, whoever they were, could do this to the Astoria, if they could do it to the Old Trout, The Marquee, The Duchess of York, Army & Navy, Jug of Ale, Princess Charlotte, TJ’s, what was stopping them from doing it to everywhere and everyone? More importantly, who was going to stop them?
In January 2014, a group of like minded people decided to answer that question by creating the Music Venue Trust. We had no budget at all, no grants, no crazy philanthropist to back us up, no brand or sponsorship partner. The Legal Beagle came rushing to our aid and registered the proposed organisation as a Charity pro bono, and The One and I started working out of a room in the top of our house to try and understand everything that had happened, everything that could happen, and everything that should happen, everything we needed which might get us a different answer to this question, one which we felt included by and represented by. New characters appeared who shared that vision, and soon that turned into a flood of people, a veritable army, from every part of the country that came together and started believing that we had an answer.
Who was going to stop them? We were.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
Another gem of a chapter, Mark. The last band I saw at the Astoria were The Soft Boys, so despite never having met a life partner or Antipodean beauty there you will understand the importance.