God bless the bands who play B-list cities
Having lived in rural areas all my life, seeing bands announce shows outside the major cities warms my little village dwelling heart
B-list city: in the touring music industry, a city outside of the major music hotspots (London, Birmingham, Manchester etc.). Cities where bands don’t play as often (Oxford, Stoke etc.)
The most exciting part about seeing Architects live was travelling there on the bus. It was October 2021 and I was just starting my third year at the University of Warwick when they announced an intimate tour of cities they hadn’t played since they were small fries, which included Coventry’s 900-capacity Empire. It was just a few stops on the bus away from Earlsdon, the suburb where I lived. My group of friends even walked back afterwards because we couldn’t be arsed to wait half an hour at the bus station, and the walking time was fairly reasonable.
There was a real fervour about the crowd that night, unsurprising, perhaps, when live music had only just been allowed to resume following a 15-month fallow spell forced upon it by Covid-19. Someone near the front of the crowd asked frontman Sam Carter if he would go out with his mum, which lead to a chant of “SHAG HIS MUM! SHAG HIS MUM!” Ever the gentleman, and the feminist, Sam didn’t bow to it, instead taking it as a moment to talk about how brilliant mums are.
I saw Hot Milk at the same venue eight months later and the crowd was positively rabid in a similar way. Those who weren’t keen to leap into the mosh pit were practically pinned up against the walls of the venue – the pit was almost the size of the whole room. The band themselves looked incredulous. I started putting two and two together – was this frenzy, like at the Architects gig, just waiting to happen, because of how much of a rarity it was for bands to come to Coventry?
For me, the Architects show had a shiny novelty to it because it was the first time a band was playing close enough to me to be able to get the bus there. Until I moved away for university, I had lived in distinctly un-musical towns. I was born in Worcestershire and lived there until I was 14, when my dad got a new job and we moved 70 miles south to a town (and later a village) that sits awkwardly between Swindon and Oxford, governed by an Oxfordshire council but belonging to an SN postcode. By the time I got there in 2015, Swindon had become a bit of a gig desert – I’d almost never see its name in the gig guides at the back of magazines, because the bands were pulled 50 miles or so down the M4 to the vastly more vibrant music city of Bristol. I meet a lot of people who have no idea where Swindon is.
Oxford fares better musically but where I am, the shows remain just out of my grasp. I don’t drive – in fact, I’ve never been behind the wheel of a car - and the bus to Oxford takes an hour because it trundles down the scenic route to pick up people in villages off the beaten track. Its final stop is miles away from the postcode where the venues are – in terms of travel, it’d be easier (and smoother) for me to get the train to London. There’s also Bristol in the opposite direction, but the last train back to Swindon leaves at 10:30pm, ripping up the possibility of seeing more than the first third of the headline act’s set in a venue with an 11pm curfew.
But when the bands say they’re going to come to you, rather than you needing to come to the bands, it’s both inordinary and wonderful. Trivium did that just this week, announcing a 13-date intimate tour of the cities they outgrew years ago – Norwich, Oxford, Cambridge, even Stoke. Generally, the artists who do this tend to be British; it’s a rarity for international bands to rock up in cities non-Brits might not have heard of. Regardless, I love them even more for it. Matt, Corey, Paolo, Alex – I salute you. And with no London date on the tour, I noticed more than a few fans in the comments feeling a tiny sense of schadenfreude over the thought of all the Londoners having to hotfoot it somewhere else for a gig when they can usually get live music on tap.
Part of the reason I wanted to write this was because I wanted to articulate an experience I’ve not really seen other people articulate - the oftentimes frustrating experience of being an alternative music lover in a rural area. The gigs are painfully far away, sometimes to the point of inconvenience, and there’s less opportunity to find real, 3D community with folks who own just as many band shirts as you. More than once, while making my monthly pilgrimage to the OneStop in my village for music magazines as a teenager, I wondered if I was the only one in the local area buying them. It makes me wonder if being a music aficionado is a passion made with city dwellers in mind – at the very least, I’ve always envied those who grew up with gigs on their doorstep, or even just a few stops on the bus away.
One day, hopefully this year, I will become one of those citydwellers, and can look forward to crawling into my own bed and drifting off within an hour and a half or so of the gig’s curfew. Regardless, however, I won’t forget the bands who look outside the periphery of city walls when they map their tours. They make us feel seen.