Grassroots Music Venues across Bristol unite to create fortnight festival of music – Fightback Bristol. 16 participating venues already confirmed – over 130 shows.

Music Venue Trust are delighted to announce Fightback Bristol, a 2 week celebration of Bristol’s vital Grassroots Music Venues that will take place 4-18th February 2019.

Fightback Bristol is a new spring campaign that will encourage audiences to visit their local grassroots music venue and promote the Bristol’s emerging and existing musical talent.

Fightback Bristol will provide the focus for events taking place at the city’s Grassroots Music Venues, with live music every day throughout the festival at a whole range of venues right across Bristol.

More than 100 events at over 14 venues have already been confirmed, with many more to be added, including special featured events. Venues taking part include :

Colston Hall • The Crofters Rights • Exchange • Fiddlers • The Fleece • The Island • The Lanes • The Louisiana • Mother’s Ruin • Mr. Wolf’s • Thekla • Trinity Centre • Bristol 02 Academy • The Old Bookshop

The majority of the events that make up the programme at Exchange and booked by promoters hiring the venue. We think it’s therefore only fair to let the world know about the wonderful people who help us fill our diary with their awesome events and to give a little insight on why they do it. The first collective of promoter’s we wanted to focus on are Eat Up, so we asked them for a few words and they most kindly obliged.

Eat Up started in December 2017, when a group of friends, who met through going to punk gigs in Bristol, decided to create our own events uniting music, performance, art, politics and activism with a strong feminist and queer ethos. Bristol already has some great promoters putting on excellent events and a wide variety of queer nights, however it still felt like there was room for more female and genderqueer voices. The punk scene is traditionally dominated by white, straight, cis male performers and promoters, and as a group we wanted to challenge that and have more bands on stage that we, and the people who come to Eat Up, could identify with and be inspired by. So here we are!

We currently put on events every two months at the Exchange bringing together bands from Bristol and beyond. At our last event, we hosted an unofficial pride party, where we were excited to add queer performers such as Brizzle Boiz and Dancing Queer to our usual brilliant music lineup. We hope to continue this for future events.

Acts that have recently graced the Eat Up stage include Charmpit, Witching Waves, Crumbs, Bellies!, Molar, The Wine Mums and many more. We also invite local DIY artists to sell zines and artwork and Active Distribution joined us earlier this year to share some of their anarchist literature. Our queer politics are also central to the work we do and as such we offer a table to activist groups too. For example we recently had ACTUP Bristol who are dedicated to ending the HIV pandemic. We really want our events to showcase the Bristol queer community and are dedicated to diversifying this as much as possible – we’ve got lots of things to be proud of in our city, and we want to show them off.

We always want to build on what we’ve made so far and have recently launched our Eat Up For Starters programme – it’s a series of workshops and events that aim to act as an aid for people forming bands. We’re specifically aiming this for people who have never been in bands before, people who felt it wasn’t for them. We want to hear as many voices as possible – it would be great to diversify the Bristol music scene, so we’re giving it a go. Exchange is a place where many super established acts now have cut their teeth – and it is now supporting us, with space in kind for workshops, to support others to grow those teeth they’ll be cutting soon.

We’ve really appreciated the support that the Exchange has offered us. Without them Eat Up nights couldn’t be what they are now. We’ve found all the staff really friendly – excellent sound technicians who are open to our bands varied requests! It’s really great to be able to put on Eat Up in a place where staff share our values and believe in the importance of safe spaces so we can trust that everyone that comes will be looked after across the board and everyone is focussed on making the nights the best they can possibly be. It means a lot to us as a collective of women and queers that the Exchange values groups and events such as ours, and sees that the representation that we are trying to showcase is as important as we think it is.

So far feedback for the events has been really encouraging and shows us that our personal need and want for a night such as this was probably felt by quite a few people. Some people have come to the nights not really knowing the bands and have gone away wanting to listen to them at home, or holding one of their records. And probably one of the best things we’ve heard is that one person who doesn’t usually feel comfortable out dancing in public spent two whole hours on the dimly-lit Eat Up dancefloor to the awesome tunes of DJ Sissy Boy Tears having the best time! And that really is testament to the people who are coming to Eat Up supporting the event and the acts who have come to perform. So we can’t thank you, and them enough! Bring on more Eat Up fun!

If you want to come to any of our future events please check out our Facebook and Instagram pages:

For specific For Starters events please see here.

In August this year we announced that the future of Exchange was in doubt and launched a campaign to #SaveExchange by becoming Bristol’s first Community owned Live Music Venue. Although the venue was never under immediate threat, the three directors of Exchange decided the long term future of Exchange could not be guaranteed without investment and involvement from people outside of the current ownership group. Therefore the decision was taken for Exchange to become a Community Benefit Society and to launch a Community Share Issue to raise £250k to help secure the long term future of the venue.

From September 2018 the people of Bristol, music fans from across the world and social investors were able to buy Community shares and became co-owners of the venue. On 26th October we reached our minimum target, and five days later at the end of the campaign we had managed to hit our maximum target of £300k with over 400 people buying Community shares.

If you are interested to find out more about why we chose to run this campaign, what a Community Benefit Society is / how Community Shares work and how we plan to spend the money raised then you can still read our Share Offer Document by clicking this link.

As of 1st November 2019 membership to the Community Benefit Society is closed until such point we can consult with our members on how best to manage future membership. In the meantime you are welcome to consider becoming a Friend of Exchange.

SAVE EXCHANGE PRESS

Bristol 24/7 Interview

Bristol Live Magazine Interview

Nitelife Magazine Interview

Bristol Cable Interview

Crack Magazine

Bristol Evening Post

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank everyone who invested, became a Friend of Exchange and helped promote our Community ownership campaign. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the following companies and individuals who helped assist us.

Community Shares Company

Social Investment Business

Ethex

Oliver Holtaway

Bath Komedia

Le Public Space

Music Venue Trust

2018 has already seen the closure of two Bristol Music Venues as well as the threats of noise complaints affecting more than half of Bristols Grassroots Music Venues. Recognising the need to address these issues and others, MPs Thangham Debbonnaire and Kerry McCarthy organised an Event to discuss these issues and work on solutions. The event was well attended with most Bristol GMVs represented as well as the Music Venues Trust, Musicians Union and Save Bristol Nightlife. More information about the event and the issues discussed can be found on Thangam’s website.

Exchange is very proud to announce that we have been signed off as Bronze on the Attitude Is Everything’s Grassroots Charter.

Attitude is Everything improves Deaf and disabled people’s access to live music by working in partnership with audiences, artists and the music industry to implement a Charter of Best Practice across the UK. They help the music industry to understand the requirements of Deaf and disabled people at live music events by building equality into the strategic process.

Please visit our Accessibility Page for more informaton on Venue Access – https://exchangebristol.com/posts/accessibility

This week marks the fifth annual Independent Venue Week and the fourth year Exchange has taken part. Full listings are on our What’s On page, but we are very happy to be hosting an official IVW event curated by local legend, Big Jeff, on Wednesday 31st January. Expect an eclectic line up with Psychedelic Post-Punkers, Jesuits, No Wave Improvisers, Ice Man Furniss and a DJ Set from Big Jeff himself.

Exchange owner, Matthew Otridge, was recently interviewed as part of Bristol Magazines Article on the challenges that Bristol Music Venues face. Topics covered include Agent Of Change, the cultural significance of live music venues and why Exchange become a Community Interest Company.

Link to the full article is here

Matt was also interviewed by Bristol 24/7 about a similar issues – Link to that article here.

Exchange has signed up to the Bristol Zero Tolerance Initiative. Over the past ten years it has always been important to us that people feel safe in our venues and becoming a part of this Initiative and making others aware of issues such as these was a no brainer.

Bristol Zero Tolerance is a new initiative set up by Bristol Women’s Commission working towards Bristol becoming a city free from gender-based violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation. Bristol is the first city in England to take on this challenge and we hope that it will inspire other cities to implement similar initiatives.

This Commission-led initiative works with the City Council and other bodies to bring together existing action on gender-based violence across the city and are encouraging and supporting other organisations to sign up and take action on this important issue. City leaders and major employers across the city are invited to lead by example by signing the pledge and committing to taking at least one action to promote a Zero Tolerance to gender-based violence.

The vision of the Zero Tolerance City initiative is for Bristol to become a city with a zero tolerance approach to gender-based violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation.

“We think Bristol Zero Tolerance is a really important project that we’re delighted to be a part of. We strive to create a space that is welcoming, safe and tolerant for everyone who comes to see a show. We strongly believe that live music should be an experience that is open to everyone and we’re looking forward to working with Bristol Zero Tolerance to help get that message across.” – Iwan Best, Events Manager

For more information about Bristol Zero Tolerance please visit their website at www.bristolzerotolerance.com

We are sad to report that our long time head Engineer and friend Paul Jocelyn passed away yesterday. In recent years PJ was best known for his work at Exchange and The Croft, but before that he was also a regular in places such as The Fleece And Firkin, Louisiana and TJs as well as working in his own recording studio. Paul’s enthusiasm, approach and unique sense of humour meant that he made a lot of friends through his job and I know the Bristol Music Community will be deeply saddened by this news. Our thoughts go out to Paul’s family and in particular his son and daughter, Sam and Louise.

Below is a video Bristol Live Magazine made for the end of The Croft with a section where PJ’s outstanding service to Bristol Music is discussed.