This Must Be the Place
Does a place have a sound? More importantly, does music sound better in some places?
On 15 January 1999 the at-the-time almost unknown act Muse performed at The Forum in Tunbridge Wells. January is a difficult time of year for selling tickets, and the band performed to no more than 50 people in total, a reasonable number of those being guests. Legend has it that this show was attended by Seymour Stein, who subsequently offered the three young musicians a worldwide deal. For once, that legend is true. And I know this because I booked Muse to play that show and was actually there that night.
I’ve will have been been booking and promoting bands for forty years next year, just one of a number of anniversaries that have conspired to turn 2024 into a massive year long party to which I’ll make sure you all get invited somehow. In those forty years I’ve seen and been part of just about every type of event, and watched just about every type of act in every type of situation. I don’t actually know how many artists I’ve seen live, but I’m guessing somewhere over ten thousand, even allowing for that 18 months we don’t like to talk about when no one got to see any. Across those forty years and ten thousand acts, I don’t think I ever saw any other band so clearly making music that belonged in stadiums as Muse.
Everything about their approach, the lyrics, the chord structures, the sounds, their attitude, all of it, on that rainy night in Tunbridge Wells over 24 years ago, was already in place. The music was always going to sound best, and most appropriate, in front of 10,000 or more people, and not out of place with a vast audience stretching as far as the eye can see with drones hovering over the top of them and laser guided robots enacting parts of the narrative. They were a tremendous band, but they plainly belonged in a massive space with massive production that suited their massive music.
Around the same time, Coldplay also performed at our little venue. The music they were playing would later appear on their debut album Parachutes. They too were a great live act, but this time songs like Yellow sounded just right for the space they were currently in. They had a more personal narrative, one you felt you were part of in a small room, and could still connect to in a slightly larger space. Later on, of course, the musical direction of the group would expand to include massive, arena-filling anthems, and as their recent tour has proved, their huge musical landscape is now filling every molecule of space in stadiums around the world. Coldplay started with a sound that felt small and intimate, grew, developed this sound, and now make music that feels right for huge audiences.
A couple of years later I popped down to Camden one night to see the new buzz band that the NME would shortly showcase with a front cover proclaiming them to be ‘the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll’. Monday 23 July 2001, Camden Dingwalls, The White Stripes. This was a gig so rammed by journalists and music industry bigwigs that it almost ate itself, but Jack and Meg were, quite simply, brilliant. The music was an intense rush of just about every influence from across the history of rock music all colliding into each other all at the same time. They had created something unique and remarkable. It was also absolutely perfect for the size and shape of the room and addressed each member of the audience in a highly personalised way. The band subsequently exploded. The music, however, and the show that produced it, did not. In 2005 White Stripes played two nights at Alexandra Palace. All the connection felt with the music dissipated into the vastness of the venue’s high ceilings and 10,000 plus crowd. Sure, there were singalongs and everybody’s favourite Stripes tune got an outing, but the vitality and energy of it, the thing that had made it so thrilling in a small room, that had been lost somewhere along the way of the transition to an arena headlining act.
I was prompted to think about the history of this by the recent appearance at Electric Ballroom by Billie Eilish. This was a one off underplay event by one of the world’s biggest acts of recent years, an astonishing event enjoyed by just over 1000 people who got the chance to be as close as it’s possible to get to an artist that inspires a fanatical response. The connection between artist and fan in that room, easily one of the best grassroots music venues in the country, was entirely different to the weekend performances at Reading and Leeds. It wasn’t just the proximity, it was something about the music and the location and space it was being performed in. Billie’s music is personal, intimate, close, confidential. It made aural sense in a building of this size in a way that it just doesn’t seem to, to me, in a stadium. This effect wasn’t lost on the artist herself, who remarked at the end of the event that she really should arrange a tour of small music venues to feel this connection.
It’s a natural aim of our capitalist society to grow everything, develop income from it. Always expanding, always getting bigger. More tickets, higher prices, bigger tours, more screens, more fireworks, more production trucks. Everything louder, brighter, and flashier than everything else. This is great for the pockets of our most successful artists and the teams around them, and provides an experience for millions of people which they obviously value.
But what about when music is created and designed, as part of its intrinsic reason for existing, to be enjoyed up close and personal?
I’m obsessively committed to grassroots music venues. Not as a political position, or even a social or cultural one, although obviously that’s where I’ve accidentally ended up. That passion started simply for no better reason than because these are the places where I like to go to listen to music in the manner from which I derive the most pleasure from it. A lot of the artists I get the most from in those places create music that feels inherently designed to work in that space, through its personal lyric content, its intensity, its quietness, it’s dynamic content. To my ears, those things work best when I can stand physically near to the creators and get a direct experience. Other people get a different, equally valid, type of buzz from being in a crowd of 125,000 people helping Liam navigate his way through his back catalogue. I’m not denigrating that experience, or criticising artists for delivering those shows.
The question I am raising is really one for artists and the people around them. Is there anyone in your team that ever says no to the bigger show on the grounds that the music that makes up the latest album simply doesn’t belong there? Do you ever sit back and listen to the work you’ve created and really, properly, think where is the best place for it to be performed? There’s a whole host of newer artists right now being escalated through the venue ladder for valid financial reasons. I’d like to encourage everyone to take a pause and consider the creative reasons why that might not be the best thing to do in the long term.