Music

The economic and cultural case is strong enough, but the significance of grassroots music venues doesn’t end there.

These creative spaces also offer a vital escape from an occasionally harsh and misunderstanding reality faced by too many in our society.

The Music For The Many campaign has sought to champion these spaces as an absolute essential to building solidarity networks and battling underrepresentation of marginalised groups. Walk into any grassroots music venue in any town or city and, amongst promotions for upcoming shows and memorabilia from past concerts, you will see posters for LGBTQ+ advocacy, opportunities for BAME creators and vital mental health support for people of all ages.

These creative spaces allow for so much more than simply expression.

The Beatles’ first LP, “Please Please Me,” had been released the previous March, and the single “She Loves You” had come out in August. That summer, the four of them had moved from Liverpool to a hotel in London’s upscale Bloomsbury neighborhood. Screaming girls were fainting at their performances. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would be released in November, and by December, the Beatles would have released four singles and two albums, all while appearing regularly on the BBC and playing almost 200 concerts in 1963 alone. For the first time in their young lives, the four working-class boys who’d grown up in a bombed-out city had money, and demands on their time were piling up. Needing a break from touring and recording, in September Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr visited Greece. John Lennon and his wife went to Paris. George chose to visit his sister, in Benton, Illinois (pop. 7,000).

His two weeks there, starting on September 16, might have been the last carefree moments of an increasingly hectic, difficult and arguably tragic life. In America, no one knew who George was or cared. He was just Louise Caldwell’s skinny little brother, a 20-year-old with a weird haircut, who said he played the guitar and sang a little, and was gaga for American cars, especially ones with tail fins.

In 1988, in a motel room in Atlanta, Georgia, I sat down with Shane to do an interview on the last night of a week-long trip through the American south with the band. It was a Sunday evening as I recall, and Shane, who hated interviews, was for once in a sober and reflective mood. When I asked him about the mixture of tenderness and brutal realism that characterised his songs, he said: “People don’t understand what it takes to write a truthful song, a song that is trying to be pure and honest.” Though I pressed him to elucidate, that was all he would say on the matter.

For a time, some would say too short a time, Shane MacGowan wrote pure and honest songs like no one else. Last week, when I chatted with his friend and fellow songwriter Nick Cave, at a public event in St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, we began with a kind of impromptu tribute to Shane, who had died that morning. Nick spoke candidly about his “pure spirit”, as well as how envious he had once felt about Shane’s ability to cut to the heart of things in his songs, and the empathy he evinced for the outsiders and marginalised who inhabited them. He regarded Shane with obvious awe as “the songwriter of his generation”.

Though this is not the time to go into it too deeply, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that Shane’s lifestyle of dogged excess – and the darkness that sometimes descended in its wake, at considerable cost to himself and those in his sway – diminished his extraordinary talent. “You call it chaos,” he once admonished me, when I asked about his rapidly advancing state of dissolution. “I don’t regard it as chaos. I regard it as natural living.”