To be Match Fit is to be at the top of your game.
Practice, practice, practice makes perfect.
To be absolutely dedicated, to work hard to be the best you can be. To raise the game for others.
We consider the hard-working independent music venues and the artists who play there as being the living, gigging embodiment of this sentiment.
For 2025, we are spotlighting both - celebrating bands and their local venues up and down the country. Hometown heroes, all of them.
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Walk up the 24 stairs leading to the gig space at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut and you’re standing on the shoulders of future giants. Painted on the treads are the names of some of the bands who’ve played this legendary, 300-capacity Glasgow club. There, in at the ground floor, are The Charlatans, early adopters in 1990, the year of the venue’s opening. It’s a night seared into the memory of frontman Tim Burgess.
“Playing King Tut’s was a massive deal for us,” the singer says of his band who, that year, released their debut single, ‘Indian Rope’. “That’s a huge venue for artists starting out. It was the first time we got fed at a gig! I remember even turning up in our van as being a magical thing.”
The rollcall of future superstars immortalised on King Tut’s stairway-to-stadiums is little short of era-defining. In 1991, Manic Street Preachers and Blur; 1992, Suede; 1993, Pulp, The Verve – and, on 31st May that year, a gang of unruly Mancunians.
The five musicians had hustled their way onto the bill below Creation bands Boyfriend and 18 Wheeler, and were performing third or fourth on the bill. Recollections vary of that boozy night, but by the end of their 15-minute, four-song set, one thing was clear: Alan McGee had seen the future of rock’n’roll and its name was Oasis. The boss of Creation promptly signed the band.
If that impromptu moment 32 years ago at that independent venue hadn’t happened, the world’s biggest tour of 2025 – the Oasis comeback, ticket demand for which broke the internet last year – wouldn’t be happening. And the lives of two generations of music fans, not to mention the lives of the young lads onstage that night at King Tut’s, wouldn’t be the same.
“Alan McGee’s wouldn’t, ours wouldn’t,” Noel Gallagher agreed when I put that point to him in 2021. “We’d have got there eventually, no doubt. But all it would have taken was for someone to not be there that night at King Tut’s. Or for someone not to be there at the next gig, which might have been two months away. Or for someone to lose interest in the band and give up.”
Walk down the stairs leading into the 100 Club and you’re stepping into history. In its 80-year existence, the hallowed venue on London’s Oxford Street, hidden beneath the pavement of Britain’s biggest shopping thoroughfare, has hosted them all. From The Sex Pistols to The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney to Paul Weller, Metallica to Green Day, Wet Leg to CASISDEAD, multiple up-and-coming acts, buzzed-about phenoms, tomorrow legends and actual legends have played this graffiti-scarred, autograph-bedecked, photography-stuffed, 320-capacity room.
“I have a special connection with the 100 Club,” says Mark Davyd. The co-founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust (MVT) is friends with Jeff and Ruby Horton, the fired-up father-and-daughter team who run the London club. He’s not talking, though, from bias – not least because he owns his own club-sized spot, Tunbridge Wells’ Forum – but from passion. “It was the first venue I ever paid to get into myself: I went to see a band called The Sound in 1980 or ’81. I leant on a pillar at the back and just felt completely at home. I thought: this is what I want to do. I was fascinated by the band, but also the lights, the sound, who put the show on, who’s doing what jobs. I realised there was a lot of work there – and maybe I could be part of it.”
Davyd wasn’t wrong: there was magic in that room, and it did take a lot of work to make that magic. But over four decades on from that transformative night for this hardcore music fan, it’s taking a lot more work for people like the Hortons to keep that magic alive.
Jeff is an indefatigable 64-year-old who’s been running the 100 Club for 41 years. He’s now helped by Ruby, 29, the pair putting on some 200 gigs a year, five nights a week, in what is arguably London’s most iconic club venue. When South London band Folly Group performed to a packed house in December, a night immortalised by Fred Perry, playing the 100 Club was as much a buzz for the band as was the general feeling of capping a busy 2024 with a victory lap gig in their hometown.
All of which made that band, that evening, in that venue, the perfect launch point for our MVT series in which we celebrate grassroots bands and the local, grassroots venues that are helping build the musical stars of tomorrow.
As Tim Burgess puts it: “Those venues are the ecosystem. They’re like bees. If bees disappeared from the globe, there’s only four years of life – no more pollination, no more crops, no more food. And venues are where bands grow. Every band who’s playing a stadium has started off in a small venue, whether that’s Oasis or Coldplay or Sam Fender. They’ve been through Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff or Bath Moles or the 100 Club.”
“That Folly Group was a great night for the 100 Club,” says Ruby. “We’ve been looking forward to having the band at the venue for a long time. That time of year, with a gig in the festive/Christmas party season, always works really well. From end October to end of December we have lot of shows like that. It always makes for a busy room and a lot of fun.”
But the Hortons, like their fellow venue-runners and gig-promoters up and down the country, are enduring a perfect storm of pressures. Those 200 shows are largely confined to the weeks from September to February. The rest of the year, the calendrical creep of festival season, and the contractual blocks on festival-booked bands from playing smaller venues, robs them of available artists. And, therefore, of revenue.
Beyond that, “the biggest issue is the economy,” says Jeff. “People’s lack of money. Rent in London now is absolute ridiculous. You have people on minimum wage, on zero-hour contracts, who are paying through the nose just to have a roof over their heads.
“The other situation is that bar takes are much, much smaller now, even with a room full of people. People drink a lot less, and they’re far more health conscious. And I don’t care what anyone says: most venues lives depend on their bar takes, because a big percentage of ticket sales normally ends up with the artists. That hasn’t helped.”
Britain’s grassroots music venues (GMVs), and the musicians who play them, are in crisis. In 2024, one of those venues closed on average every week. MVT’s latest annual report, launched in January, highlighted what they describe as the “huge decline” in the lowest levels of the UK touring circuit. That is, the small- and medium-sized venues in which artists play their first gigs, learn the ropes, build an audience, build a future.
As the report put it: “In the 30-year period between 1994 and 2024 those touring locations have collapsed, with an average tour in 1994 including 22 dates and the equivalent tour in 2024 consisting of only 11 dates. Furthermore, touring in 1994 was spread across a range of 28 different locations across the country. In 2024, just 12 locations, all of them major cities, remained as primary and secondary touring circuit stops, acting as regular hosts to grassroots tours.”
More numbers from the report: last year the 30,000 people employed by those venues helped put on over 162,000 live music events. That equates to almost 1.5m individual artist performances, playing to a combined audience knocking on for 20 million music fans. MVT calculate that those events contributed £526 million to the UK economy. “However,” it wrote, “on average GMV’s, 33% of which are now registered as not-for profit entities – a 29% increase in not-for-profit registration since 2023 – operated on a profit margin of just 0.48%, with 43.8% of them reporting a loss in the last 12 months. This means that the sector as a whole effectively subsidised live music activity to the tune of £162 million.
And that’s before we calculate the value of the collective pleasure brought by those 162,000 music events. Because, well, that’s incalculable, right?
