For our friends and partners who are at the heart of grassroots music venues and everyone that is part of their local venue community and touring world, we feel so much for you all right now.
We are aware many of you are taking the very difficult decision to close your venues or postpone tours. This is incredibly painful but it does feel like the only course of action right now as companies and individuals make the decision to stop going out whilst government attempts (badly) to find the right way forward.
Decisions like this don’t just affect the venue itself, but the bar staff, sound engineers, promoters, and so on – everyone who makes these spaces run so well and so valuable to local communities and the music industry more widely.
We are watching the announcements hourly and daily about changes we need to make as to how we live as a society for the foreseeable future and what support there might be for everyone affected.
Last week, we met with Music Venue Trust to look at ways the two organisations can work together more closely to collectively support the venue community in general. As CoVid19 issues have developed so rapidly, they have issued some guidelines and advice about what you can do which they are constantly updating as government advice comes in – that can be found here. We will continue to speak with MVT to support the work they are doing and together support venues through this tough time and beyond.
We are updating the IVW site so you can easily find and support any venues that are crowdfunding during this time – just go here – links there will go directly to each venue’s own crowdfunding page and we will be adding to this as we get more in over the coming days and weeks.
We would encourage you to hold on to any tickets for upcoming shows, even if a gig has been cancelled/postponed, as it is likely to be rescheduled and the funds will help venues so much at this time.
We hope everyone will stay safe and that we can all work together over the coming weeks and months to keep spirits high and look to a time when we can all get back out to gigs, for people to be working and for music to be at the heart of our lives.
Sybil, Chloe “Colin”, Charlie and Ruby x
