An uneasy quiet is starting to settle on the UK, particularly at night. People still go out; millions of us still seem to have a deep fondness for nocturnal company, hedonism and noise. But this fundamental part of our culture may well be slipping away, for one very stark reason: the accelerated closure of clubs and music venues.

Earlier this year, the Music Venue Trust (MVT), which exists to help and nurture grassroots establishments with an average capacity of about 300 people, published its latest annual report. In the course of 2023, it had registered the loss of 125 such venues, which had either gone out of business or stopped hosting gigs. The issues that tied everything together centred on soaring rents and energy costs, the economic slipstream of the Covid crisis, and the apparently mounting issue of disputes about noise abatement kicked off by people living in city centres, which were common factors all over the country. By way of illustrating their spread, the case studies in the report included venues in Liverpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Bath.

The latter city, it still pains me to write, has just lost a much-loved place called Moles, which took its name from a performance space that was literally and metaphorically underground. This was where, as a 20-year-old freelance music writer, I did my first big interview, with a long-lost band whose name now seems crushingly apt. They were a gnarly, Velvet Underground-esque quartet called The Perfect Disaster. Thirty-odd years after I nervously quizzed them in the venue’s back room and watched them play to a crowd of 200 before the obligatory indie disco, the MVT put Moles’ tragic........

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