Once upon a time, the places where bands start out had an identity crisis. Some people called them “small venues.” Others said “independent venues.” Musicians affectionately grumbled about “the toilet circuit” - which, to be fair, was often both a description of the quality of the backstage facilities and a summary of the travel schedule. Hands up for this one, I bear some personal responsibility for its usage having been a key contributor to the opening of a music venue in a toilet.
In Australia they’re “sticky carpet venues,” in the US they’re “dives” or “honky-tonks,” in Germany often just “klubs” (said with a look that suggests you may not come out alive). I’ve heard them called spit ‘n’ sawdust joints, chicken-wire bars (thanks, Blues Brothers), the sticky-floored temple, the pub-that-pretends-it’s-a-theatre, and my personal favourite from a Canadian friend: “ear-sweat sheds.” The aforementioned venue I helped to build is colloquially known as The Holy Toilet. Why? Because it was once a public toilet and if you’re there on the right night it’s like a religious experience.
These names are colourful, but they’re slippery. They don’t tell a politician, a funding body or a planning committee that this is critical national cultural infrastructure. They just make it sound like somewhere your cousin’s band is playing next Thursday, or a place your parents wouldn’t be entirely happy you were hanging around in.
Back in 2014, Music Venue Trust realised that this lack of a widely accepted descriptive phrase was a serious issue for the work we wanted to do. We needed a name that stuck, something that wasn’t apologetic, and that put these spaces at the foundation of the music industry instead of on its outer fringes. We couldn’t imagine a politician standing up in the House of Commons and declaring they were concerned about the toilet circuit. So we all put our thinking caps on and after thirty minutes of staring out of the window and waiting for inspiration to strike, it knocked all of us out of our chairs when Beverley Whitrick said “what about Grassroots Music Venues?”
It’s neat, tidy, perfectly positioned and you can immediately imagine what it is. It’s deliberately evocative of grassroots sport, politics and activism - things people are truly passionate about and that everyone likes to believe they support. It came with a proper definition too: a Grassroots Music Venue is a space where live music is the primary activity, presenting original, emerging talent, with infrastructure and staffing designed to support that role, embedded in its local community, and acting as the entry point into the live music ecosystem. Not a pub that sometimes has a band wedged between the karaoke nights and the meat raffle. Not a multi-purpose hall that books one original music event a year. Definitely not a stadium.
We started saying it a lot, then we started telling other people that they should say it a lot, then we started talking about the sector it described with facts and data that could be counted, measured, defended. And with that came stats that made Westminster sit up: 810 GMVs in the UK, hosting over 19 million audience visits a year, contributing £525 million to the economy, operating on a heroically impossible average profit margin of 0.48%. Before that, if you told an MP that “small venues” were in trouble, you’d get a polite nod and a story about how they once saw The Jam at their student union and “didn’t they used to be good?” Nice, but useless. Say “Grassroots Music Venue” and you’ve got a category they can hold a Select Committee inquiry about. You can get it written into government reports. You can get major artists to put £1 from every arena ticket into a fund for it. Changing the words changed the rules.
Of course, once you create a term that actually works, it doesn’t take long before other people start trying to borrow it. Some have meant well but misunderstood it, cheerfully slapping “grassroots” onto anything with a stage and a vaguely musical intention. Others have tried to create their own knock-off versions: “Seed Venues” was one I saw recently, an attempt to describe the casual use of pubs as places where musicians also play. I personally think those places are quite important, it’s certainly where I learned to play every single Beatles song (alright, not Revolution #9), and it’s got a nice ring to it, but unfortunately it’s trying to describe a pub where the landlord is a bit more likely to let you set up your PA in the corner and bash out some cover songs while the regulars play darts. I suspect it won’t stick for that reason; the pubs themselves wouldn’t call themselves that, and it suggests more intent on the part of those spaces for music than the actual pubs would recognise. The reason Grassroots Music Venue caught on wasn’t because it sounded nice; it was because it was accurate. It described a very real, very specific set of spaces and activities that had previously been blurred into vagueness. It replaced a mess of half-baked terminology with something precise enough to stand up in court, or Parliament, or both. And it stuck because the venues themselves all started using it because it was better than what we had before.
Of course, I’m not trying to pretend that giving something a proper definition makes it any less prone to being gloriously shambolic. It’s still perfectly possible you will have your feet stick to the floor in a way that makes you wonder if you’re being slowly claimed by the building. There are places where you will still be handed a pint in a glass that’s lived a life and has the battle scars to prove it. And right across the country you will still see a drummer duct-taping their kick pedal mid-song, hear a sound tech warn “the desk is haunted, don’t touch channel three,” and watch the headliner leave through the crowd because the only other exit is blocked by the bass player’s mum’s car. But the new name they came to be described by also had an impact on how the venue operators felt about themselves, how the people who battle through all that daft shit to get the artist on stage in front of an audience feel recognised for what they are doing. It’s become such a powerful phrase that there’s an argument to be made that the sector itself has been lifted up by it and lifted itself up to meet it. They are proud of being a Grassroots Music Venue in the way they weren’t proud of being a dive bar or ‘that wee place above the chippy.”
Around the world, they are known by a huge variety of individual slang titles that seek to describe what happens inside the four walls - “The Rubber Dub”, “Boozer Gig”, “All Ages Sweatbox” and “Craic Shack”. Inside, it’s always a launchpad. Outside, what you call it changes how the world treats it.
When the phrase Grassroots Music Venue started appearing in official documents, in press headlines, in artist interviews, something shifted. “Save the local pub gig” became “protect the grassroots pipeline.” And that, in turn, opened doors that had been bolted shut for years. Suddenly this wasn’t just a collection of quirky local haunts - it was a national asset. The same places where the bass player’s dad is roped in to work the door are now a protected category, a funding priority, a recognised part of the music industry. And it all started with deciding what to call them.
There’s probably a lesson here for other parts of nightlife. Take the word “nightclub.” What does that actually mean? To one person it’s a glittery, rope-barrier palace with bottle service and a policy on chinos, to another it’s a sweaty basement that was central to the history of Grime. Sadly, all too often in The Daily Mail comments section it’s where people who have never been to one believe other people go to get stabbed. It’s incredibly difficult to generically defend “nightclubs” in policy terms when the people in the room are all imagining completely different things. Until the sector agrees on exactly what they’re talking about, they’ll continue to struggle with the clarity, and therefore the traction, that a term like Grassroots Music Venue gives you. This is why so many ‘Nightclubs’ across the country who support new and emerging talent have increasingly defined themselves as Grassroots Music Venues, a recognition we completely support and agree with.
All of this is why, even though it’s just three words, it was a bit of a moment when, in an interview with NME this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer actually used the phrase Grassroots Music Venue. He didn’t mumble “little clubs,” didn’t say “smaller spaces,” didn’t fumble for “you know, the… uh… toilet circuit.” He said the thing. Clearly. In context. Ten years ago, nobody in his position would have even known what that meant. Now it’s in the mouth of the Prime Minister, sitting there as if he’s always called it that and it’s always been the obvious term.
That’s not just a nice coincidence for people who like tidy language. It’s a quiet revolution of getting the words right - a reminder that in the messy, sweaty, sticky, duct-taped world of live music, sometimes the smallest, neatest change can open the biggest doors.
If you can get from “ear-sweat shed” to “protected cultural asset” that the Prime Minister says must be supported “not just to survive but to thrive” in under a decade, you can probably get anywhere.
Even, improbable as it might seem, into the actual protection, security, support, and improvement that Grassroots Music Venues have earned, deserve, and need.
Great to read all this. You’re right, Grassroots music venue does sound better. Thanks for putting this together. I used to organise gigs at a venue in Birmingham called The Old Railway. Like many venues in Birmingham it’s gone now but it was great fun while it was still standing. Bands from all over the world and all over the country came to play and lasting friendships and connections were made. People forget that Grassroots music venues are a safe space in the heart of the community where people can gather, make new friends and bands, songwriters, and artists of all types can present their work.
Another great read and I have to applaud you for setting this up and sticking it out all this time.
I have only been to your venue once before when I travelled to see Jim Jones Review many years ago and it was an incredible evening.