I’ve recently gotten involved in an interesting online debate about the music scene here in Lincoln, UK. As a matter of fact, I’ve had related conversations about four times in the last week too, with several different people.
It seems that the mythical ‘scene’ is still a perennial favourite subject of musicians in the city, and it’s one to which I’ve devoted an inordinate amount of thinking time over the last ten years, and considerable sweat and toil from about 2002 to 2005.
I walked away from promoting music ‘for the scene’ (arguably, in that this is what I thought I was doing) in the mid 2000’s and haven’t really looked back, except to run things which explicitly support the aims of my various musical projects. There’s usually nothing like a little distance from something with which you were once involved to help your perspective on the matter, so I thought I’d put mine to the test.
The discussions I’ve been party to recently are essentially the same one I remember taking place historically and in which the people who ran the precursors to my own efforts often participated in, I’m told. The scene as a creature is cyclical, and I’m yet to understand why it doesn’t seem to learn from it’s own past and improve it’s present.
I’d like to try and distill the main arguments, issues and approaches, perhaps even as an extension of this rather skeptical post I wrote long ago.
It’s a difficult one to pin down though, as it’s very much relative to the genre you’re working in for a start. I’ve seen regular punk rock shows taking place when almost nothing else is, and I’m sure house DJ’s have been doing fine over the last few years, for instance. I intend to start by narrowing the definition to ‘a scene involving local live acts’, and I’ll make an attempt to define exactly what I’m talking about in the next post.
For now, I’ll start with a series of headings, all of which I’ve come across cited as factors any budding local promoter must consider -
Venues, or the lack thereof…
Audience “apathy”…
Band egos and infighting…
Quality, not quantity…
Promotion, it’s definition, and the way it takes place…
Lincoln’s historical attempts at a scene…
Feel free to comment and add your own headers if you think they’d be worthy of a post, and I’ll do my best to have a think about them too.
