The day Van Halen played the humble Cafe Wha?: “This is a temple”
If you go to Camden, just off the main high street, you’ll come across a pub called Dublin Castle. It looks relatively unassuming to the untrained eye, but this is a venue that any artist from London worth their salt has played in.
“It’s 99.9% the same. I go in, and I say, ‘It’s lovely what you’ve done with the old gaff… fuck all’,” said Madness lead singer, Suggs. The pub is still one of the boozers he frequents most often in London, and it holds a lot of memories for him, given it was the venue that gave his band a residency. Madness developed as a band a great deal within those four walls, and were much better off for it.
“Dreadful mock Tudor Irish boozer,” is how Suggs described it, “But the story of that place is that’s where we got our first residency in the late ‘70s by pretending we were a country and western band because all the pubs were Irish… I mean, there used to be about 15 pubs in Camden when I was a kid, and most of us have gone, and that’s why The Dublin Castle is sort of this beacon of hope.”
Those last few words, “a beacon of hope”, feel incredibly appropriate. That’s probably the only accurate way that you can describe these venues, these small spaces that are willing to take a punt on bands when they’re complete unknowns. Without such rooms, bands wouldn’t be able to work out their own unique tone of voice, they would have no idea what original direction they wanted to go in, and the majority of the music you know and love today would cease to exist.
Mark Davyd, the founder of the Music Venue Trust, said: “I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else. I go to festivals, and I go to big gigs, but they just don’t have the same thing. I like that feeling that the singer might attack you at any moment and the sort of element of when a room kicks off.”
Davyd is committed towards saving these independent venues, not just because of the great bands who are shaped there, but the music-lovers who get to call such a space home. “In a small venue, it can properly kick off; you get 300 people watching a band, and the band plays a song, and the whole room goes up; even the bar staff are on the bar,” he said, “That can happen at a small venue. The whole thing has just got that raw community spirit.”
One of the most famous small venues in the world is Cafe Wha? Located across the pond, in New York City. So many of the artists who are credited with changing music forever did their first shows here, as they learned what it meant to be on stage, and perfected a craft which they would soon become famous for. Alumni include the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix.
The venue was founded by Manny Roth, the uncle of David Lee Roth who made a name for himself as the lead singer of Van Halen. David also found his love for music in this venue and knew the kind of people it attracted. He knows that these are spaces for the true music lovers, for the people looking for something new, innovative, and original. When he went back to play a gig there with Van Halen he was incredibly excited but also deeply nervous, as he knew this would be a hard crowd to please.
“This is a temple,” David said to the crowd as his band were playing their set. “This is a very special place, and I am more nervous about this gig than I would ever be at the Garden. There is no hiding up here. There are no fake vocals. There is no fake anything.” A band who conquered the world, heading back home, in a bid to show they’ve still got it, exposed in a way they hadn’t been for a long time. What a gig to have been at.
