The Metropolis

Livingstone advocates a SXSW-style fest for London

Darryl Chamberlain | Sunday 5 September, 2010 20:58

London’s Labour Party members will be choosing their candidate for 2012’s mayoral election during September – with the capital’s live music scene joining transport, housing and the economy as one of the themes of the debate.

Challenger and former MP Oona King – last seen losing to George Galloway in her Bethnal Green & Bow seat five years ago – has made much of her apparent youth in the contest, with the 43-year-old fondly reminiscing about nights out at the Ministry of Sound.

She hopes her talk of clubbing will persuade the Labour faithful that she’s more in touch with today’s London than former mayor Ken Livingstone, who’ll be 66 when Boris Johnson’s job comes up for grabs.

Ken’s response to Oona’s club-hopping claims was to promise to champion London’s live music scene if he got a third term in the post he was booted out of two years ago.

One of his ideas was to change London’s planning guidelines to protect music venues and rehearsal spaces, after the loss of the Astoria, the Hammersmith Palais and numerous smaller venues.

While Ken’s conversion to the live music cause will be welcomed by many gig-goers, his words were not matched by his deeds during his eight years as mayor.
Where the Astoria stood is now a huge building site for Crossrail – a project backed by the mayoralty.

While the on-off Crossrail plans had threatened the Astoria’s existence for nearly 20 years, no attempt was made to find an immediate replacement, meaning the West End has no medium-sized gig venue.

Ken also mentioned the long-running threat to Camden’s Electric Ballroom – but that was down to the then-mayor himself, whose Transport for London wanted the site to give Camden Town station a long-overdue revamp. Camden Council threw out the scheme in 2003.

But his most eye-catching idea was to create a London version of South By South West – the acclaimed industry get-together in Austin, Texas. Of course, SXSW is about a lot more than music – covering film and interactive media too. But would a London version – LDNxSW? – go down so well?

One thing to bear in mind is that Austin is a tenth of the size of London, with the US music industry happy to relocate to the Texas state capital for a few days. As anyone who’s ever been annoyed by freeloaders at gigs will know, the UK music industry is already in London.

The big problem LDNxSW would face is that another English city got there first.
Manchester’s In The City – a series of gigs and industry seminars – has been running since 1992 and was the brainchild of much-missed impresario Tony Wilson.

Like Ken is for London, he was a passionate advocate for his city. Mancunians won’t welcome London moving in on their territory – and would the British music industry support two similar events?

And is it really the mayor’s job to directly intervene in a music industry that’s perfectly capable of coming up with the goods itself?

All a mayor can really do is create the conditions for live music to flourish – and some would say Ken didn’t help that during his first two terms.
However, altering licensing and planning laws plays to Ken’s strengths as a man who can take a strategic overview of how a city runs.

He might be better advised to leave organising festivals to others, though.

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