Thirty-five years ago in London there were hundreds of small venues and they would compete to host bands to pull punters in to buy beer. Now there are so few venues the bands are being charged for beerspace in which to be heard.
Thirty-five years ago holding auditions for a show was an overhead, an upfront cost, as was advertising and the deposit on the venue. Selling tickets brought a bit of cash back in in the run up to it but the real profit still came from selling beer and tshirts on the night.
Now Simon Cowell has turned the audition process into a highly profitable television show and makes his money whether beer is sold or not. It is that role the promoters who charge crave, the one they forget they saw on telly.
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No city has ever been responsible for creating a vibrant art and music scene. It is always the art and music scene that creates the vibrant city. It is always the vibrant city that then attracts the moneyed who all too soon flood it with their sterilising cash.
It is not for artists to bemoan the passing of an era in an area, not to dwell in what once was there, just to understand it and to take learning from it that wherever you are inspired to create or to perform you are the seed of the next vibrant place.
Oh, and, please pick somewhere with better weather than London's. Leave cold, grey conurbations to the bankers and let them pay each other silly rents and salaries to live and work there.
Take your imagination and your equipment to somewhere the sun shines to your taste and you have space in which to live and breathe.
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Politicians of all colours have failed to balance Greece's books and Economists are having serious trouble with the sums, too, the ruins of its passed greatness having become millstones in the fullness of time.
Maybe we should send in the Artists, the people who can turn still air into poetry using their voices and instruments of music and those who can separate light into whatever they think.
© Po 2015
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