After the coronavirus forced the live music industry to shut down for months, it’s finally getting back up on its feet, with social distanced shows and campaigns to help the industry. But despite all the campaigns that were launched, many venues, especially the small indoor ones, are still at risk of not surviving the crisis. One of the many campaigns is the #SaveOurVenues campaign by Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd.
In a recent chat with NME, Davyd showed how drastic the situation still is and explained that music fans are desperately needed in order for the venues to survive. “Basically, at the moment we still need to take all of the venues through to the end of September”, he said. “We’ve had some who were not successful in acquiring the Emergency Grassroots Music Venue Fund, we have some who weren’t eligible, and the other problem we have is that not every grassroots music venue is going to get funded.
People need to be realistic. That’s going to be a big problem. We still have around 200 venues who aren’t eligible, and we need to Crowdfund them until we can open them safely.”
Morning everyone. @musicvenuetrust has a dedicated team of people working day & night through the weekend supporting grassroots music venues to make the best bid they can to @ace_national @DCMS Culture Recovery Fund. Please send some love their way. @Lucy_Stone @OliverDowden
— Mark Davyd (@markdavyd) August 16, 2020
He pointed out that there are also problems in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland “because we’ll have to step in and help financially before their funding is released. There’s still work to do.” Davyd emphasised that all the people that are still be seen using the campaign actively, it means that “you can be certain that we are working with them to make them eligible for government funding, but they currently aren’t.” Some of those are in the capital as the government is trying not to overfund London but there are a lot of venues in London.
But the CEO confessed that the campaign alone won’t be able to save all the venues, simply because there are so many just in London alone. “We don’t expect every London venue to be saved by public funding so we’re going to need to do a lot of Crowdfunding. A lot of them are very iconic.”
Since #SaveOurVenues alone isn’t capable of saving all of the venues financially, many artists have stepped in to support the campaign, such as Foals Singer Yannis Philippakis who released a video of a 2018 show at London’s Bermondsey Social Club in order to raise money for the club.
