Small Venues

Throughout the history of popular music, the careers of many culturally significant artists and groups began on the small stages of local bars, clubs, pubs, and discotheques. When the stories of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the New York punk, hardcore, and post-punk scenes are told, iconic venues such as The Cavern, The Marquee, and CBGB’s serve as the settings of their early chapters. Small live music venues such as these are pivotal in the narratives and history of popular music. However, very few of them survive.

Small Venues focusses on the role of small live music venues as incubators for emerging talent and social hubs for music scene participants. Such venues are grassroots spaces of cultural labour and production that often struggle with issues of financial precarity, yet are fundamental to the live music ecology of a city. They act both as platforms for emergent performers and spaces of sociality for local music scenes.