With over 125 grassroots venues closing in 2023 (Music Venue Trust), Off Licence Magazine are stepping in with Long Hot Summer II - a national club tour in defence of the dancefloor.

Long Hot Summer II is Offie Mag’s first national club tour, rolling through London, Manchester, Bristol and Brighton this August and September. The line-ups are a love letter to the underground as heavyweight headliners Steven Julien, System Olympia, Sticky Dub and Coco Maria are paired with rising independent DJs. The venues are all grassroots spaces, all chosen with intent. The tickets are capped at a fiver because whilst the cost of living pushes clubbing out of reach, Offie Mag want to get people back into the venues that keep nightlife alive.

Since launching seven years ago in Brighton as a blog and A5 print zine, the mag has grown into a DIY institution. With 15 print issues, radio shows, club nights, pop-ups and festival coverage, Offie Mag has built a community by showing up in physical spaces for human connection. The mission is a good one: platform the overlooked, celebrate the underground and remind people why culture matters.

That mission runs through Long Hot Summer II. While other promoters are forced to hike prices or scale down, Offie are doubling down on accessibility. £5 gets you through the door and if you take public transport to get there, you might even get your ticket refunded as part of an environmental scheme. They’re also giving free tickets to community groups and music charities because although the main aim is to pack out the room, it’s also to seed a culture that lasts.

But they haven’t done it alone. The tour is backed by Champion Europe and supported by Arts Council England’s Grassroots Music Fund, two lifelines that allow Offie to take risks most independent promoters can’t. Founder and editor Greg Stanley tells us the system is broken and real support for UK nightlife has to come from every direction: government policy that protects cultural spaces, commercial brands paying back into the scenes they profit from, local councils valuing venues over property developers and an industry that stops funnelling profits to the top. Without curing the music ecosystem’s ills, the pipeline of new artists, DJs, promoters and communities will simply dry up.

In many ways, contemporary club culture carries echoes of its late-80s foundations. Then, ravers created spaces of release and resistance in the face of recession, political division and government crackdowns on civil liberties. Now, Offie Mag are responding to the same pressures, using the dancefloor as a site of resilience and rebuild. There’s power in a packed room and the shared joy of dancing.

Offie Mag began 7 years ago in Brighton and has since built an international following through print, radio and online laughs. How’s the journey been so far?

It's been amazing and it's one I'm very grateful for. When I started Offie Mag, I wanted it to be my full-time job but it didn't feel like a realistic feat to achieve. It was a space for me to get my writing out and to write about a few corners of underground music that I felt were underrepresented. It was a blog and A5 print and as much as it was exciting and it was really resonating, it wouldn’t be what it is now without opening it up to other people and events. That’s what made it a more effective tool for platforming music and speaking about issues in the creative industry. It became more of a community-led enterprise.

We had our first event at the end of 2018 just after we launched Issue Two. I was hanging out at Glazed by The Level a lot and it was becoming a bit of a hub. Through having that in-person thing, we realised we could actually do an event. A guy called Neil took a punt on us and gave us £200 to throw an event upstairs in the bar at Patterns. We got Lord Apex and Lava La Rue on the lineup because they were in Issue Two of the mag. Patterns even gave us a split on the bar and we were like: “oh, this is actually quite sustainable.”

It’s amazing to see a grassroots community-led project really going places. Your first ever club tour kicks off in London on 30 August, heads to Manchester and Bristol, ending in Brighton on 19 September. How are you feeling and what does each city mean to Offie?

Ever since we launched Issue One, the audience has been all over the UK. We’ve always sold a fair amount in Manchester, Bristol and London so it feels right that those are the cities that we're hitting. I’m a bit nervous because we've never officially done an event outside of Brighton but I’m excited to reach these cities with our curation. 

Whilst I don’t think what we do in terms of hosting really good club nights is a particularly unique concept, I think that our curation and pairing smaller independent artists with larger independent artists is. There’s real care in the lineups, the venues that we choose and the way we package them and address issues - this one specifically being about the struggles faced in grassroots music venues and the nightlife sector.

From local Brighton nights to a national tour, what have you learned about curating spaces for underground talent?

The main learning is - for better or worse - you’ve got to put on the event that you would truly want to be at. That can often lead us to booking very underground, obscure hip hop rappers from the US that no one’s heard of and it’s a tricky one to sell. But at the same time, you’ve supported an artist, you’ve made a good night happen and the small number of people that were there really got something out of it and they want to be at your next one. That’s why we do it. 

Without the Arts Council funding and the support from Champion, we wouldn’t be able to take the financial risk to book artists of that level. The fact that we’re able to make the tickets affordable, book really nice venues and get good local support without some of the financial gymnastics that promoters have to go through is the only reason we’re able to do it.

The support you’ve received from Champion and the Arts Council is game-changing. How important is this kind of backing for keeping grassroots culture alive?

I used to work at Audio Active which is an amazing music charity based in Brighton. I learned a lot about the non-profit art world and the fact that music and culture doesn’t just have to have monetary value if it's for the betterment of society and helps to create a genuine sense of community that can lead to better mental health and better job prospects for people, then there's real value there. Once I learned that, I realised that Arts Council funding is for me. I thought it was just a loan for people who want to play the violin, to get lessons and then pay it back once they start becoming the new Vivaldi. It’s important that people know that it’s for them.

There’s some other organisations too, like Youth Music and PRS. Without these non-profits or the government taking some responsibility for the issues that the arts industry is in right now, then the future of the arts isn't diverse and it will only be upper class people that have the opportunity to create or to take those kinds of risks. That's not really a creative scene I think anyone wants to see - with respect to the gentry. We want to see more working class promoters, more working class artists, artists from diverse backgrounds given the opportunity to do so.

I couldn’t agree more. Thinking about the grassroots industry, is there a moment or memory from a small venue that shaped Offie’s path?

In 2023, we did Long Hot Summer the first time around and it was the same concept but only in Brighton: four different events, four independent venues, all independent artists. We did a night at Alphabet which had only just changed and reopened since being Rialto. It felt like the perfect storm of a new venue that's really ambitious, us who were desperate to put more shows on and then an audience who's absolutely thrilled about a new venue, a new promoter and a world class DJ, all happening at the same time. It just really felt like: 'when you build it, they will come.'

I’ve lived in Brighton for 11 years now and I'm quite critical of Brighton's art and music infrastructure but I really do believe in it and I do believe that there's so much potential here for more. That night was a nice moment where we realised there’s always a chance that a new thing might open, a good idea might get funding, people might see the vision. That was really reaffirming.

And you’re heading to Alphabet again for Long Hot Summer II!

Yeah, we’ve got Coco Maria, Mr Bongo DJs, Shadrack and Baloo. The venue is just really, really good. I loved Rilato and thought it was a shame because often these things don’t go well - the Wolfox-ification of Brighton is very real. But Will who runs Alphabet is an amazing person. The love and care he’s put into the venue and the curation is amazing. It was a no-brainer for the tour to end there.

You’ve chosen to keep ticket prices low, and with more than 125 grassroots venues closing last year, I wonder how the £5 cap speaks to Offie Mag’s mission?

Whilst we don’t want to devalue music and clubbing, so many venues are shutting. When we did the first Long Hot Summer we were very much in the cost of living crisis but inflation hasn’t gone anywhere so we’re keeping the price low and offering free tickets to music charities, organisations and community groups. £5 is still £5. We’re also reimbursing tickets each night for people who can prove they got public transport there as an environmental scheme.

The aim is to get as many people into venues as possible spending money or at the very least, engaging with music and culture. Either reminding themselves that clubbing is great or if somebody hasn't really been out, they've got a chance to experience it at a low price and they might go out regularly for the rest of their lives, they might want to start their own club night or start DJing themselves. 

The system is broken at the moment and the old format of promoter, artist and venue being three shareholders in the night doesn’t really work anymore - someone has to lose. The artists need to be paid fairly but the venue’s got a lot of overheads and it’s often the promoter who has to fork out upfront with the risk that it might not come back in. Again, if it wasn’t for Arts Council funding or sponsorship, this wouldn’t be feasible. 

Aside from fundamental governmental change of direction and better funding, what else do you think needs to be done to create real change for the underground music, arts and culture world?

I think the commercial sector and big brands that benefit from the cultural clout of music and culture need to be investing. They owe it. There are a lot of brands that are synonymous with hip hop music or club music. They owe an element of their generational advertising and exposure of their brand to these sorts of spaces and this sort of culture. 

Local councils need to really value the importance of art and culture for the betterment of the people who live in their councils. We're really lucky in Brighton that there's a lot of art spaces and you can find opportunities to interact quite cheaply within music. However, there's so much more to be done and we're a long way off the grassroots music scene being as healthy as it can be.

One last thing is the music industry itself. Spotify and the three major labels that dominate over 70% of all streams need to be putting their hands in their pockets and putting it into genuine grassroots activity because there won’t be another Ed Sheeran if there’s not a small venue for him to play at. There’s some really big bands donating £1 per ticket sale into the Music Venue Trust and they’re doing great work to save grassroots venues. Basically, as often in society, I think those with extreme financial privilege need to put it back into the system.

You're completely right. And Coldplay is one of those bands! Maybe I had Chris Martin all wrong.

Maybe it was all yellow after all.

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