In the Scattered Fields of Memory

The Live Music Venue

As noted above, over the years many live music venues have taken on an iconic resonance, becoming integral to understandings of popular music history and the sociopolitical and cultural significance of particular popular music genres and/or performers. And yet little attention has been focused, in academic work or elsewhere, on the music venue. When music venues are referenced in academic work it tends to be in terms of broad descriptors linked with particular performative conventions, for example, pub rock or stadium rock (see Laing, 1985). Or, alternatively, in policy writing on live music scenes (see Brown, O’Connor, & Cohen, 2000; Flew, 2008), venues are often referred to in a relatively anonymous and quantitative fashion—that is—the number and proximity of venues in a city or quarter catering for live music. Other aspects of the live music venue—their actual physical appearance, their regular audience, the kinds of bands that perform there and the qualities that blend through such characteristics to give venues their aesthetic appeal—are infrequently mentioned. A body of literature on the more spatial and sensual aspects of music venues is now emerging, particularly in Australia; the work of journalist/researcher Clinton Walker (2012) and Shane Homan’s (2011, 2010, 2008) work on Australian rock venues is rich in description and links the “tone” of these rooms to a number of academic issues, as does Brendan Smyly’s (2008) work on Sydney’s Sandgrinham Hotel. What it is clear, in both this recent work and anecdotal accounts of our respondents, is that the venue setting plays a pivotal part in shaping the live music experience. Further to which, venues are an increasingly important part of the way in which people formulate memories in relation to music and how they articulate forms of emotive attachment.

In this article, we would like to introduce another subsector of music venues to this field: unofficial live music venues. Although in this article we focus on Australian examples of unofficial venues, evidence (including that given by one of our interviewees regarding her experiences in Berlin) suggests that such venues are becoming increasingly important and prominent given the increasing regulation of live music in official night-time urban economies (see Banks & O’Connor, 2009; Tarassi, 2012).

In defining the “unofficial” live music venue we refer to a type of venue that may embody one or several of the following features:

These venues take varied shape. Many are housed in modified light industry and residential spaces (converted warehouses, workshops, studios and rehearsal spaces drawn from the wider arts sector) while others rove, remaining untethered from specific locations. As the above list of characteristics suggests, unofficial live music venues often emerge as a response to specific circumstances. For example, and as previously noted by Rogers (2008), the establishment of venues such as these often reflects a perceived gap in venue provision at the level of the official night-time economy. Similarly, this kind of venue may correspond with the expressed desire among a particular community of music fans for a different kind of experience than that which can be garnered from an officially run venue space, whose listings may be governed more by dominant music tastes and the need for profit.

We will presently focus in more detail on issues such as the core motivation for the establishment of unofficial music venues and the type of clientele who frequent such sites. Before going on to discuss this, however, some attention needs to be given to the role and significance of unofficial live music venues in the urban context.

Music, Memory, and Emotional Geographies

Popular music has long been understood as a primary driver for the construction of sociocultural identity in a late modern cultural context (see Chambers, 1985). This understanding of popular music also extends to the local context where it is seen to mesh with other aspects of local culture, such as local dialect and vernacular tradition in the production of rich and highly nuanced perceptions of space and place (Cohen, 1991; Bennett, 1997, 2000; Finnegan, 1989). Our ongoing research into the relationship between popular music and cultural memory suggests that such local aspects of popular music production and consumption are also firmly located in the way that individuals remember music—and use such memories as a means of articulating and justifying music’s ongoing significance in their daily lives. In this sense, there is a highly palpable connection between the significance of music and what is now commonly referred to as ‘emotional geography’ (Davidson, Bondi, & Smith, 2007). Thus, along with other aspects of everyday taste, aesthetics and lifestyle (Chaney, 1996; Featherstone, 1991), music and the way it is experienced becomes an important means through which individuals form an emotive attachment to local spaces. To put this another way, music becomes one of a series of interrelated signature experiences through which individuals understand themselves as social beings grounded in space and place.

Given its primary status as a musical space, the live music venue serves as an important barometer for individuals in respect of their involvement in the production and articulation of a specific, collectively shared emotional geography. The venue is a place in which a collective sharing and celebration of musical taste unfolds—the latter being underpinned through the venue’s function as an occasion for sociality (Maffesoli, 1996). In the case of the unofficial live music venue, the intimacy and shared sense of belonging may take on an added dimension of importance, particularly in cases where a venue has been established to meet a specific demand among a local community of music listeners whose tastes and/or notion of musical enjoyment appear at odds with what is made available within the official nighttime economy. In such an instance, that is to say, where an unofficial venue responds to a negative or impoverished experience of the local music scene, the latter becomes a critical resource for individuals in addressing a “gap” in their sense of what a local music scene should consist of. Thus, from a position of experiencing a sense of exclusion from the local scene, the unofficial live music venue emerges as a platform through which individuals are able to effectively win back space and thus articulate a sense of inclusion.

The emotional attachment of individuals to an unofficial live music venue is thus one in which collective memory making and the significance of emotional geography merge together to inform a sense of ownership and aesthetic control over a space. This, in turn, informs particular shared understandings and conventions within that space. Thus, for example, whereas an official live music venue situated both physically and ideologically within the local urban nighttime economy may be built around a solid economic imperative, in the case of the informal, unofficial venue, emotional labor may surpass or entirely replace any form of economic imperative. Granted, where an unofficial venue is situated in a private dwelling or other kind of non-commercial space, then such an ideology is easier to create and sustain. However, in real terms this does not detract from the manner in which such informal venues often come to be regarded by those involved with them—as organizers, performers, and consumers. In effect, the emotional work that goes into the creation and use of an informal venue—and the added elements of ownership and aesthetic control which individuals enjoy in this respect—means that such venues are invested with a high degree of importance, authenticity, and aesthetic value when individuals recall and describe their long-term engagement with and involvement in local music scenes.

In the second part of this article, we explore these issues further through examining several examples of unofficial and informal live music venues in Australia. The first of these examples is a now defunct venue space located in Brisbane called 610.

Origin Stories and 610 (Brisbane)

610 initially began as a band rehearsal facility in the heart of Brisbane’s Valley Special Entertainment Precinct. ² Over a period of 2 years (2004-2006), 610 morphed from an impromptu performance space—one where bands and audience occasionally collected in a large practice room—into a more formalized unofficial music venue hosting multiple shows a week in a more purpose-built area enclosed within the same building. The venue was notoriously chaotic; a mix of all-ages audience members, unlicensed alcohol consumption, graffitied walls, crowded rooms, and broken equipment and fixtures. Yet throughout 610’s short duration, it became an established part of Brisbane’s live music infrastructure:

Sam: There was always a whole bunch of different places to go to. That was a pretty big time . . . 2004, 2005, that was a really active time and I would have been 21 which is peak going out time . . . places like 610 opened up, I used to go to 610 pretty much every week. Like I used to, you know—back in those days you’d have kind of The Troubadour, The Rev, Ric’s and 610 pretty much doing good shows almost every night from, like, pretty much Wednesday through Sunday, so I used to go in, and you used to go into the Valley, and you’d just move between shows . . . (Sam, personal communication, January 2008)

With the exception of 610, all of the venues this respondent mentions in passing are licensed music businesses with booking staff; The Rev was a larger capacity custom refurbished performance space, while Ric’s Cafe and The Troubadour (now The Black Bear Lodge) are smaller bars with permanent stages and republic address systems. The respondent quoted above speaks here as a young audience member, new to Brisbane and still 610 figures largely in his experience of the city’s live music scene more broadly. Yet 610 was noticeably different. The venue maintained its ad hoc, often disorganized, volunteer staff throughout and could be seen to look more to aesthetics, convenience and community when booking artists. The work volunteers conducted for the space rarely provided financial remuneration. Despite this, 610 maintained an extended role in the city’s music culture and had a pronounced effect, drawing much of its affective strength (and future influence) from the accessibility and interchangeably it shared with regular venue patronage.

In the years since 610, the Brisbane music community has maintained a set of active, albeit unstable, all-ages music venues. Many of the people responsible for these newer spaces were volunteers or committed patrons of 610. One respondent who was heavily involved with the space continued to organize and promote all-ages shows after the closure of 610, booking a number of gigs in his centrally located share house. This musician did not exactly lament the demise of the venue but cites the positive effect it had on the music community:

Tim: I guess during 610, in those days, there was maybe a tighter connection because there was a central premise and spot. There were so many shows concurrently, one or two a week, so you’d end up playing with these bands. And you needed bands to fill out the line-ups and stuff. (Tim, personal communication, January 2008)

For many, 610 was an agreeable cultural space, supportive of almost any kind of amateur or hobbyist music. For younger musicians in particular, 610 was not a distant and desirable site, it was matter-of-fact and at hand, in recent and lived memory. The venue’s success was achieved almost entirely due to the resourcefulness and motivation of these younger people, their willingness to create and recreate the space and populate it with their work, or indeed start bands with this type of performance scenario in mind:

Alex: I was out in the Valley one night, before I was eighteen, and I asked . . . if I could play a show, which was the first show at 610. He said that would be ok if I opened it. During the next day I realised that I really wasn’t ready to do that, like I didn’t feel up to playing some punk . . . so I asked some friends of mine who had never been in a band before to make music with me. And I had a bunch of noise-making toys and stuff like that so we just dragged a bunch of stuff in on public transport. (Alex, personal communication, 2011)

The subset of the Brisbane music community represented here utilized the particular dynamics of 610 to explain and contextualize the origins of their music-making. The music that came out of this community after the decline of 610 was marked by the performative spatial relations the venue encouraged. These were bands that saw what was possible in 610—the social currencies and aesthetic freedoms fostered by the space—and created music with these same elements in mind. The collective memories engendered by the space were extremely motivating and mobilizing.

In the years since is closure, these narratives of 610 have begun to circulate more formally. In the January 2012 issue of The Wire, musician and writer Daniel Spencer filed a report on Brisbane’s underground rock and pop scene for the magazine’s Global Ear column. In his piece, he predominantly described the work of his friends and the scene close to hand: the international touring of Brisbane bands Slug Guts and Kitchen’s Floor, and Spencer’s own band Blank Realm. All of these acts are representatives of the scrappier, noisier end of Brisbane music and all reminiscent of, or directly springing from, the 610 scene. James Kritzler of Slug Guts played a pronounced part in establishing the venue and booking it. Slug Guts would later play many of their early shows in similarly ad hoc spaces: residential houses, a disused army barracks, an abandoned film theatre. The slightly younger Kitchen’s Floor present a more direct example: their recent recordings have all included photographs of the same share-house/DIY (do-it-yourself) venue in cover art and associated film clips. They make the association clear. The photograph accompanying Spencer’s article was taken in the very same share-house Kitchen’s Floor cites; here, local artist/musician Andrew McLellen leans over a small amplifier mid-performance. And Spencer’s piece does not stand in isolation. The presence of non-traditional venue spaces is further touched on and foregrounded in various other media: homemade film clips, taped live performances, local music blogs, press interviews, and so on. In these documented, recorded narratives of Brisbane music, the specific music culture exemplified by 610 proved a recurring theme, an influential touchstone and an important part of self-reflection on and explanation of what exists in the present. “The unconventional use of space . . .” writes Spencer (2012), “remains central to the Brisbane underground” (p. 16).

The case of 610 serves as a compelling example of how a live music venue, rather than merely functioning as a space in which to stage performances and/or create a sense of scene (Peterson & Bennett, 2004) becomes inextricably interwoven into the emotional tapestry of space and place. It is interesting how those interviewed in relation to their memories of 610 consider its informal and inclusive properties to have radiated out into the broader independent music-making scene of Brisbane. In essence, those local musicians who performed gigs in 610 are deemed, or deem themselves, to have imbibed its DIY and unregulated aesthetic and made this as much a part of their approach to music-making as the musical influences and competence that they have acquired along the way. Thus, the aura of 610 has become part of the emotional assemblage of local independent music and a way in which the past and present remain linked as the local scene re-produces itself over time.

Multiuse and The Church (Adelaide)

During fieldwork conducted in Adelaide in 2012, we heard multiple reports of a DIY venue space known only as The Church. Our research was able to turn up respondents with close ties to the space only to learn that it had ceased operation a few weeks prior to our arrival. Yet this in itself became a benefit of sorts, as what we found when we spoke to respondents was a community in the process of documenting The Church, reflecting on its importance and anticipating its ongoing influence.

In reviewing the interview data and secondary sources collected, the emotional investment made by individuals and groups in The Church became exceedingly clear. The Church was well known as a venue in the traditional sense: it accommodated shows, provided a meagre stage and sound system, and drew on an established audience and a unique ambience – an iconic ambience even, given that Adelaide is often referred to as the “City of Churches.” Yet The Church itself was much more than a place to perform or see shows. In broader terms it was also home to a close circle of friends, both in terms of day-to-day residence and shelter, and in terms of music-making and social interaction. The space was imbued with emotional resonances and a multiplicitous usage that traditional for-profit venues would struggle to facilitate. In the introduction to Death of The Church (McGuiness, 2012) narrator Benjamin Cooper states the following over a montage of photographs taken inside the building:

Narration: The old church on Young St in Parkside came into our care way back in 2002. An abandoned empty shell. Early disciples constructed bedrooms, a rehearsal space and recording booths out of salvaged and scavenged materials. We made the place our own. Over the next 10 years, over thirty people called The Church their home. Whenever somebody moved out, there was always someone else keen and ready to move in. There were always bands rehearsing, recording or loading out for a show. Bands came and bands went but through all of it, the same core people stayed stuck to the dirty old floorboards. This film was made on the last day we called The Church our home. The owners had finally decided to convert it into apartments. Each band played with conviction and sincerity, knowing it would be their last performance within its walls. We called in the help of friends with cameras and recording equipment and all of these wonderful people generously donated their time and expertise. They all gave a day to help commemorate the good times we had and everything we achieved within these great stone walls.

What this community is celebrating is experiential and memory-based; it is past-tense. The achievements spoken of are clearly displayed in the documentary: a particularly local and abstract flavor of Australian hardcore punk. Made up of 14 performances by bands The Church hosted or fostered, the film is noteworthy in what is excluded. There is no mention at all of revenue, week-to-week upkeep or the venue’s national or international recognition. In fact, there is no additional narration at all, only a string of subtitled live performances. Yet by framing the space directly around the music achieves their point: many of the bands noticeably share members and stylistic elements, the crowd is shown often (band members watch their friends perform) and the constructedness of the event is frequently noted; the viewer sees the recording engineer, snippets of camera operators, leads, equipment and computers running various applications documenting the day. What is emphasized in Death of The Church is the uniqueness of the space and the currency and sense of encouragement it provided to the people who lived there as a place of residence, and the bands and listeners who frequented it as a performance site, practice space and recording studio. Yet a great deal of this emphasis is depicted through the frame of local bands playing in a room to a small crowd.

This type of music-oriented multi-use is one of the core strengths of unofficial venues. As Walker (2012) notes in History Is Made at Night, music venues are much more than static service-oriented businesses. Even for-profit establishments have cultural facets to them that go well beyond binding communities and audiences together to aid alcohol, ticket, and merchandise sales. These places in which musicians learn their stagecraft also create the raw materials of the archive. As such, what these spaces have traditionally produced in Australia are robust rock musicians, playing in bands tailored to the specifics of their “local pub”:

Part of this cerebral power is the very earthly reality of live music, it’s here and nowness in the dingy room in which it takes place. As Peter Grarrett said in 1984 in The Big Australian Rock Book: “Every Australian band comes from a different pub, and it’s there they define what they are about. Every band remembers that pub, and it’s more than sentimental value; it’s something much stronger.” This is the unique local identity of Australian music . . . Garrett’s old band Midnight Oil couldn’t have come from anywhere but Sydney, anywhere but the northern beaches, and even more specifically, anywhere but the Royal Antler Hotel at North Narrabeen. Nick Cave and the late Rowland Howard couldn’t have come from anywhere but St. Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom. (Walker, 2012, p. 18)

The impact of traditional venues on bands and artists, the way these spaces act to develop and finish stagecraft, sound and character, takes on a much more literal and direct route in non-traditional venues. The Church was lived in as a domicile, recorded in as a purpose-renovated studio, performed in as a venue and promoted and documented as a community. This is the venue as a type of cultural space realized in much the same way Barry Shank (1994) and Will Straw (1991) have described music scenes more broadly: these spaces are geographical sites where, “musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (p. 373). In The Church, creative practice is not always formally music-based but always has music as a centralized and valued core. Its multitude of uses all interact with the music produced, performed and documented and these uses have been imagined and created from the outset:

Peter: . . . [they] found this bargain basement old shell of a church and they moved in and got some old timber and some pine and then whatever wood they could find and that sort of stuff and built three bedrooms, a darkroom, an office and . . . a nice recording booth and also a rehearsal space as well. (Peter, personal communication, 2012)

The resulting venue—with its planned, in-built documenting mechanisms—proved a rich and inspiring place for one of Adelaide’s music communities, one marked by the specific spatial dynamics of a room, much of which was recognized, promoted and self-reflexively understood by the audience and community who frequented the space. As such, The Church, and the other venues like it in Australia ³ , are key sites for the live performance of music not just because of the social transit through the room but because this transit is often conveniently and enthusiastically recorded and archived for future reference.

As such, what these unofficial venues may lack in audience attendance and profitability is recovered through a range of other tangible benefits, many of them intimately tailored and ongoing. Like traditional venues, unofficial spaces such as The Church are places in which musical taste and consumption are celebrated, announced, and recognized. Yet the relation between production and consumption is much more pronounced and present in The Church. In this venue, the music and memories recalled and evoked by the building are not neatly confined to live presentation; the venue’s presence spills out into the social and home lives of the The Church’s residents, into the acoustic properties of the sounds recorded there and it takes on a more central role in the biographies of the clique of people utilizing the venue. It is a location participants visited for a variety of reasons. Unlike the “here and now” of a rock show and the more amorphous ongoing identity of a traditional venue, The Church was embedded in various creative practices that all speak to longer-term interaction, namely to the ongoing social and practical experiences that exist outside the momentary escapism of a live performance. By actively acknowledging more than live performance, The Church effectively netted a wider variety of music memories into its story.

In the context of Adelaide, The Church is doubly articulated within the emotional geography of the local music scene. On the one hand it speaks to a vernacular discourse through which Adelaide is distinguished from other Australian cities. On the other hand, it defines a “special” space among a discrete group of individuals whose collective emotional investment in The Church works in significant ways to articulate their sense of “community” and belonging. In contemporary urban contexts where competing narratives of locality (Bennett, 2000) are a normalized aspect of everyday life, spaces such as The Church act as critical nodes in the articulation of aesthetic and lifestyle diversity. Moreover, as was similarly observed in the case of 610, even as The Church closed its doors to those who had made it their home for a number of years, the more intangible qualities of community and distinctiveness that it had helped to foster among those associated with it remained an embodied aspect of the local hardcore punk scene.

The Social Networked DIY Venue and High Tea (Sydney)

The idea behind Sydney collective High Tea is a relatively simple one: live music in a quiet setting. Established by a group of musicians, artists and enthusiasts, the fortnightly event currently takes place in a residential warehouse space in Sydney with each night featuring performances from two singer-songwriters, one selected by the collective and one selected by the headlining artist. Despite its nonprofit status, the collective is extremely successful, maintaining an audience reach of over 1,300 potential attendees and reportedly selling out 100 capacity events within minutes.

During data collection in Sydney, we spoke to one of the High Tea organizers. In recalling the origins of the event series, she explained how one of the key motivations were her memories and recollections of experiencing similar informal music performances in Berlin:

Sara: So we started it just over two, well it started two and a bit years ago, we had our second birthday in September last year . . . it was based on one of the guys who’s in one of the bands . . . a local band. He and I had been friends for about ten years and he lived in this warehouse where he thought, “This would be great.” I’ve been to Berlin a few times and they just open their house to friends and they . . . play music all afternoon. . . . and I [thought, ‘I] want to do that one day,” so I’ve been talking about that for about five years. (Sara, personal correspondence, 2012)

Later, in the interview Sarah also positioned the event as a response to a multitude of experiential and practical issues faced by local musicians and listeners in Sydney:

Sara: The whole premise was (that) more and more music venues are shutting down (and) we want to go somewhere where we know that there’s going to be consistently good music, even if we don’t know the artist that’s playing. We want to be able to hear the lyrics . . . People just come, they sit and they don’t speak for an hour. (Sara, personal correspondence, 2012)

This type of live performance environment lies in stark contrast to both the “pub rock” culture of Sydney’s past (see Homan, 2008) and the city’s present position as a hub for electronic dance music. The High Tea shows play off an intimate and private residential aesthetic, as opposed to a public and open one. Their nights highlight the quiet music of the bedroom, “the sort of feeling that’s being created in a room,” as a respondent described it. This is a striving for household intimacy in music performance and longs for the listener contemplation that typically goes along with music in the home.

The means by which these events are brought to fruition is via similarly informal and social back-channels: via the use of Facebook and Twitter. While not exceptional or innovative in their use of social media, the collective use these tools to mitigate much of the administrative labor that goes into running the events. Potential artists tend to approach the collective online. Spots on the limited guest list are allotted via Facebook responses. On the night, participants pay $10 at the door and bring their own alcohol. Tea is served. As an ongoing concern, the series has become a somewhat non-intrusive and automated part of the High Tea collective’s everyday lives: as one respondent put it, “We don’t really have to do very much at all.”

High Tea is a venue drawn from a different emotional geography. It is a transitory operation, hosted in a static position (but far from fixed to this position) and yet it has been drawn together from a broader field of personal experiences and memories. Its concept tellingly relies on memories from international travel (Berlin) and appears to purposefully break from Sydney’s local venue practice. Aesthetically, it owes little debt to the separatist punk notions often attached to or fueling unofficial venues in Australia; during data collection, the next event hosted by the collective featured Wes Carr, one-time Australian Idol winner. High Tea instead presents a very different type of venue into the Sydney music scene: quiet, popular and pop. The collective have created a well-tailored and financially viable response to much larger issues at work within the city’s music culture. As an example of a non-traditional venue, the quiet, tea-drinking audience who inhabit the space are the near polar opposite of the ‘beer barn’ pub rock cultures of Australia and the music curated and celebrated within the event does not valorize the masculine rockist heritage of Australian rock. High Tea similarly does not fit neatly within the hardcore/punk schema of The Church or the youthful, chaotic abandon of 610. Instead High Tea very selectively takes elements of all these cultural spaces, and from spaces further afield, and maps these ideas onto a very different concept of how a music performance and performance space is supposed to be. In relation to the emotional geographic discourses inscribed within High Tea, it is clear that the venue plays an important part in helping its community of supporters evolve a new and alternative narrative of live music in Sydney. Just as previous studies of style and music have claimed that these articulate patterns of resistance to particular aspects of the dominant status quo (see, e.g., Hebdige, 1979), so it could be argued that High Tea and the discourses inscribed within it become a means for those who maintain and support the venue to articulate a lifestyle politics that they perceive as not being supported by Sydney’s official night-time economy where musical choice and diversity, and the cultural politics associated with this, are often subverted by the profit motive.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to examine the importance of what we term the unofficial live music venue in local live music scenes. While the data collected has been limited to cities in Australia, evidence suggests (and is indeed iterated in the comments of one interviewee) that unofficial live music venues are a more global trend; similar venues are known to exist across Europe, Asia, and North America. The findings of the case studies presented in this article may have a significant role to play within broader notions of the music venue and the live music industry in Australian and global contexts. Each of the spaces discussed hint at localized and personable solutions to larger issues troubling live performance. It is entirely possible that future notions of the live music venue will be dominated by the examples set by these smaller, more acutely tailored operations. In a world of ever-increasing customization and specialization, even the communal nature of music performance may fragment further into smaller subsets and favor these hands-on modes of practice more frequently. Indeed, as this article has illustrated, it is not merely the physical presence of informal music venues that inspire promoters, performers, and consumers. The emotional attachment to and collective memories that become imbued in such venues work to suggest alternative possibilities for individuals in local nighttime economies that are often seen to become increasingly more regulated and devoid of the aesthetic diversity that a significant minority consider integral to the production and consumption of local live music. As such, this is a field of social, industrial, and cultural production that is ripe for study by cultural scholars interested in the changing nature of music practice, locality, and performance.