UK towns with a healthy live music scene?

[Sparky Mark]

Are you lucky enough to live in a UK town that has a great live music scene? Large towns and cities excluded, where else is there that encourages local musicians to get involved?

For example, Hertford is pretty good with several live music venues for local musicians and bands of all abilities to perform as well as a couple of decent music festivals.

 

 

[NHM]

All Kent is great, Canterbury excepted.

[SteveXFR]

I live in Frome, Somerset. There's a great live music scene here. Quite a few little blues, jazz and folk jam groups. There's a pretty lively punk scene kind of lead by Far Cue and Frenzy who have been going decades. We have a good number of bars and pubs with regular live music nights. The local senior school has an awesome music department which is turning out some excellent musicians and putting them on stages infront of good size audiences to get them performance experience. 

We also have the Cheese & Grain, a venue which has everything from concerts for the local school and local bands to a punk festival and slightly more well known acts such as Airborne, The Stranglers, The Damned, Skindred, Frank Turner, Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters. Not bad for a small Somerset town. 

 

[T-Bay]

Tamworth and Lichfield are pretty good, although both have lost brilliant venues since Covid.

[Len_derby]

The Derby/Nottingham M1 corridor has a pretty healthy scene. Apart from the two cities there are lots of small towns and villages (mostly ex-mining communities) that contain pub and club band venues. I tend to gig between 2 or 3 times a month and I can’t remember the last time I had a drive of more than 30 minutes to a venue. As much as I love the countryside, living out in the sticks would put too many burdens on being in a gigging band. For me, anyway.

[theplumber]

Paisley,Scotland.

[neepheid]

Aberdeen isn't too bad, despite my frequent bemoaning of its geographical location. It (and the surrounding Shire) has provided me with bands to be in since 2009, both original and cover so it can't be that bad

[Vin Venal]

Bristol is phenomenal for live music. Probably regardless of genre I'd have thought.

[SteveXFR]

12 minutes ago, Vin Venal said:

Bristol is phenomenal for live music. Probably regardless of genre I'd have thought.

 

Bristol is awesome for live music although doesn't quite fit the description of small town. 

There's a great selection of venue ranging from bars and pubs to old warehouses and an old cargo ship.

[Vin Venal]

1 minute ago, SteveXFR said:

 

Bristol is awesome for live music although doesn't quite fit the description of small town. 

There's a great selection of venue ranging from bars and pubs to old warehouses and an old cargo ship.

Oh yeah, sorry I missed the bit where OP said excluding large cities. 🙃

 

I saw Grace Petrie at Thekla the other night, that's one of my favourite venues. Usually a phenomenal atmosphere in there if it's packed.

 

And it's just very cool to be on a boat.

[Bigguy2017]

Malvern and Worcester.

[Elfrasho]

Glasgow. Pretty excellent.

[xgsjx]

Falkirk seems to be pretty decent.

A big contrast to Perth, where just about everybody that says they're a musician is a lekky guitar player.  I think there's about 2-3 okay singers there & I never met any of them.

[lownote]

Diss at the very centre of East Anglia has a jazz club.  Quite popular I hear. The only downside is it involves listening to CDs.  Like a book club. Any thought of actually playing an instrument is a no-no.  The nearest centres of livacious music are Bury St Edmund, Ipswich or Norwich. Which means I am at the centre of 2000 square miles of quiet. That's not to say there are no venues or musos to supply them - for example, pre-covid the Burston Crown had a remarkable array of very high London quality acts - but the OP asked for thriving scenes.

Edited November 1, 2022 by lownote

[SteveXFR]

1 hour ago, Vin Venal said:

Oh yeah, sorry I missed the bit where OP said excluding large cities. 🙃

 

I saw Grace Petrie at Thekla the other night, that's one of my favourite venues. Usually a phenomenal atmosphere in there if it's packed.

 

And it's just very cool to be on a boat.

 

I've enjoyed many nights of metal in a nautical setting. It only seems polite to drink lots of rum in there. Who'd have thought a cargo hold could have decent sound?

[King Tut]

Milton Keynes. We’ve got the Theatre for watching shows, The Stables for tributes and heritage acts and The Craufurd Arms for younger stuff and touring rock acts. Stony Stratford, which is part of MK has a thriving folk scene and three or four pubs that regularly have gigs and open mics. There’s also various estate pubs that have bands and some pubs in the older parts that have been swallowed up by the city, Newport Pagnell and Fenny Stratford come to mind. We’re also only half an hour from Northampton and Bedford so yeah, a good place to be. 

[Leonard Smalls]

The whole of South Shropshire/North Herefordshire is absolutely dire in terms of thriving musical scenes...

Ludlow has a sports bar filled with 15 year olds ignoring the occasional very standard covers band playing. Plus there's the Brewery, which has about 2 gigs a year, exclusively blues.

There's Bishop's Castle, where there's music in 1 pub - exclusively blues again.

And that's about it until you get to Hereford, or Shrewsbury - (which has Alberts Shed, though that's not exactly filled with live music lovers - mainly big drinkers).

You have to go as far as Whitchurch to get to a really decent venue (Percy's) which is about 1.5 hours fast driving from me!

Mid Wales isn't much better - Llandrindod has a couple of pubs that do music, but there's always the same 3 bands playing there - not sure why everyone goes to see them as some variety would be good, plus there's the Pavilion, which is mainly tribute acts.

Otherwise, it's a bit of a musical wasteland!

[Sonic_Groove]

14 minutes ago, Leonard Smalls said:

The whole of South Shropshire/North Herefordshire is absolutely dire in terms of thriving musical scenes...

This is so sad. I lived & played, in many bands there in the late 80s through the 90s. All the places You mention had many venues & pubs with music! At least 5 or 6 in Ludlow (Bull, George, Assembly rooms, etc. & 4 or so in "The Castle" (Grapes, Castle Hotel, 3 Tuns, Vaults, etc. And places around like Knighton, Clun, Leominster, Hereford all had pubs & clubs with gigs. And Olivers in Shrewsbury had Bands most nights! 😢 Real Sad.

 

B

Edited October 30, 2022 by Sonic_Groove

[martthebass]

We hark from the Sheffield-Rotherham area but the biggest share of our gigs tends to be in the West Yorkshire area. Huddersfield in particular has a great live music scene.

[gjones]

6 hours ago, xgsjx said:

Falkirk seems to be pretty decent.

A big contrast to Perth, where just about everybody that says they're a musician is a lekky guitar player.  I think there's about 2-3 okay singers there & I never met any of them.

Hasn't Perth got a music college? I know a lot of musicians that started off there. I would have thought there would have been a healthy live music scene up there.

[JapanAxe]

Swindon has a lot of pub gigs going on. Whether the scene is healthy is another matter. There are a growing number of solo acts with backing tracks - boring, boring, boring.

[ubit]

Oban is terrible for live music these days, unless you play traditional music jazzed up perhaps with drums. No one is interested in putting live music on anymore and when I count the places we used to play that have closed down or turned into restaurants, I get depressed.

[Geek99]

Loughborough has lots of open mic and jam nights 

[lurksalot]

Chester isn’t too bad at the minute, Alexander’s , Telford Warehouse and the Live rooms are at the top end, and having just won best pub for entertainment in ‘The Great British Pub Awards’ , The Saddle rocks, and is bang on the money. 

[skidder652003]

Torbay area in South Devon. Loads of live music pubs in Torquay, Newton abbot, Teignmouth, Paignton, Brixham, Exmouth, Dartmouth, then up on the moors theres a few towns that do live music so it's pretty healthy at the moment.