#savepublicmusic

It’s been a troubling week for music as a collective activity, open to the general public. On Monday, news rapidly spread that legendary Shoreditch club Plastic People is under threat of closure by Hackney Council under the advice of the police, prompting an extraordinary ‘Save Plastic People’ campaign. The club has spent a decade housing and incubating the best and freshest of UK dance musics. Days later, we learnt that the unique BBC digital radio stations 6 Music and The Asian Network could well be shut down as part of a belt-tightening exercise that apparently pre-empts an oncoming Conservative government.

Plastic People, BBC 6 Music and The Asian Network all share a faith in music that’s outside of – even ahead of – the mainstream, and they exist to bring that music to a wider audience. Institutions like these are of course vital to the health of musical creativity and innovation in this country and worldwide. Moreover, the threat of their demise is a symptom of the trend that sees music slowly transforming from a collective activity that builds and benefits societies, stoking the imaginations of those who participate in it, into an economically viable product made for personally selected, individual consumption – or at the most, a fashionable, elite but ultimately inoffensive decoration for the solipsistic cycles of sex, money-making and waiting around that our lives are increasingly held to amount to.

Tellingly, one of the reasons given for the ‘application to review’ Plastic People’s licence was ‘Prevention of Public Nuisance’. Which public? Whose public? Here, PP’s promotion of public activity becomes the nuisance caused by a public, which evidently needs to be prevented. Music is being shifted from a publicly shared activity to the peaceful security of private consumption from within our own little kingdoms – from a collective, participatory act of open-minded creativity and imagination to an easy, quality-controlled and stultifying familiarity.
Let’s not have that. Get involved. Help save public music. These are the first things you can do:

You can sign the petition against the closure of Plastic People by following this link.

You can sign the petition against the closure of BBC 6 Music and The Asian Network by following this link.
But don’t let it end there. Keep watching and protesting, because there may well be more of this sort of thing to come.