Back To Live

With it looking highly likely that restrictions on gigs and festivals will be gone by the time you read this, we talk to musicians and industry figures about the state of live music post-covid.

With restrictions on gigs and festivals likely to have been lifted by the time you read this issue, we talk to Download promoter Andy Copping, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, and Noel Nevin, boss of London music venue The Cavern. Plus full gig listings – find out who’s playing where and when.

When the live music sector was closed down by the British Government in March 2020, few suspected that 16 tortuous months would pass before restrictions could be lifted. Indeed, this issue of Classic Rock went to press just as performers, fans and industry people had started to believe that things were returning to something resembling normality – only to have restrictions extended by a further four weeks.

Things had appeared tantalisingly close after months of being stuck indoors watching musicians perform in their living rooms or attempting to pay the mortgage with pay-perview packages – some of us were brave enough to attend occasional socially distanced gigs.

We still don’t know whether the latest restrictions-lifting date of July 19 will hold firm, effectively allowing festivals and indoor events, but the vaccination program is going well and the Download Pilot event at Donington Park encourages a note of cautious optimism.

It’s time to think positively, although the full effect of what awaits us when restrictions end completely remains to be seen. Sixteen months without pay is a long time. Some pro musicians have retired (especially the older ones), or at least been forced to take day jobs. With livelihoods on hold, tech providers, trucking and bus companies, tour staff and various support workers have faced severe financial distress, and in some cases gone out of business. And then there’s Brexit, and its as-yet unknown ramifications. It begs the question: once the resumption of touring can go ahead, will the infrastructure necessary to do so still exist?

Back in March the government paid out £486m to the arts sector, a chunk of which made its way to our beleaguered venues.

The Music Venue Trust (UK) and its Save

Our Venues campaign provided financial aid to grass-roots venues, supplementing £100m of government support with £5m of donations. And while in 2020 it had been predicted that 80% would have to close permanently, three months ago the MVT’s

Mark Davyd said he was “very, very confident” that at least 55% of their grass-roots venues would reopen in May, with 83% being able to open on June 21. The subsequent delay to restrictions lifting will hopefully only set this back to July 19 (in England, at least).

Classic Rock prides itself as being a ‘glass halffull’-type of magazine, although we also want to tell the post-covid saga how it really is. Over the coming months, as things settle down (we hope), we’ll be talking to musicians of varying stature, and also to those who make the wheels go around – booking agents, venue owners, tour managers, managers, road crew and more.

We begin this issue with Live Nation’s Andy Copping, whose Download Pilot show gave us such hope, and Noel Nevin, boss of The Cavern in London, which was among the last to shut its doors and the first to re-open. We also talk to Wayne Coyne, whose band The Flaming Lips went to quite extraordinary lengths to perform to defy the confounded virus.

Fingers crossed, everyone!