So, having skimmed a variety of recent LJ posts on the subject...

[mrph]

Today's question: Is the UK goth scene broken? And, if so, just what changes d'you think would be needed to fix it?

Yes, I know this is a can of worms. But I'm curious to see what people think. This is mostly sparked by Uncle Nem's excellent Leipzig piece and the LJ comments it triggered.

(Now that you've lured him to Leipzig, can we drag him to M'era Luna next year, chimera_s? I'd quite like to see a similar write-up on that, a very different kind of German festival...).

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

Funny you should mention London. London's gig scene, AFAICS, is saturated or possibly over-saturated, compared to the apathy of the punters. Flag seems to be putting on gigs every week, or fortnight at most, but not many of them seem to raise much enthusiasm, especially amongst non-London goers. Outside London there is still very little.

I think it might help if the bands who are playing London regularly were to play less frequently but over a greater geographical area. I suspect the problem is that bands and promoters alike have run out of cash to keep the gig scene going, since the punters won't support it any more.

I'm not sure what the solution is. People just can't be arsed with gigs, so their only exposure to music is at clubs, hence "club music" (i.e. bleepy shit) sells CD and "gig music" doesn't (yeah, I know it's not as black and white as that, but the point stands). What we need is something to make people get off their arses, something to make people care about live music. What that might be, I don't know.