This is one of three blogs written by students on the module Curation and Heritage at University of Liverpool, led by Dr Marion Leonard. The students were asked to write responses to the objects included in Lost Music Venues, a display curated by Harriet Reed for the Theatre and Performance Galleries (30 May 2026 – 30 October 2027). Featuring around 50 ‘lost’ performance spaces from the 1980s to 2010s, Lost Music Venues celebrates music venues as centres of creativity, shining a light on both their cultural contribution and the challenges they face as a sector.
In this blog, student Rebecca Dickinson writes about a bookings diary used by the Roadhouse, Manchester.
The year is 1997. Oasis has just played Knebworth, Tony Blair is about to win a landslide election, and things are all still done on paper. There is no Spotify, no Instagram and no algorithmic recommendation telling you what to listen to next. Instead, if a band wanted you at their show, someone who believed in them had to go and tell people, pressing flyers into strangers’ hands on a Friday night and trusting that enough people would show up to make it worth it. The small venues that they performed at were integral to this analogue network of promotion.
This labour can be seen through the Manchester Roadhouse’s 1997 bookings diary. Diaries scheduled the shows that kick-started the careers of bands who would later play arenas. These venues, such as the Roadhouse, formed a network of unglamorous small venues in the UK called the ‘toilet circuit’. For the Roadhouse, this included artists such as The Verve, Coldplay and Elbow, the latter of whose members worked the doors and pulled pints at the Newton Street venue before anyone even knew their names.
Depicted on pages 16 – 17 April is the organised chaos of a venue on the circuit. Four acts are scheduled for the Tuesday, with numbers scrawled in the margins, names crossed out and rewritten, and a note outlining bands printing their own flyers. Local bands Psycle and Laughing Gravy were scheduled, showing the venues importance within the local music scene. Information essential for gig coordination is also included, as seen in the load-in times, staff scheduling, band contact details and technical set ups.
Filled out by booker Debs Wild, famed for discovering Coldplay, and John McBeath, founder of the venue, the adaptation to cancellations and rescheduling reflects the instability of live music promotion at a small venue.
These risks are reflected in the attendance record, showing inconsistencies in revenue and attendance taken on in the name of supporting emerging artists’ access into the music industry. The attendance record also highlights the presence of club nights at the venue, with numbers not being recorded on weekends when they would’ve taken place, such as the ‘Electric Chair’ nights that occurred at the venue on the last Saturday of every month.
Stapled into the 1st of April is “Debs and Johns” typed revenue sharing agreement, outlining door prices rising from two pounds to two pounds fifty and ticket splits with bands. This reveals the financial architecture of ‘toilet circuit’ venue promotion, showing thin profit margins on tickets and how they were shared between venue and artist.
Later on in the diary, there is a shift from the informal chaotic scribbles of April to formalised live music promotion in July.
Stapled into its pages is a typed and formally titled scheduling sheet for a gig on the 8th July 1997. The scheduling and planning were done with a precision that is not present in the earlier entry of April, where the use of small, standardised stamps detailing times was used, as opposed to a now formalised signable document. This change to a typed schedule shows a need for the venue to adapt to shifting relationships between artists and venues, from partnership to contracts. The stark contrast between April and July shows that there was a need for the venue to change the way their live music promotion was carried out in order to survive in a changing industry environment.
After John McBeath left the venue in 1999, the Roadhouse was taken over by Kate Mountain, the previous general manager, and Steve Lloyd. Mountain ran the venue for over a decade following McBeath’s departure with the same commitment to local musicians and small artists. In 2015, the Roadhouse closed its doors, falling victim to the same financial pressures as many others on the ‘toilet circuit’. What was lost was not just a music venue or somewhere to go on a Saturday night, it was an important pillar in the infrastructure of the music industry, supporting mobility and access for emerging musicians. This diary paints a picture of the promotion that it took to get these artists to where they are, revealing the venue’s hard work that laid the foundations for musicians’ success.
