"I worry where the 18-year-old equivalent of me will go if we continue losing venues" - why Independent Venue Week matters

Independent Venues Week has a pretty simple premise; celebrate the UK’s indie venues in a week of special gigs and national promotion.

It’s a no-brainer for the Lamacq show to support - making space for good (or at least interesting) music is the root of what we do. And that starts with small, independent venues - where bands can get their first break.

We’ve been speaking to artists all week on the show - from Radiohead and Fuzzbox to Wytches and Caro and every single one says the same: the independent venues who gave them the opportunity to perform shaped their careers.

Independent venues are about giving something a chance - taking a punt on your local, seeing what’s on tonight. You might not recognise any of the band names, you might never see any of them again but you’ve walked past the venue a few times and your mate said it does a decent pint.

An irony of the success of the UK music scene is that all these little venues created the idea that gig-going is cool, then lose out to gigantic stadiums. On the local level, live music is a labour of love - whereas a world tour can and does rake in millions.

When you head out to a small venue near you there’s no guarantee that the band will be any good, that they’ll ever gig again or - with the life music ecosystem as fragile as it currently is, the venue will even be there in six months time.

Indie venues support small, varied scenes - if you only have to get 70 people in to fill a room you can take a punt on an emerging sound that might only be fashionable in that area for three months.

From bashment to skronk, punk to folk, you're able to find venues that cater for you. Maybe all four in the same place.

When we spoke to Vix from Fuzzbox, she said she was pleasantly surprised at the health and vibrancy of the Birmingham indie venues scene - maybe the loss of a few old favourites has made us unnecessarily pessimistic. She said the breadth of music available at indie venues has always been their strength.

"The person through the door who likes folk music might have been to that Slits gig in 1976."

People go to a venue because they can trust it to be a good night out, as much as a good band. And because indie venues can pick who plays, you can usually trust them to do both.

Making a space for music is about more than sticking some speakers in a room and chilling a few cans of lager. Bands and scenes are born in the venues they're inspired to play in - everyone has to start somewhere and everything from the punters that attend gigs to the quirks of the soundsystem can affect what forms there.

Like a sticky-floored petri dish, the independent venues of a town nurture the culture of the area. It might take a few crusty attempts to find musical penicillin but with a healthy live music scene, anywhere -especially a town without much else - can suddenly find itself at the heart of a huge transformation.

On Thursday the Lamacq team went to Chelmsford, where Steve's gig-going life began.

"I grew up in a lot of little venues, the ones we're featuring this week - and the reason that I go to these gigs is because of the first gig I ever went to. My very first gig was in a venue now called Evoke but it used to be, back in 1978, the Chancellor Hall. I saw Britain's answer to The Ramones, The Lurkers.

It was amazingly loud, it was just a fuse - honestly, at that point I don't think anything had been as good in my life. And from that moment on, all I wanted to do was go and see more gigs."

Which is what he's done ever since and what we've done all week. Looking at indie venues struggling, surviving and thriving and seeing the acts that play there. We finished the evening in Bassment, watching bands screaming with energy.

Steve said "I've never been to the Bassment before - there are loads of venues like it up and down the country - and we shouldn't take them for granted.

I'll tell you why; what a terrific night, a Thursday night and it's full of people, some of whom have never seen the bands before and they've come out just out of curiosity, really. I think that's brilliant.

You need places like that in every town and city around the country, to encourage people to just have a look and see what's out there.

They're terrific places and if you take them away - if you close them down, if you bulldoze them - where are all these people going to go?"

Speaking to London's Night Czar at the start of the week, though, we discovered something positive.

A new report has said that for the first time in a decade, London has not lost any music venues. And some tiny bouncebacks are being made.

With the appointment of a Night Czar, the commitment to preserving London's night life - and a broader political understanding of how vital indie venues are to the UK's music industry, as shown by Nigel Adams MP when we spoke to him on Tuesday - show that making a noise in and about independent venues is worthwhile.

And new venues are springing up - even in brutally challenging economic environments. Before we set out on tour, we spoke to three people who've opened new venues recently and how you can take up the challenge.

If you can hear a band from the car park, get inside and keep the doors open on indie music.