When Kerry McGregor arrived at the Sir Charles Napier one Sunday evening in June 2015, she found the door locked. A sign informed customers the pub had closed. This was news to Kerry – she’d been drinking and watching gigs there for more than 20 years. When she called round to other regulars, nobody seemed to know what had happened.
In many ways, the Napier was a traditional British boozer. Posters for Jack Daniels and beer brands hung onto the walls for dear life. For a time, a laminated sign on one wall invited drinkers to “Stick your chewing gum on here!” The pub hosted darts, dominoes and pool teams, AKA the sorts of gatherings that had little to do with craft beer and small plates. But it also served a role in the community: providing a second home for Blackburn’s hard rock and metal fans. They’d shout-sing rock karaoke every Tuesday and Thursday. On gig nights, the upstairs bar would fill with headbangers in the typical uniform of band T-shirts, black hoodies and ‘cut these myself earlier’ sleeveless vests. The Metal Travel Guide, a website for globe-trotting metal fans, once wrote that the Napier “has the most metal staff you will meet in England” *sign of the horns*.
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In fairness, the pub hadn’t been quite up to its old standard for a couple of years. “Other venues have come and gone,” says Kerry, “but the Napier was always the centre of the local rock and alternative scene. Everybody felt quite strongly that we wanted to do everything we could to get it reopened and for it to continue as a rock and alternative pub.”
The previous landlords had decided they’d had enough, and brewery Thwaites was said to be considering a sale of the venue. So about 100 regulars met to set up the Save the Napier campaign. It successfully applied for the pub to be made an asset of community value, giving locals first refusal if the pub went up for sale. As soon as that happened, Thwaites opened negotiations for the group to take over the tenancy as what’s known as a community interest company, running the pub as a social enterprise. Money to pay for rent and upgrades to the venue, including a new sound system, came from five shareholders and a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly £6,000 from 147 backers.
On 17 September 2016, the Napier reopened as the UK’s first community-owned rock venue, with a launch party quite literally attended by Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford. The pub now hosts several live music nights most weeks – taking in heavy metal, rock, punk and hardcore – and has helped revive one part of Blackburn’s flagging live music scene. We’ve all heard stories of local music institutions under threat, but not so much in cases where venues have returned after closing. Could crowdfunding offer a solution?
According to charity the Plunkett Foundation, there are now more than 50 community-owned pubs in the UK. Many are rural, bought up by locals who probably weren’t ready to face the prospect of losing the only boozer in the village. But in the last three years, regulars have banded together to buy and run gig venues in bigger towns and cities, united not by geography but by their shared love of music. And I don’t just mean the Napier. This was also the case with the Globe in Newcastle, which in 2014 became one of the first community-owned music venues in the UK when it was bought by local cooperative Jazz.Coop. It now has two performance spaces, with capacity for 60 in the pub and 120 in the downstairs bar, and puts on everything from jazz, metal and rock to indie.
Jazz.Coop co-chair Dave Parker tells me that having an existing group of people united by passion for music was “fundamental to the success” of the campaign to buy the Globe, which saw 200 investors pledge a total of more than £125,000. The co-op owns not just the business but the building itself. “In a place like Newcastle, music venues come and go with depressing regularity,” he says. “Once we’ve paid off our mortgage this will be an asset to the live music scene forever.”
That all sounds peachy but not every community ownership campaign works. Less than 30 miles away from the Napier stands Blackpool’s Blue Room, renamed because – you guessed it – blue walls housed its dark wood and panelling interior. For years the Blue Room hosted touring bands and gave unsigned Blackpool artists a platform to launch their careers. The wooden floorboards in front of the stage carried heavy scuff marks left by the grubby Converse of punters who’d dance under the gig posters plastered across the ceiling. In the 2000s, it was one of several venues putting on local bands. By the time the pub closed in 2013, it was one of the last hosting gigs in the town. After briefly reopening later that year, it closed for good in 2015.
In March, Gareth Wright and four other former regulars launched a campaign to buy and reopen the pub as a live music venue. But though they nabbed a £100,000 offer of support from the Plunkett Foundation, the campaign ended unsuccessfully at the end of April after raising just over half of the £250,000 target. Unlike the campaign to save the Napier, the group wanting to save Blackpool’s Blue Room had to raise enough money to buy the pub rather than the business – and had just nine months to do it. “We struggled with talking to people about something very different from what they are used to,” Wright says of their attempt.
Ultimately, the campaign failed to capture the local imagination. Speaking to ex-Blue Room regulars, there’s a sense that the venue has had its day. Bobby Pook was guitarist for pop punk band Me Vs Hero and worked as sound engineer at the Blue Room for several years in the early 2000s. “It was kind of making a dive anyway,” he says. “It’s obviously bad that it closed but I worked there when no-one was coming.”
For anyone growing up in a small town, far from the international touring circuit, the back rooms of pubs and working men’s clubs can hold just as much significance as the Hacienda or the Astoria. In many cases these venues aren’t just a hub for the local live music scene, they are the live music scene. So how can they fail? Often these spaces rely on the passion of individuals that can’t be sustained indefinitely. In some cases, market forces make a business unsustainable. Sometimes it’s a combination of factors. Then again, sometimes, the scene just moves on.
Since the Blue Room closed, other Blackpool venues such as Bootleg Social and the Waterloo Music Bar have stepped up to cater to live music fans. Ian Fletcher, manager at the Waterloo, and says he used to drink at the Blue Room and in its later days, the pub wasn’t offering anything that isn’t now available elsewhere. “It’s a shame,” he says. “It fell by the wayside.” Why? “Generally just the bands that they were getting. People had probably seen them one too many times.”
By contrast, back in Blackburn, the Napier now offers a wider variety of gigs than ever before. Local promoter Ed Hall used to put on gigs at a local arts centre, but now hosts monthly nights at the Napier. “To be 100 percent honest it wasn’t much of a staple back when it had the old ownership,” he says. “The new ownership is great. They’re very open-minded, they’ll book anything and everything.” And it’s not just the Napier – the pub reopening seems to have revitalised the wider nightlife scene. The Live Lounge, closed in 2013, was revived earlier this year as The Loop. Recent acts include seminal British hardcore band Discharge, while Joe Goddard is booked to play there in July. Cellar Bar, another recent reopening, will host an Outlook Festival launch party this summer.
It’s an indication of how just one venue can make the difference between a healthy music scene and no scene at all. The locals behind the Napier say they hope at some point they’ll be able to buy the building from the brewery, to try secure the pub’s future for good. They’ve made other changes, too. The pub has branched out into putting on comedy. There’s a wider range of drinks and a new food menu. But the people behind the bar might still be the most metal you’ll meet.
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