Venues in the South missing out on touring bands

Music venues in the South are missing out because touring bands are opting to play a small number of major cities instead, a new report has found.

Live music has "fractured into clear zones of haves and have-nots", according to the Music Venue Trust (MVT) findings.

Reading, Slough, Oxford, Bournemouth, Poole, Basingstoke and Portsmouth are among the places listed as being out of the loop.

The report says the change was "starving emerging artists of essential development opportunities" and "undermining the talent pipeline that underpins the wider UK live music and recording industries".

It suggests the primary reason for the "collapse" was because such tours were no longer financially viable.

"What was once a nationwide ecosystem linking hundreds of towns and cities is now a series of isolated clusters connected by a handful of touring routes," the report says.

Portsmouth is one of the places described as a "once-regular destination" that has "fallen silent".

Geoff Priestley, general manager at the Wedgewood Rooms in the city, recalls the charity's previous observation that Oasis played 34 venues during their 1994 Supersonic tour, and now only 11 exist.

"A similar tour now, I think averages 10 to 12 venues," he explains.

"That's because of the increase in costs of touring, and all the economic impacts.

"People feel they need to put their bands in places where they're going to get seen, so it becomes about key cities."

Priestley says while acts are risk-averse, the industry has changed too, as smaller touring bands often had record deals where the costs could be subsidised by record companies.

"Weirdly, last year we did more shows but had 40% fewer touring bands, and so in real terms that that's quite a large chunk of what would be our programming for the year," he explains.

Priestley says while this trajectory is "very sad", there is "still an appetite for live music, but you just see the external economic factors chipping away at the business".

The Purple Turtle in Reading received a £29,502 Arts Council grant last year, which has enabled it to attract more bands from overseas, Neil Goulding from the venue says.

"But on the whole, it just seems that a lot of the bigger stuff is not coming through and we don't really get a look in," he adds.

"For some of these younger bands coming through, it's hard for them."

According to Ronan Munro, editor of Oxford's local music magazine Nightshift, the lack of larger tours is not a "new concern".

"We have London, Birmingham and Bristol all within a relatively small radius, who always get the big name acts," he says.

"What Oxford is brilliant at, and always has been, is getting those acts on the way up, before they're massive, and that's down to the fantastic promoters we're lucky enough to have, and seeing acts on the way up is always the most exciting time to catch them."

He cites acts such as Idles and Fontaines D.C. "often playing to a few dozen punters" on their early tours.

"You can then boast you saw them before they were famous," he adds.

"As ever, my advice is to take a chance on new acts. Of course not all of them will go on to be big but some will, and seeing them at that level is always exciting."

On Monday Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens will host a programme from Strings in Newport on the Isle of Wight to mark Independent Venue Week.

The venue may not seem an obvious stop on a UK tour but co-owner Claydon Connor is proud of securing recent bookings such as Newton Faulkner "which sold out in a record 15 minutes", British Lion - the side project of Steve Harris from Iron Maiden - and The Sugarhill Gang.

"People on the Isle of Wight would never have thought that the Sugarhill Gang would play their local music venue," he laughs.

"We've somehow managed to get more and more - this year has actually been our best year yet in nearly nine years.

"On the Isle of Wight, we are a captive audience, there is no other dedicated music venue here, so we seem to have nailed it in terms of being quite consistent and getting acts over.

"We've certainly seen an upturn in interest on the Isle of Wight as well. It's a good focal point at the moment and I think that's partly down to the rise of bands like Wet Leg.

"We still have a major UK festival which brings in a lot of tourism, so music here is really important to people.

"We've had plenty of stuff that we're really proud of and it feeds the fire for us to keep going and push on."

At the launch of its annual report, the trust's CEO Mark Davyd put forward a plan of action to help the problem areas.

This includes the new Liveline Fund, which aims to address the "root causes of the touring crisis" by covering venue costs, reducing promoter risk, and guaranteeing artist fees.

It follows a £1 levy on tickets for all arena and stadium shows with more than 5,000 capacity, raising up to £25m annually for grassroots venues.

Pulp, Coldplay, Wolf Alice, Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender are among those to have adopted the scheme, as have the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Arena, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport says it "fully supports" the rollout.

Priestley says it will make a difference.

"There's a football analogy that gets used, that major clubs support their grassroots clubs," he says.

"It should be the same in music."

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