Madding Crowd in Bournemouth are sitting on a 300 capacity venue which was raring to re-launch following it’s 2019 closure and reduced capacity at the start of the year. The venue need more support than ever to make their relaunch a reality, and have joined the #saveourvenues campaign to raise the funds they need. Here’s the lowdown from Director and Co-Founder Peter Gilbert….
How would you describe the importance of Madding Crowd to the people of Bournemouth?
As we’re just about to re-launch with the full capacity of 300, rather than 60 due to details of our emergency escape route being overlooked by our original legal team, our importance to the people of Bournemouth was to give them a rare experience of bringing international touring artists to an intimate environment, whilst using this platform to showcase local grassroots bands as support.
Your 3D walk through the club on your website is great – was it complex or costly to set up?
In total it took about a day, with just a few hours being required on sight. We were very fortunate that Perspective Media donated their time to help show Madding Crowd to the world in its full glory.
We’ve just heard that Nick Capaldi is stepping in to live stream in support of the venue’s #saveourvenue campaign. Does he have a link to the venue or is he just being super nice?
Super nice. We were looking through the events on the campaigns website and saw that Nick was hosting a gig for us. Nick hasn’t yet played at the venue, but will be scheduled in as soon as the lockdown has been lifted.
What local bands have you been listening to recently?
Naipia have caught our attention since playing at MC for a private party. We have now secured them to support a very well know band later in the year.
Finally, what will the donations mean to Madding Crowd and what will the cash go towards?
Any donations will go straight towards the running costs to keep our lease.
As you can imagine, after not trading for the whole of 2019 we have had to raise some serious capital to keep our dreams alive. Luckily, we created office space above the club that was rented out to generate some revenue, but now that has stopped due to COVID.
At the same time we were expecting to build some income for the business from a fully booked roster for May, which has all been put off until the end of the year, we now need to raise cash now more than ever before.
We require a minimum of £5000 a month to survive. It is looking a long way off before we can even start to pay off any of the initial capital that went into building the venue from scratch.
