Words: Darren Grayer. Pictures: Chris Moorhouse.
The recent news that Southampton music venue The Joiners is in line to be granted funding from the Music Venues Trust was gratefully received by everyone involved in running it as well as the hundreds of music lovers who regularly attend gigs there.
The trust, which was created in 2014, is a UK registered charity and acts to protect, secure and improve Grassroots Music Venues such as The Joiners. In 2022 another part of the MVT, Music Venue Properties held a fundraising round which saw £2.88 million raised which helped secure 5 venues through community ownership. In May, a new Community Share Offer was launched with the aim of securing another set of venues, including The Joiners.
It’s impossible to understate what an important role the 200-capacity Joiners has played in providing a platform for musicians both locally and all around the world to showcase their artistic skills.
Upon entering the venue, you are surrounded by posters and pictures that create a rich history of music stretching back nearly 60 years. The list of artists that have walked down the dressing room stairs and shuffled their way through the audience to reach the stage is nothing short of remarkable. Ed Sheeran played to not much more than a handful of people on his first visit, before eventually becoming a global superstar. Coldplay, Radiohead, Oasis, Blur and The Arctic Monkeys have all carried their instruments in through the side door after backing the tour van down the narrow lane leading up to it.
I’m no historian, but I don’t think anyone could argue that the 200-year-old building isn’t one of the most culturally important in the city, so safeguarding its future is essential.
With that in mind, I was delighted to have a chat with venue operator and promoter Ricky Bates, about the past, present and future. I started by asking him about the different challenges he’s faced in his time in charge.
“From when I first started there has been a culture shift more than anything,” he reflected.
“The venue has always been very expensive, it costs around four-and-a-half to five grand a month for the overheads, so you’re looking at the PA, the building lease, council business rates. All that stuff comes before you sell a single ticket or pay a band or a staff member.
“Between 2012 and 2018, people were just going out regularly until we saw a culture shift towards Netflix and video games becoming popular, and younger people growing up thinking this is what we do, with everything on demand. You don’t have to go to the cinema anymore; it’s there in your living room. Same with restaurants; you don’t have to eat out, you can get it delivered. It’s essentially become more about keeping people’s attention, we weren’t competing so much against those things back in 2012”.
DG – What about after Covid?
“Covid was really hard. People are creatures of habit, and if you tell someone they have to stay indoors for a length of time and then suddenly tell them it’s ok to go out again, it can take time for the brain to readapt. Since then, we’ve had the cost-of-living crisis being constantly drilled into people. We’re fighting against the rhetoric as much as anything because people think they have less money but a lot of times they don’t and they hold out on how much they go out, but it’s definitely more expensive to eat out or go to bars and drink. We’ve tried to keep things as cheap as possible here, it’s all about being able to provide a good night out for £20 or so.
“There is a huge community around The Joiners that cares so much that they’re very attentive to it. We operate with a skeleton crew because we don’t have the money to employ lots of people. There are two of us who do the booking and promoting, and obviously it’s not just here, we just had Panic Shack at Papillion on Monday, and we also work with Heartbreakers, The 1865, The Brook and the Engine Rooms.”
DG- One of the things I wanted to ask you about was the collaboration with other music promoters in the city, such as Tom Dyer’s Psych Ltd and the So Young team. It appears you all have a good working relationship.
“Yes, we work together in the sense that Heartbreakers is the home of Psych, just like The Joiners is our home, but everyone goes in as an independent contractor to those venues, so we go in and hire. They have music that they want to book, just like we have music that we want to book, but it creates a circle that in the last eight years or so has led to healthy competition that has driven the local music scene.
“We motivate each other into attracting good bands from different countries. Usually bands want to play London, Manchester, Glasgow and potentially Bristol or Brighton and then go home. We constantly have to punch above our weight as promoters to get these bands to play Southampton and finance plays a large part.
“Bristol has venues like SWX which has a 1200 capacity. The equivalent of that here is the Engine Rooms, which holds 800. That band will expect to be paid the same as in Bristol even though we sell 400 tickets less which at £20 a head means a difference of £8k, so there are occasions when we take literally nothing to attract a band here just for the betterment of the music scene.”
“Basically 50% of all Joiners shows make a loss, so the others that make money offset the loss, which means you’re just about breaking even most of the time. Going to the bigger venues such as Papillion, The 1865 or Engine Rooms allows us to sell more tickets and make money that can be reinvested here, and if we weren’t doing that we’d have been gone long ago. I’ve made a concerted effort to change the mindset here, because the worry was always about losing money but in trying to create more revenue the risk is obviously much higher. It’s like playing a musical casino, rolling the dice and hoping the show sells. We do meet as promoters at like a round table every now and then to see how we can help each other and discuss what we feel is going right and what is going wrong but ultimately, we are relying on the populous of people to engage in what you’re doing.
“We look at customer data and often we get people coming to shows from Oxford, Reading, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and Exeter, which means the people of Southampton aren’t engaging. Sometimes half of the crowd are from the city and the rest are travelling, because they like the venue and know the production is always good.
“Southampton has a mainstream populace of mindset that is not really into alternative or underground culture until something big enough comes along to play the Guildhall for example. That’s why it’s so difficult to compete with places like Bristol or Brighton, where the music community is far more on the ball and have their finger on the button, which means people always showing up to see bands. We’re treated as a slower market compared to those cities, but we all try our best and in the last five years Southampton has gone from a category C to B city in terms of attracting artists due to the hard work that’s been put in. We have to try and constantly stay ahead of promoters in Bristol and Brighton in terms of sourcing new bands and getting them to play here.”
DG – When the MVT formed, did you apply for membership straight away?
“I’m pretty sure we were one of the first 20 venues to sign up when MVT started and it was the same with Independent Venues Week. There were only 14 of those originally, and we were one of them. But the relationship with MVT has been solid for 8-10 years or so, and venues day is a yearly conference where venues meet collectively and hash out issues and share drama or trauma, ha-ha, of working in the music industry.
MVT are a fantastic company that have grown over the years and now a registered charity that does ‘God’s work’, quote-unquote for independent venues up and down the country. Before them, venues were just in the dark, councils don’t really care. It’s a different system here compared to Europe. Having worked in Europe at festivals for years before Covid, I know the subsidiaries they receive so there’s no overbearing risk or pressure. France and Germany have had a system in place for 30 years where money trickles down from the top to the bottom, which is obviously what the MVT are still fighting for with venue levies and ticket levies to get money from places like Wembley Stadium to reinvest in small places like this but everyone in England is kicking back on it because of the greed at the top. Consumers are hardly going to cry about adding a pound to a ticket if that ticket is already £110.00”
DG- I have noticed that artists seem to be becoming more conscious about this and are starting to make donations.
“They’re doing it themselves though. People like Frank Turner are consciously making that decision to set up that levy. What it should be is a compulsory levy set up through those giant promoters like AEG and Live Nation who do these Hyde Park shows, and stadium shows. They should just go yes, we do want to support the future of music, like they have done in Europe forever, and implement a £1 levy which then starts the ball rolling. The longer they kick back on it, the more venues will close. Southampton is in a position where everyone has worked their ass off for years to get it to the point of where it is now. Other places might only have one venue and if that closes it’s they have nothing and no music scene. The MVT have been absolutely crucial for all the venues because there’s not always people like me or other biggish promoters that are around venues, sometimes it’s a newer person who don’t have the relationships with the labels or agents. It takes five years to build that up and that’s where the MVT can be very helpful.”
DG- At what point did discussions start about possible funding?
“We’ve been talking to the Music Venue Properties, which is another arm of MVT, for a year and a bit behind the scenes prior to the announcement recently. We knew the lease was coming up on the building and there’s been a bit of back-and-forth with the landlord about what we were going to do. I was ready to leave at one point but then I thought what happens if they turn it into shops or student accommodation? Everything I’ve worked so hard for in the last 12 years would be lost, as well as 57 years of history straight in the bin because someone wants to sell it for commercial property. Luckily, they figured out that might cost too much, so the other option was for us to buy the building. But where do a bunch of working-class people find half a million quid from? That’s where MVP came in, as they’d just bought the first set of five venues and we started having a conversation that became ongoing.”
DG- When the MVP decided to fund another set of venues, was The Joiners picked randomly?
“Yes, they didn’t know our lease was up. There was a phone call to Mark, and we were like thanks for wanting to look after the place forever, we’ll do it, because it’s not just the history, it’s the amount of shows that come through here and the reputation of the venue, the people that work here who are regarded as family. It’s exactly what MVT strives for with their messaging, their ideals and ethics and that’s also exactly what The Joiners is. That is the blueprint for it and why they support venues like this. If there’s a chance they can buy the place they will try to do so because it’s steeped in everything they stand for.
“The fund raising got announced at The Great Escape (festival in Brighton), so we’re pushing it out and it will run until July 31st. Every week from now there’ll be more content and more incentives to get people involved in doing stuff. When I slow down a bit, we have 34 shows this month, I will be reaching out to my bigger band mates and be like why haven’t you thrown some money at this stuff? Ha-ha! And there’s also the idea of us doing some shows with local bands when we’re a bit quieter at the end of June beginning of July to help raise money for the venue so that we can buy our own shares. Once the transition goes through and they become our landlords then we won’t be paying that 5 grand overhead because the MVT is not about turning over profit from struggling independent venues, they are about sustaining venues like ourselves and helping on the financial side, which frees up more money for us to employ more people, which means we don’t have to run around doing five jobs each. I’ve kind of volunteered 20 hours a week for ten years unpaid. During touring season, I do a sixty hour week but the venue can only afford to pay me for forty, so if I took more, I’d be putting the venue at risk and in order to keep running at the level of steam that we do then you have to volunteer those hours. People don’t understand, it’s a passion for the greater good and even if it is 15-20 hours I’m like fuck it, I’m having a good time and doing something I want. I’d rather survive doing something I love than make more money and hate it.”
DG- The first round of fundraising reached £2.3 million, do you expect to see a figure like that this time round and if so, does the money get divided equally between the chosen venues?
“I don’t know about the ins and outs of the financial side of it; I’m assuming in their heads they’ll know which venues to buy first. The long-established venues such as Bedford Esquires, Stoke Sugarmill and The Joiners will hopefully be seen as the jewel in the crown with the rest bought if the money is there, but I’m sure everyone will be treated fairly. I would imagine that with the first round making £2.3 million they hope to try and double that. Launching it in the middle of the month and we all know how people are watching their money, so I think it’s on about £200k at the minute (at the time of speaking). We haven’t really pushed it yet. On the day of launch we had two shows, so juggling those and the press release made it difficult to focus on, but we did get stuff out which was well received and shared. I think people care enough, it’s about getting the message out and timing is everything, with people feeling stretched financially. Even when we put shows on sale we try and do it around pay day. If you wait 10 days afterwards that can be gone.”
DG- So if things go well and money does get pumped into the venue, will that mean any changes to your role?
“I will continue to do what I’m doing but hopefully… (DG – get paid properly?). Ha-ha, yes, get paid properly but also bring more people into the team, because I’d love for there to be another £3k a month to bring people in and teach them, which is already what I have been doing, and that means offsetting stuff that I have to do, and that in turn means being awake at 1 or 2 in the morning trying to catch up, which is exhausting. We could put a proper infrastructure in place where we can make things work because our overheads and the risk of closure are non-existent once they become our landlords, but we’ll still try and do as many shows as possible.
“Then if we become a Community Interest Company, it would bring our VAT thresholds down. It’s something that’s bugged us for years because theatres don’t pay vat on their ticket sales because they’re deemed as being culturally more important than music venues. It doesn’t seem fair that for every ticket we sell, 20% of it goes to the government. Why are they looked upon as being more important than us? It’s all to do with a class system it seems. Orchestral musicians get tax exemptions because it seems aimed at middle and upper classes. Not that I don’t like orchestras but why are all artists not treated the same? Part of the reason it feels so broken in this country compared to Europe.
“So, I don’t think my role will change, I’d still be hammering about, but I’d just have more hands that would free me up to improve things in the venue, like accessibility. If we tried to do that now, it’s the shows that would suffer and we would cease to function. If we raise enough money we really will be cooking with gas.”
DG- So if things work out and the lease gets paid for, the venue becomes self-supporting.
“Yes, that is completely the plan, and we’ve had those conversations with MVP because we have a whole load of structural work to do on the venue which is going to cost a sugar bunch of money, but that’s inevitable because the building’s 220 years old and we want it to be structurally sound for the next 50 years. We’re better off doing that immediately to get it out of the way, knowing that it’s done and the money has gone in the right place. Hopefully the arts council might help with a few bits and bobs.”
DG- Would you agree that some people like the fact that this place is a bit ramshackle?
“Completely, I think now perfectionism and the minimalistic Instagram aesthetic looks, where everything is just plain white and there’s some plants, everybody does that. When you travel the world and go to these dive bars in places like Japan, America and Canada, you start to see the character of each place and they attract a certain type of person. They are built for creatives, people who love music, who want to be around where that stuff happens. Here (The Joiners) people can see a band that in six months or a year could become the biggest band in the world, and you could be well I went to that show, and it cost me 12 quid, and no one would believe you. We could tear all the posters down, but you would lose all the character and history of the venue. People who travel to come here have heard stories or read the book (by Oliver Gray) or read stuff online or seen videos. You don’t want to come into a place that looks clinical. This place belongs to the people, it’s The Joiners. Lots of towns and cities don’t have one of these. I was in Belfast recently and they have a venue there similar to The Joiners, dingy place with a tiny bar with a bunch of local music people who play in bands behind the bar. They want to be in that environment when they’re not on tour. It’s all sustained by the music community. People who work here because they love it, our sound engineers work with some of the biggest bands in the world. They go off and tour with the likes of The Damned, Artemus, Fidlar and Kasabian and then come back because they want to work here. They don’t want to be in a bleached out big commercial venue because they’re attracted to the looseness, the character and the people who walk through the door. A lot of bands who come through here want that engineer to go on and be their touring engineer because they work at such a high level.”
DG- Will having a bit more money perhaps encourage you to chase bands you might not at the moment?
“No, I just do that anyway, ha-ha! I constantly think, I want this band, then think, you can’t afford it, but I’ll figure out a way of making it work. I have tick lists in my head about who I want to play and I’m usually 90% of the way through them. Some might get blocked by contracts with national promoters and things, so we’re aware we can’t get that artist, but usually if there’s a one out of a hundred chance of getting an artist, I will get that artist! That might mean me travelling to a different country to introduce myself to a band to build up a relationship, which I’ve done before, and then two years later they’re saying let’s do a show with Ricky in Southampton, then that’s what I’ll do. We all care about what we do enormously.”
DG- That comes across very well. I’ve noticed how you always refer to the ‘Joiners family’ in any correspondence and press releases.
“Yes, you’ve got the weird uncle in Pat (Muldowney) and the niece, who is the young 20-year-old just started behind the bar” (chuckles)
DG- How long has Pat been involved?
“25 years now, the lease that’s running out is 20 years, and we’re carrying it on as a gentleman’s agreement for now until the transition of the new venue goes through. He took it on when it was part of three venues under one umbrella. Since then, he’s been a staple part of the place, and you’ll usually see him on the door. There’ll be a tag on his ankle in the morgue that will say ‘Pat from The Joiners’ rather than his own name, because his own identity is exactly that! He’s given 25 years of his life to the venue, always being there and saying yeah, I’ll do it if we need him to do something. Pat doesn’t get involved in what we do upstairs, but he’ll often say oh, you got that show, that’s great, and that’s all part of the family deal. Everyone’s just part of this weird Adams family vibe, ha-ha! We have two staff parties a year and they’re complete chaos!”
DG- How many people are employed here?
“Most people here act as independent contractors. The engineers are all self-employed, there are around eight of them who are on rotation due to them being out on tour as we spoke about. Then there are about eight bar staff who all work on rotation, and then two of us upstairs, me and Luke who do the booking, promotion artwork etc, and then Pat on the door, and 3 or 4 security who are on rotation. So, realistically it’s about 25 in the mix that come and go. We also have back-up people and show reps, from other venues who come and look after our shows. We sometimes have 2-3 shows on the same day, so we need someone to cover, so it could be a member of staff from the Engine Rooms or The Brook. We reach out and they work with us.”
At that moment there is a knock on the door, so Ricky pops around the bar to open up. In strolls the aforementioned legend, Pat, along with his beautiful dogs. I reckon his ears were burning! He is swiftly followed through the door by members of Manchester band Ist Ist, who are appearing later that evening in a near sell out show.
Once greetings have taken place and the band shown where everything is I get the chance to thank Ricky for his time and will no doubt see him again soon at one of my regular visits to the venue.
It’s an exciting time for all involved at The Joiners and the wider music community of Southampton and beyond. The local scene is in good health in terms of what is being provided by people who clearly work hard and care a great deal about what they do. The recent Wanderlust Festival was a fine example of what can be achieved by working together for the good of others, and if like me, you enjoyed that weekend or have any passion whatsoever for live music, you have until July 31st to consider donating. It’s a no brainer, isn’t it?
More information and other supporting documents are available on the Music Venue Properties website: musicvenueproperties.com
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