Black box venues: Niluccio says nay and thrice times nay

The totally dull fanfare around the opening of Manchester's grotesque black box mega-venue Co-op Live (is it a new form of banking?) has come with the obligatory "the big venues should be required to subsidise the grassroots ones" debate. Or pseudo-debate. It's pretty tiresome stuff. People invoking the supposed model of the Premier League and its subsidy (aka pittance) paid to the English Football League ought, on the one hand, to resist the apparent temptation of comparing English football (one of the world's most grossly commercialised "products") to a music scene which, while obviously itself hyper commercialised, doesn't quite run to letting betting companies dictate what goes on musicians' clothes or on the advertising hoadings (ad nauseam ...) at venues. Give it time though, I suppose. And, anyway, where's the dignity in running a smaller venue which requires handouts from a money-making machine like the Harry Styles co-owned Co-op Live, bankrolled by the delightful United Arab Emirates (take a bow Manchester City FC), a venue where music will almost certainly go to die - to be re-born as an Eagles farewell concert with tickets starting at £283.95, section 102/row 17? No, as the old saying goes, DIY or die. 

Meanwhile, the discussion around the advent of mega-venues like Co-op Live seems - in typical bigger-is-better fashion - to be built around a presumption that bands/artists will eventually wish to "progress" to these big box venues after a supposed "apprenticeship" on the toilet venue circuit. It's really patronising top-down stuff. Who's to say whether so-called "smaller" bands playing smaller venues want to progress? Maybe they're already "big" in their own minds and playing the exact places where they want to play - venues where they know the people, where - dread phrase - there's an existing "community" and some kind of artistic eco-culture? Maybe they'd rather not commit artistic suicide and throw their lot in with the 1,500-seater KOKOs as a "stepping stone" to the full-on music mauseleoms - the Co-op Lives, the O2 Arenas, the Robbie Williams football stadia circuit. Just a thought. As it happens my own "progression" through the venues, so to speak, has been a thoroughgoing regression. As a 15-year-old, my first ever gig was an unlikely trip to Staffordshire to see Thin Lizzy in their pomp at the cavernous Bingley Hall in 1979 (18 December: I vaguely remember a Christmas-y atmosphere). Not my idea, I was - in my own immature way - more interested in the chart-level pop-punk of the time: Stiff Little Fingers, the Members, the Undertones, Squeeze, Buzzcocks, the Skids. Since then I've scaled down, and scaled down, and ... scaled down. These days I won't go near a gig in a venue of more than about 200 capacity, even if it's a band I like. And preferably it'll be smaller than this - 50 or below is even better. And I'm always vaguely hoping that there won't be any kind of crowd in attendance anyway - a petite, pocket-sized audience in a petite, pocket-sized venue suits me fine. So let's hear it for regression not progression. So here's Niluccio's vital message: go to your soulless, money-devouring black box mega-venues when you're a teenager. Yeah, let it be a rite of passage. But then you need to adopt Frankie Howerd's approach and repeatedly say nay. To give up these horrible places and take a ride back to the minuscule venues where real people play real music in close proximity to er, other real people. Yep, you need to get off the black box music gravy train and ride on time ...