Centre Stage: Mark Davyd turns the spotlight on the Music Week Awards' grassroots venue finalists

Mark Davyd turns the spotlight on the Music Week Awards' grassroots venue finalists... The Grassroots Venue: Spirit Of The Scene award provides me with the chance to step outside of industry concerns and political matters, take a pause, and consider 10 exceptional nominees for this year’s Music Week Awards. Camden Assembly is a good place to begin because it already comes with mythology attached. It’s a 200-capacity Victorian pub where Adele and Amy Winehouse learned how to hold a crowd, where Oasis and The Strokes once wrestled their gear through the doorway. The important thing is not that legends played there; it’s that the current owners are still putting local bands on as support for bigger acts. Future Yard in Birkenhead has taken a more radical route. It has looked at the traditional model of a venue and decided to stretch it. As a community interest company, it runs free skills training for young people and is working towards carbon-neutral status. Essentially, it’s a highly effective social enterprise with a stage in the middle of its work. In Glasgow, Slay has carved out a space that feels both joyous and necessary. Since opening in 2022, it has established itself as a vital hub for the city’s LGBTQ+ community, hosting club nights and drag performances from stars such as Bimini Bon Boulash and Jinkx Monsoon that are as much communal ritual as showbusiness. It’s loud, celebratory and unapologetic. More importantly, it’s safe in a way that’s tangible rather than rhetorical, a room where self-expression is assumed to be the standard. On the Isle of Wight, Strings Bar & Venue operates with quiet focus. Run by musicians for music lovers, it sits at the centre of an island that keeps exporting serious talent. When BBC Radio 6 Music chose to broadcast live from its stage, it was recognition that cultural gravity does not operate only in major cities. The Boileroom in Guildford has just turned 20. That’s not a milestone to pass over lightly. Two decades means surviving the 2008 crash, the property developers and a pandemic that shut every door. Its story is important precisely because it’s not unique; it’s the story of almost every grassroots venue still standing. If you want to understand what has happened to grassroots music venues in the last 20 years, look at the Boileroom. Darlington’s The Forum Music Studios has opted for security via community ownership: a share offer to fund renovation, a new carbon-neutral studio and a roof garden. It’s a key example of how the sector is developing new and innovative ways to continue to keep culture alive in our towns and cities. When audiences become shareholders, the relationship shifts. In Stepney, The George Tavern stands as living proof that history is not something you curate behind glass. A Grade II listed pub allegedly mentioned by Chaucer and Dickens, it’s now steered by artist Pauline Forster, who has spent years defending it from property developers. Nick Cave has played there, Kate Moss has posed there. But its real achievement is simpler: it’s still open, still slightly scruffy, still gloriously itself in a city that prefers clean lines and higher rents. Newcastle’s The Globe is less grand but no less essential. It nurtures emerging talent through nights like Aelius Rising, giving artists their first experience of a crowd that doesn’t know them. It’s where confidence is built and mistakes are made in front of people who care enough to listen. Like many others on this list, it is an exemplar of the new model of not-for-profit entities safeguarding grassroots live music. The Half Moon in Putney has been a home for live music since 1963, building a remarkable history along the way. Its stage has welcomed The Rolling Stones, The Who, Elvis Costello (before the glasses), and Kate Bush’s first public performance. Over the decades, it has survived floods, fires and enough local campaigns to test anyone’s patience. It has survived because the community around it decided that Putney without The Half Moon would be absurd. And then there is The Sugarmill in Stoke, the embodiment of what used to be called the toilet circuit – a phrase that sounds dismissive until you realise how many future headliners once queued for its dressing room. Since 1994, it has hosted Coldplay, Muse, Daft Punk, The 1975 and Bring Me The Horizon on their way up. Its 400-capacity stage in Hanley has witnessed both awkward early sets and those moments when you can feel something special transforming from potential into inevitability. Across these 10 venues you can trace an alternative map of the UK. Camden, Stepney and Putney in London, obviously. But our music nation extends its arms around Birkenhead, Glasgow, Guildford, Darlington, Newcastle, Stoke and even the Isle of Wight. Different models, different missions, one shared belief: talent exists everywhere and music belongs to us all.

Centre Stage: Mark Davyd on why we need to join up grassroots geography

MVT’s Mark Davyd on why we need to join up grassroots geography... For over a decade now, the music industry has been learning to speak fluently about pipelines. We can explain them on one leg, in a lift or to a sceptical civil servant with a stopwatch. Small rooms become medium rooms, medium rooms become big rooms, big rooms become arenas, and somewhere along the way, Britain renews its status as a global music superpower. It’s neat, logical, and it has finally landed. When politicians talk about grassroots venues now, they do so in the language of investment rather than nostalgia – and that matters. But there’s a danger in becoming too good at a single argument. You start to believe that because it’s correct, it might be the complete picture. And while we’ve been talking, rightly, about the future value of artists who might go on to sell out stadiums, something quieter and more troubling has been happening in the present. If you stand back and look at the map of live music in the UK right now, it no longer resembles a network. It looks like a series of islands. Large cities still glow brightly, but vast areas in between have gone dark. Entire towns – some with proud musical histories and perfectly viable venues – are no longer on the touring circuit at all. Not because the audiences vanished or the talent dried up, but because the connective tissue failed. Touring shrank, risk increased, costs rose, and slowly the idea that live music is something that happens everywhere was replaced with the assumption that it happens somewhere else. This matters far beyond the business of breaking acts. A town without live music isn’t just missing gigs; it’s missing a collective experience that can’t be replicated onscreen. A grassroots venue is one of the few remaining places where people of different ages, incomes and backgrounds gather in the same room for the same reason, at the same time. When it disappears, what goes with it is not simply entertainment, but a sense that this place participates in the country’s wider cultural life. While we were winning the argument about talent pipelines, politics was busy circling back to a truth we take for granted: people care deeply about where they live. They want to feel proud of it, connected to it and confident that it has a future. The current political fascination with “place” isn’t abstract; it’s a response to communities saying that economic growth alone is not enough if it never materialises as a lived experience. A working grassroots venue answers that challenge in a tangible manner. It creates jobs, animates high streets and gives young people something to orient themselves around that isn’t just upping sticks. It’s where you first realise that the industry isn’t a distant concept, but a collection of real jobs done by real people who started out exactly where you are standing now. This is why the collapse of the national touring network should worry us even if it wasn’t an essential part of the story of the next breakout artist. When live music retreats to a handful of major centres, it quietly tells millions that culture is something to be consumed elsewhere. It reinforces the idea that creativity belongs to other places, accents and futures. That’s not just culturally corrosive, it’s strategically illiterate. An industry that draws from a narrowing geographic base eventually narrows itself. What has changed recently, and what gives me genuine optimism, is that the tools to reverse this are aligning. After years of emergency conversations about survival, we’re starting to talk seriously about rebuilding. The principle that the most successful parts of the live music economy should reinvest directly into the grassroots is no longer radical; it’s accepted policy. At the same time, local and regional leaders are being given resources explicitly to strengthen community infrastructure, not just polish it. The opportunity now is to connect these dots deliberately. A grassroots venue is not a niche cultural indulgence. It’s exactly the kind of asset that “pride in place” funding is meant to support. It delivers economic impact, but also something harder to quantify and far more valuable: the feeling that this town is part of the story. For the music industry, this requires a subtle but important shift in how we frame our case. We don’t need to abandon the pipeline argument. But we do need to place it next to an equally compelling claim about rights rather than outcomes. The right to access live culture. The right to see creative work happen where you live. And also the right to imagine yourself inside an industry that currently, for too many people, feels too distant. We have spent years proving that grassroots venues are essential to the future of music. The next task is to show, just as clearly, that they are essential to the future of our towns and cities.Get that right, and the pipeline takes care of itself.

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