Stop bleating on about Independent Venue Week

Contain your excitement, but next week is ... Independent Venue Week. Yes, amazing. How lucky are we to have a whole week that "champions" local music venues? Good word that - champions. As in supports, advocates for, helps to celebrate. It sounds so positive, so beneficent. So ... pro bono. Though, in fact, it seems this particular supporting, advocating and celebrating has got some relatively heavyweight backing. IVW is:

"Supported using public funding by Arts Council England, Wales and Creative Scotland in the UK as well as the wider music industry and brands globally, Independent Venue Week brings together these venues along with breaking and established artists, promoters, labels, media and tastemakers to create a nationwide series of gigs."

Hmm. Maybe not quite so independent. Well, as regular Niluccio on noise readers will know (probably just me), I'm not adverse to a gig in a small venue myself. In fact, that's pretty much the only type of musical event I ever go to. And I'm not so aloof and "pure" about the art-cum-music world to imagine that these events just emerge spontaneously, that there's no commercial imperative/underpinning. Lots of gigs (good as they might be) are - in an economic sense - merely the window-dressing (the marketing) for a hard-headed alcohol-selling exercise. Or they're about getting people through the doors of small record shops. Or even making a place seem cool (I've been to gigs in clothes shops, small art galleries and libraries among other places). But, but ... Independent Venue Week. Do we really need this branded "week" to highlight that small/independent music venues are - on balance - a good thing? Isn't this just another version of the infantile - and increasingly exploitative - Record Store Day? (Or - gulp - Cassette Store Day). It's all faintly desperate. I don't think the creative urge to put on shows/to play at them/to go to see stuff requires this kind of "support" or championing. In fact, it's even somewhat antithetical to the DIY spirit of the best musical endeavours. The IVW's site has a photo of the Sex Pistols playing during the "100 Club Punk Festival" in central London in September 1976. But I don't think the Sex Pistols - or other bands on the bill - would have needed a designated week in which to have their gigs (it was simply two themed nights of "punk rock" cooked up by the promoter Ron Watts). OK, no doubt I'll be going to something during Independent Venue Week (sic), but I'm pretty sure I would have been going to a gig or two during any ordinary last-week-in-January in any case. No, a week of this, a day for that - it's the mentality of sheep-herding. We're being pushed (maneuvered) around by the quietly assertive sheep dogs of the music industry. And we're supposed to be positive about it all. To be grateful. Baaaah! Baaaaah!

                           

Bah humbug - Dolly says we should ignore all sheep dogs 

Yep, if you ask me it's another creative cul-de-sac/straitjacket. I think we should stop bleating our praise for these dubious promotional devices and ... do our own thing. No days, no weeks, no BBC backing, no Arts Council, no brands, no nothing. That's it. End of blog post. Now I'm off out to try to catch a gig in what someone I follow on Twitter calls the "no-audience underground". It sounds exactly like my sort of thing. But ... how do I find out about it? If only there was an umbrella structure for this kind of thing. An organised set of events. A designated time and place. A No-audience Underground Week ...