Music Venues

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for identifying this absolutely vital ingredient in our creative industries. Why is it vital? It is because the great companies of this country—opera houses, orchestras, and pop and jazz groups—are often seeded and nourished at grass-roots level. All the great talents have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is often in small venues up and down the country. I think of my visits to the Cavern Club in Liverpool, for example, where the Beatles, among others, found fertile ground to gain experience. I shall never forget visits to the Marquee in Soho, where I played and many more successful groups than mine took flight. I think of small venues at festivals like Cheltenham and Huddersfield and clubs in Manchester and Birmingham. I think of Club Inégales, a haven for contemporary composers in London. For many audiences, small venues offer the only opportunity to hear live music.

How I envy New York its plethora of small jazz venues and its resulting success with modern jazz; yet visit Ronnie Scott’s or Pizza Express—and occasionally the House of Lords—and you will find here, in this country, a huge and healthy appetite for jazz. At a recent Classical Music meeting here in the Lords, we heard from Ed Vaizey. I was extremely impressed by his passion; doubtless this commitment helped inform the very welcome financial news regarding the arts from the Chancellor in his recent Statement, although I take my noble friend’s caveat on board.

I did, however, point out to Mr Vaizey that because music commissions are very much now largely in the gift of major Arts Council clients, and since the devolution of commissioning funds, small groups and less well known or younger composers have rather fallen through a gap in funding. Indeed, small venues were often instrumental in commissioning new and promising talent. I and my colleagues had our early works performed—and what a learning process that is: to hear your music and hear the mistakes you are making—in music clubs and village halls before some of us found ourselves at the Royal Opera House or the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. Indeed, on one occasion I had a work premiered in a venue that I gather doubled as a strip joint and pole-dancing venue. I could not help thinking that perhaps hard-hitting contemporary music would have even bigger audiences if we could combine these two activities. But then, of course, I thought how much music plays a very vital role even in that.

We are not talking about a huge amount of money here, but small venues and commissions are financially the, if you like, soft underbelly of experimental and innovative creativity in this country. They are such an easy target for cuts and they exist on a knife edge, yet feed into and supply the income-generating companies that help to fuel the economy of which the Government are justly proud.

I have a request for the Minister. Ed Vaizey promised to take back to the DCMS the point about composers and the gap. I would like to go further and combine it with what we are talking about today. Therefore, will the Minister please talk to him about the way in which we can address these two issues together to see whether there is any way of protecting and nurturing the vulnerable but vital work of small venues and thus, in the long run, the overall future health of creativity in this country?