Live Music Bill [HL]

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Friday 4th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I support the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, with all the energy I can. I am aware how important it is. I declare an interest: I was for eight years the chair of the National Campaign for the Arts. As such, I thought of addressing your Lordships with a poem:

“We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams.

World-losers and world-forsakers,

Upon whom the pale moon gleams;

Yet we are the movers and shakers,

Of the world forever, it seems”.

The Government of this country are the movers and shakers, and we here are movers and shakers ourselves who have a duty to the music-makers of this country.

The National Campaign for the Arts was inundated from the moment that the original Bill, which became the 2003 Act, went into operation. We have hundreds of members, and they all, in small groups, seek to find a voice through the National Campaign for the Arts to speak for their interests. It quickly became clear that the Act was not working. Like other speakers, I shall address the problem from three points of view: that of the musicians, the audience and the venue.

Musicians in this country have the benefit of an outstanding musical education, if they go to college. If they get together in small groups, they are often better. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, has already spoken of the emerging music of the 1960s. When the Beatles came to public knowledge, they had already been part of a group of musicians in Liverpool at a time, from 1960 to 1962, when there were 300 groups in that city alone. How could they have survived under this law? They met in small places, playing to friends and family. They were in cellars and attics everywhere. Young people were completely moved by a tidal wave of what we can only call musical inspiration. We must not let that kind of inspiration be stifled by the amazingly bureaucratic nightmare of the Act. Young people need to appear together in small places where they can be appreciated by their peers, reviewed, meet each other, talk and compare instruments, music and opportunities. Musicians need our help.

Audiences need our help. We live in a world in which music is intrinsic to our lives in every nook and cranny, but too often it is coming from iPods and is not a real live activity. Anything that can move the enjoyment of music to a live event with a space between the music and the audience seems to me valuable. That exchange between the performer and the audience is about more than the music. As the poem suggests, it is about a whole relationship of creativity, as was demonstrated so well in Liverpool.

Small audiences need to go to small venues. Young people are often in awe of the larger music venues, not to mention the cost of going and the distance. Small venues that are local, familiar and congenial are an enormously important element in inspiring music-making and music appreciation. Rites of passage—birthdays and celebrations of all kind—are often occasions where small musical groups, whether informal or groups of friends, perform in venues where alcohol is consumed. They are not an appropriate subject for the 2003 Act.

As for venues, we are all aware of and saddened by the decline of the English public house. Publicans have suffered enormously from the smoking ban, as we know. Many now feel that small groups for music-making—jazz or folk—will make a difference to their survival. The PRS for Music commissioned research in December 2009, and found that 80 per cent of pub managers said that music would help them survive the recession. Pubs with music are three times more likely to stay in business.

The Licensing Act 2003 is an Act with unintended consequences. We have already heard how the Tate was required to have a licence for a Turner Prize-winning piece of sound installation. In 2009, a Northamptonshire school had to scrap a production of “We Will Rock You” following a warning from the licensing officer. As a consequence, the head of the council's licensing committee resigned in protest, saying that, soon, people would need to apply to host wine and cheese parties in their own home because selling alcohol for a good cause would need licensing permission. The current provision is not working and it calls out for revision. The movers and shakers, of whom I am now proud to be one, back the Bill.