The horror of London’s music venues

There were headlines last month about the plight of live music in Britain. More than a third of grassroots venues are making a loss; more than 100 of them are ceasing to put on live music or closing altogether. Cue the stories about how, if it wasn’t for these broom cupboards giving musicians the opportunity to learn their trade, you’d never have got all those acts you know and love. All true, of course. We need small venues, and not just for the health of the music industry but for the simple pleasure of sipping a pint watching a young band in a small room.

But dear God, the bigger venues that accommodate graduates of the grassroots circuit need to up their game, too. In London, consider Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a theatre whose sightlines are so bad that many genuinely (and wrongly) believe the floor rakes up towards the stage. Or take Brixton Academy, a venue so poorly managed that two people died following a crush there in December 2022. It will reopen next month. Thankfully, risk to life is seldom an issue at London’s larger venues, but sometimes these places seem too determined to deny visitors a good time.

The Ghanaian-American singer Amaarae played two nights at Here at Outernet, which opened in 2022 as part of a major central London redevelopment. The venue itself is several storeys underground, which always prompts a frisson of fear in me. But more to the point, it feels as though it were designed to be a nightclub in which there might happen to be live music: it’s essentially a big box, with a balcony around three sides of it.