A Tribute to Dave Laing

The Popular Music scholar and writer, Dave Laing died suddenly on 6th January 2019. Amongst many other things, Dave was a very good friend to Live Music Exchange, someone to whom we often turned to for advice and help. Both were always freely given in a wonderfully supportive way. In this post, we offer an LMX tribute to Dave.  

Fall Guy – Martin Cloonan

Mark E Smith, leader of English post-punk group The Fall, died on 24 January 2018. To mark the anniversary of Smith’s death Live Music Exchange co-founder Martin Cloonan provides some thoughts on the band’s live appearances.  

Valuing small venues: The Cellar, Oxford – Live Music Exchange team

Anyone following the Live Music Exchange blog will be well aware that the UK has seen an alarming number of small music venue closures over the past decade or so.  The latest venue under threat is The Cellar in Oxford, an underground 150-capacity venue which has been a music venue for more than 45 years. The owner, St Michael’s and …  

Getting the Needle – Martin Cloonan

This week’s blog post is by Live Music Exchange’s own Martin Cloonan, who, with John Williamson, has just completed an important piece of work on the social history of the Musicians’ Union (for more on this, listen to Martin on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed). This piece is about how the policy of ‘needletime’, brought in to protect the musicians …  

The Ecology of Live Music: the evolution of an idea – Live Music Exchange editorial team

To mark the publication of our academic article on the live music ecology, the LMX team is publishing our original discussion notes. These illustrate the origins of the ideas that inform the article but include points that weren’t further developed (and perhaps should have been). We thought it worth making public—particularly in relation to this topic—an aspect of the academic process that is usually hidden.