Can This Ever Happen Again?

A jaw dropping run of gigs in a town that still doesn't have a McDonalds.

I was asked a question the other week about the area where I live and how it affected my upbringing as a musician. I gave an answer about older musicians in the area and the legacy of the 60s and 70s in the area. How all the older musicians I knew had regularly watched amazing artists, how they landed local support slots with legends. When you were playing in local pubs and clubs all the older music fans seemed quite knowledgeable and discerning. I'm not sure how well I articulated myself but I've been thinking about it ever since.

I was at my Mum and Dad's house and was leafing through my Dad's copy of 'Going Down th'Imp', a history of the Nelson Imperial Ballroom which I'm told is pretty hard to find these days. Dad was given a copy as the back pages list all the bands that played there and the Uptown Band is listed a good few times. The gig listings are pretty astonishing, even if you don't live and breathe this stuff the quality leaps out. I might be cherry picking a page here but look at

April and May of 1967:

It seems like they managed to book  genre defining, world renowned career legends every week for a solid two month period. You can look at other pages and see similar patches but this one always beggars belief for me because the Stax roadshow came to Nelson. Otis Redding walked around Nelson. If you haven't been to Nelson this might not resonate with you so just imagine some shitty little town you know with a population around 20,000. Then imagine Otis Redding wandering around there.

If you didn't make it out to see Otis Redding (and Booker T and the MGs, Eddie Floyd, Sam and Dave etc. etc.) that week you could always watch Cream the week after. Or Bo Diddley the week after that. Or the Small Faces the week after that.

What would you have to do to have an eight week run of gigs like that nowadays? You'd have to live in Manchester or London for a start, but even if you do and regularly watch live music it would be unusual to be watching a list of artists with songs people have no difficulty remembering half a century later.

Part of what's happened might be a decline in popular music in general (that’s your personal call) but the more tragic issue for me is the decline of live music in small provincial towns. Before mass media the only way bands could access their full market was to appear everywhere they could possibly think of. John Steel from the Animals once told me that back then, in the absence of an established motorway network, if you were driving to London you'd have to physically drive through all these towns anyway. It made sense to play in as many of them as you could.

The rise of mass media and later the internet meant that an artist could get their message out everywhere in almost no time and then cherry pick cities with big enough arenas to make as much money as possible on one night. Tours of five or six shows can generate hundreds of thousands, even millions. There's no longer any need to do a tour of forty or fifty medium sized towns and villages.

Look at the listings for the theatres in any small town like Burnley, Blackburn, Accrington or Nelson if they've still got one and you'll see tribute bands and pantomimes. The audience doesn't get new music or even credible older acts delivered to them any more and so they aren't there on the odd occasions they visit. A friend put a Dr. John show on in Blackburn ten years ago and struggled to sell 100 tickets. He'd have cleared 1000 in Manchester.

Bands don't visit these smaller towns but comedians still do and sell out their shows too. Look through the tour dates for any of these second tier comedians who haunt the comedy panel shows and they resemble a 1963 Beatles run. It's obvious why comedians are still doing smaller venues, they need a microphone and a towel. Maybe someone drives them so that they can get pissed. Larger bands gave up the possibility of doing this when they adjusted themselves for the aforementioned arenas. Their crews expanded to dozens of technical staff, lighting engineers, video crews and riggers. Once you're geared up to play an o2 arena you can't really nip in and do a Burnley Mechanics show.

Smaller bands need to start doing it again though, the internet isn't a fool proof marketing method. It needs constant nurturing and attention. Get a review on a music website and within a few hours it's off the front page and the only people looking at it are your own friends and fans who you're desperately trying to direct there so that the website think you're worth writing about. Stop making content and you lose followers and subscribers. The internet is a treadmill that everyone puts their energy into. You'd be a fool not too because at first glance it's really easy.

But every time you do a gig in a small provincial town you have a chance of making a connection that no amount of instagram posts or tiktok videos could substitute. People might only go out once a week, or even once a month whereas they can swipe past posts at a rate that is easily more than one a second. There's much more chance of remembering a gig you were at, you might remember it for life

There are venues in small places that buck the trend, Hebden Bridge Trades always springs to mind but there should be more options. If you're a band that have bothered going to the trouble of touring the UK and you're doing 200 tickets in Manchester or Liverpool it should be a no brainer to pop one in somewhere like Preston or Lancaster. Even Clitheroe dare I suggest. Someone might lose a bit of money at first while people readjust to being on the cultural landscape but think of the upside. You could train people to expect excellent, current music wherever they live. People could lead richer cultural lives, bands could make a few quid more. I'll certainly show up.

It can't be impossible. Because once upon a time Otis Redding went to Nelson. And people were ready for him, because everyone went to Nelson.