150 people at Margate’s ‘Where Else’: Inside the vital triumph of Courtney Barnett’s mini tour of British indie venues
Courtney Barnett recently wrapped up a whirlwind and triumphant tour of tiny club dates spread out across England. The unusual mini tour saw the Australian take in nights at the Independent in Sunderland, the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge (where she treated the crowd to a cover of Wings’ ‘Let Me Roll It’), Esquires in Bedford and, finally, the especially intimate Where Else? in Margate.
The tour was a beautiful triumph, but why did she embark on such an intimate run in the first place?
The first time that I ever saw Courtney Barnett live, she was playing on a bill in support of Patti Smith and Nick Cave on the main stage at London’s All Points East festival in Victoria Park in front of 50,000 people. On that beautiful summer day in 2018, Barnett was by far the best of those three acts. She was the most engaging, commanding, energising and enervating. She was the most vital, electrifying and arresting presence at the whole festival, for that matter.
In fact, for me, the highlight of even Patti Smith’s set was seeing Barnett standing at the side of the stage, wide-eyed with wonder and mouth wide in a grin, snapping photos of the punk-poet on her Polaroid camera.
Though I was already a huge fan of Barnett’s music by the time I saw her singing for the first time, I was now entranced by her live performance, too, and so made an effort to see her whenever I could, including at a sold-out headline show at London’s Roundhouse in Camden just three days after that All Points East performance. That early July night, she played a giddying, sublime and excoriating run-through of Tell Me How You Really Feel in its entirety to start the show before working in some older songs in the second half of the setlist.
Later on, at the end of that year, I caught her again at the Brixton Academy, just a short walk from where I was living at the time. In between those shows, I’d seen her perform – perhaps the best show of all of them – in a relatively small bar in Nashville, TN, before jumping on a Greyhound bus and moving on to see Bob Dylan, first in Chattanooga and then again in Knoxville, on Halloween. The Dylan shows were spectacular, but the trip would have been worth it alone just to see Barnett in such close quarters.
The next year, I saw Barnett again on another stage at another trip to All Points East (this one headlined by The Strokes, and featuring standout sets by Jarvis Cocker and Connan Mockasin). By that time, I’d taken to bringing Barnett’s photo to the hairdressers with me and wearing my hair in a mullet. I would even mirror Barnett’s stage uniform: always a white t-shirt (hers plain, but mine with a small red text that read Tell Me How You Really Feel emblazoned across the chest), loose black trousers, and the look completed by a black pair of round-toe Chelsea boots and blood-red Tell Me How You Really Feel socks.
There was a sort of holy communion taking place in each and every one of those crowds, the conversation not just coming off the stage but being transmuted back towards Barnett and her band, and an energy being shared by everyone in all of those rooms. “I am just a reflection / Of what you really wanna see”, she sings on ‘Kim’s Caravan’ from 2015, but I think, really, in every crowd, we’ve been a reflection of Barnett, and a reflection of all the pieces of the people in her orbit.
When Barnett announced a string of tiny club dates in support of her latest album, Creature of Habit, at the start of the year, including one in my now-hometown, Margate, and at the 150-person capacity bar ,Where Else?, of all places, I was in dreamland. Unsurprisingly, tickets for the show sold out in seconds and became the fastest-selling booking in the venue’s nearly 10-year history.
Whether you’re surrounded by 15,000 other people seeing Courtney Barnett with you, or just 150, she has got an uncanny knack of making you feel as if she is singing for an audience of one – each and every song is all for you, and you alone – but it’s in the smaller venues where her music really comes alive. She deserves to be seen and heard by as many people as possible, but it’s in the smallest and most intimate spaces where her music really gets to show you just how terrifically enormous it is.
But the question still lingered… Barnett is now an international star. With a new album on the horizon, why did she choose to launch it in such an understated manner, to rooms packed to the rafters with not much more than handfuls of people?
“We wanted to pick towns in the UK that have strong music communities that often get overlooked by international touring bands, and play their grassroots venues”, Barnett’s management team told me ahead of the show. “We also kept ticket prices at £15 for all shows to make them affordable and accessible for fans.”
Where Else? had been struggling with financial difficulties for the last few months, as everywhere in Britain has been, but continued to be a vital space in our community for people wanting to come together to share a common interest and to have a good time. Thankfully, the venue has been given a lifeline by the local community and survives to book gigs for another day.
Alongside The Margate Bookshop and The Crab Museum, CAMP and Cliffs, Olby’s, Some Nice Things, Giant, Curve Coffee or else The Margate Caves and The Shell Grotto, Where Else? has established itself over the years as one of the best-loved local haunts for anybody in town, and has become central to the music scene in the neighbourhood.
Though legendary names like Tom Jones, The Flaming Lips and Chic have frequently played on the scenic stage in the Dreamland funfair down by the sea, Where Else? has always been more of a springboard venue for up-and-coming talent, and boasts performances from a tantalising and diverse range of artists in recent times like Los Bitchos, Sports Team, Wet Leg, Lael Neale and Chloe Slater, as well as pulling in incredible but less well-known international talent like Sahra Halgan, too, and, now, Courtney Barnett as well.
As excited as owner and booking agent Sammy Clarke has been to be able to draw Courtney Barnett to play in the venue (making this the second time that he’s booked Barnett to play in Margate, following a surprise 2017 show where she played backing guitar during a show by Jen Cloher in Olby’s Soul Cafe), but he’s also keen that people take note of the other acts that are appearing on the Where Else? stage in her wake, as well.
Barnett herself is no stranger to championing new and up-and-coming talent (you only needed to look at the glorious and curious ethos of discovery that radiated off of her Milk! Records roster and her range of supporting artists over the years like Hachiku, Jade Imagine and Waxahatchee), and Clarke wants people to be excited about not only seeing Courtney Barnett herself in this venue, but also wants them to be as excited about seeing the next Courtney Barnett there, too.
Upcoming shows at Where Else? include groups like The Leaf Library, Heavenphetamine, Ni Maxine, Dean Rodney Jr & The Cowboys, The Tara Clerkin Trio and Chinese American Bear. Clarke has also got an eye, and an ear, on Marsy, a London-based five-piece signed to Heavenly Recordings, who have been recording elsewhere in Margate. If you like Courtney Barnett, he tells me over coffee, chances are you’ll like Marsy as well.
Barnett had quietly been playing new material through her summer shows in America in 2025, and has since gone on to release her fourth record, which might just be her best album yet. Creature of Habit finds Barnett back at the top of her game, and in its strongest moments, the release sounds like an amalgamation, culmination and crescendo of everything that she has made before. These songs would all have worked on any of her previous records, but they also manage to sound fresh, vital, celestially charged and solar-powered. They’re each and every one of them quintessentially Courtney Barnett.
And, like all of her best songs, they come alive even more on the stage. Stepping into the Where Else? spotlight alongside long-time bassist Bones Sloane and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, Barnett is in imperious form from the off. In interviews, in public, in Anonymous Club and in her lyrics, she may seem shy and unassuming, but with a guitar around her neck and an audience at her feet, Barnett emits an awesome power that can barely be contained by the bigger venues that she plays in, let alone the bars and clubs she’s been playing this week.
Opening with the Creature of Habit lead single, and album opener, ‘Stay in Your Lane’, Barnett bites into the lyrics, her guitar overdriven and ready to blow at a moment’s notice, locking into step instantly with Sloane and Mozgwana. “I do my best”, she roars into the crowd, and we know from the off that she really will. “Gotta get this off my chest!”
For the rest of the night, Barnett blended the best of her new album with selections from her ever-more-impressive catalogue. ‘Avant Gardener’ and ‘Depreston’ draw huge cheers from the crowd, who sing along with every word, while ‘Small Poppies’ has only ever grown in demonic, earth-shattering power over the years. By the time the band blast through ‘Pedestrian at Best’, the entire room is shaking with everybody jumping, bouncing and letting loose.
Some more recent songs like ‘Before You Gotta Go’ and ‘Write a List of Things to Look Forward To’ are also supercharged on stage and wash over the crowd with incredible energy, but it’s the new songs that were injected into the setlist which tipped the show over the edge and took it from strength to strength, though, and which really cements her status as one of the best contemporary touring, performing and recording artists.
‘Site Unseen’, ‘Mantis’ and ‘Sugar Plum’ feature some of Barnett’s most joyous, effervescent and freewheeling melodies, and in person, they each radiate a warmth and electricity that could have powered the room, and all of her amplification, as well. In a very short time, these will be the songs that people come to see her for, as much as ‘Depreston’ or ‘Avant Gardener’.
In a room this size, barely any amplification is needed in the first place – the crowd is so close to the stage that it feels like everybody in the room is part of the group, and are all a part of what is going on, and the noise that just these three people in front of you manage to make is astounding. Barnett plays a simultaneous rhythm and lead guitar hybrid style that kicks off a fuller and more impressive sound than some groups manage with multiple musicians wielding the axe.
The intimacy of performing in a place like this was especially evident through Barnett’s solo reading of ‘Mostly Patient’, the most tender and serene song of her latest collection, the slight crackle and sandpaper-edge creeping into Barnett’s voice from a week of overuse, and what seems like the start of a cold only adding an extra texture and emotion to her singing.
By the end of the night, and now at the end of this tour-in-miniature, Barnett has blown the minds of everybody in the room. These new songs might not be a step outside of the familiar, or into the unknown, for anybody with a passing interest in Barnett’s work – she is, after all, a ‘Creature of Habit’ – but they are easily as strong, inventive, surprising, evocative and life-affirming as anything that she released on Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Tell Me How You Really Feel or Things Take Time, Take Time.
Barnett is the best at what she does, and these new songs are some of the best that she’s ever written. Her tour now moves on to North America, before a string of dates in Japan later in the year. After that, she’ll be back in North America for another stint of shows before returning to Europe in October to perform in Berlin, Cologne, Utrecht, Brussels, Esch-sur-Alzette, Paris, Glasgow, Gateshead, Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol and London. A day after her 39th birthday (“I’m a fake, I’m a phony, I’m awake, I’m alone. I’m homely, I’m a Scorpio”), Barnett will then take her tour through her Native Australia, before ending the year in New Zealand.
So don’t just stay in your own lane – go out and see her when she next comes through the town that you live in. You won’t regret it one bit. Tickets for her UK tour are on sale now.
