The first thing you see going down the stairs to Bloc+, the beloved Glasgow music venue that’s been keeping Bath Street moving for more than twenty years, is a massive Antifa mural. Sitting with venue manager Chris Cusack, I wondered how important it is to him to lead with their values.
‘So few venues actually seem to represent anything any more,’ he said. ‘ It’s hard to feel personally invested in a lot of music venues, because even though you might see some really great gigs there, ultimately they’re just retail outlets. We wanted to underscore the fact that we’re accountable; the fact that we’re in tune with things that are happening; the fact that we will, when appropriate, stand up on an issue. One of the maxims we used was that we want to succeed as part of the scene, not just profit from the scene.’
That inclusivity extends to the venue always having free entry, something Chris attributes to his experiences as a working-class artist. ‘There are always ways in which you end up being excluded from certain aspects of music. There are statistics that show that with the Top 20, a certain percentage – around 84 percent – are privately educated. The ladder is slowly getting pulled up and it’s getting harder to make music if you’re from a lower income background, because you don’t have a financial safety net. Maybe you can’t afford the right instruments; maybe you have to go straight into work after school and you don’t have that privilege of the time to experiment.
We wanted to try and do as much as we could to minimise those barriers. So free entry is one less cost that could make people think twice about going out and having a social life, about being housebound. People don’t have to come in here and drink. They can come in, have a glass of water, watch a show, and just enjoy that and feel like they’re surrounded by people.’
Glasgow has always produced a wealth of great artists disproportionate to its size, and I wondered if Chris had any insight into why. ‘A lot of creative types converge on Glasgow. That’s why I’m here. Stirling was a very hard place to get something going, or at least keep it going. I think the other part of it comes from its really working class-credentials. If you look back through some of the biggest acts that have emerged from Scotland, they came from fairly normal backgrounds; going back to John Martyn, even Billy Connolly. It’s such a creative city, coming from that musical background. It has an authenticity.’
Whilst some massive names – Clutch and Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, to name just two – have played in the bar, some of the most memorable gigs have been much stranger, with cracked electronics or performance art. That eclecticism is an important part of the venue’s ethos: ‘I was in a number of bands and, sensing that all our opportunities lay elsewhere, we started travelling around Europe and the scenes there.
Because they’re not the centre of the universe the way that the UK tends to think it is, those scenes were a lot more innovative. And that level of innovation was really inspiring to me. We weren’t getting those acts here often enough, so we would try and put them on. We had bands from China, Latin America, all over Europe, North Africa. We’ve had bands from the Middle East. But they all had something totally unorthodox that we wanted to show to people here and get their brains thinking outside the box.
There’s a lot of great indie rock, but you would come in here and see a guy with triggered drums and a face mask, and a guitar going through a looper that was hanging from a handle, and he was hitting at these drumsticks. And it would give people ideas. So I saw our free entry policy as a way to say to people: come and see something that could be totally outrageous. I think my favourite customers are the customers that just decide it’s Thursday, I’ve not got anything on, I’m going to take a chance. Because then they’re really putting their trust in me. I really respect that.’
Bloc+ is at 117 Bath St, Glasgow, with free-to-enter gigs almost every night. More details on their website bloc.ru
