Full Description
Venue Stories is an anthology of creative non-fiction that remembers, celebrates and reinvigorates our complex and plural relationship with small and independent music spaces. Written by musicians, promoters, fans and academics who have a shared passion for small music venues and musical cultures in all their splendid variety, this anthology features memoir, essays, life writing, historiography and autoethnography. Each chapter is united by a focus on the personal, the sensory and half-remembered. These are stories that cross disciplinary lines and blur distinctions between creativity, reportage and critical analysis. Venue Stories pays a visit to the toilet venues, back rooms and ad-hoc club nights that make up so much of our musical landscape. It spends time in small and local venues and asks what they mean in personal and cultural terms. Writers visit celebrated spots, long forgotten spaces and emergent venues. Whatever the lineage, they are independent, original and wonderfully weird. The stories are memories of seismic gigs and life-altering raves. They are mosaic remembrances and recollections; funny, heart-breaking, rage induced and sometimes a combination of all of these things. This is a collection of stories by and for fans, band members, merch sellers, pint pullers, journalists with a freebie, roadies with a backache and sound techs with an earache.
Contents
Foreword
Emma Warren, Journalist and Broadcaster
Introduction
Helen Pleasance, Robert Edgar and Fraser Mann
1. Peripheral Dancing: The Jazz Rooms, Brighton 1984
Helen Pleasance
2. Finding the Dirt: Nesh at Elektrowerkz
Fraser Mann
3. Chatting to Jarvis
Robert Edgar
4. Fascinating Rhythms
Beth Hughes, Writer
5. The Bull & Gate, Kentish Town, London 1987-1991
Polly Hancock, Musician, Photojournalist and Promoter
6. Weapons of Bass Destruction
Kevin Narrainen, Musician, Producer and Writer
7. Girls with Guitars
Vim Renault and Lene Cortina, Punkgirldiaries
8. (Princess) Charlotte and her 1980s offspring O' Jays
Ruth Miller, Musician
9. The Brewery Arts Centre
Peter Atkinson, University of Central Lancashire
10. 'Nothing Comes Easy': Small Venue Concerts with The Wedding Present
David Lewis Gedge (Musician) and Jon Stewart (Musician and BIMM Institute)
11. In Memory of the Standard: Hard Rock in East London
Anna Marie Barry, Historian and Writer
12. The New Breed - 1990s Mod Revival Scene in Leeds
Abigail Gaines, Photography Studio Manager
13. Sitting on the Bench in Leicester's Charlotte
Ed Garland, Writer
14. Kings Cross, Kentish Town and Kensington Gore via Gallowgate: In Search of the Goldilocks Zone
Julianne Regan, Musician and writer
15. Spiritual Auras: Jungle Venues in Birmingham and the West Midlands 1993-7
Penelope Wickson, Art Historian
16. The Wheat from the Chaff
Matt Colbeck, University of Sheffield
17. More than a Club: The Genius Loci of Eric's
Penny Kiley, Music Journalist
18. Coming of Age at the Warehouse, Liverpool 1981
Dawn Amber Harvey, Writer
19. The Rainbow Venues and Swingamajig: Closing the Doors on the Home of One of Birmingham's Favourite Festivals
Chris Inglis, British and Irish Modern Music Institute, Bristol
20. Sold-out, Locked Out, Power Out
Tom Hingley, Musician and Writer
21. Mothers Club in Erdington
Alan Smith, Writer
22. Music Spaces & Music Memory
Anna Elias, Musician and Therapist
23. Glitter, Rubber Ducks, and Dinghies: The Georgian Theatre and the Teesside Gigging Community in the Early-2010s Amy McCarthy, Writer
24. The Rock Garden: Conversations with my Dad, a Punk-rock DJ'
Tom Jackson, York St John University
25. ... For a Girl
Tarryn Watkins, Musician
Final word
Mark Dafyd, Music Venue Trust
