This weekend sees the launch of the inaugural Everywhere At Once festival – with huge names and rising stars taking to hundreds of stages in grassroots venues across the UK in a bid to entertain the masses while we sit out Glastonbury. Rizzle Kicks and Inspiral Carpets are among the artists taking part, explaining to NME why this event matters.
Hundreds of thousands would have flocked to Worthy Farm this weekend, however with the festival taking its traditional fallow year to allow the land to recover, an opportunity arose for the Music Venue Trust and the many essential gig spaces they represent.
“Before we realised it was a Glastonbury fallow year, there was a discussion within the team, Save Our Scene and promoters where we realised this was a turnaround year for the sector,” MVT CEO Mark Davyd told NME. “Money will start to come in from the grassroots levy, things will start to change for the better.”
He continued: “Then there was a quick piece of maths that said if you open up all of the grassroots music venues in the UK at the same time, the capacity of those clubs if full would be 252,000. That’s exactly the size of Glastonbury.”
With the National Lottery also celebrating having reached the milestone of investing over £1billion into music, all the bodies came together and called upon artists including Becky Hill, Fatboy Slim and Tinie Tempah to pull off “a maniac’s dream” of a festival, as Davyd put it, to send out the message: “These venues are still here and still putting on great shows’.”
This time last year, Rizzle Kicks were proving themselves to be a surprise highlight of Glastonbury 2025. “It was fucking insane,” recalled Harley Alexander-Sule. “I don’t know if they told people we were giving out free money at 2pm on The Other Stage but it felt like everyone in the festival came down.”
It marked a pivotal moment for the British rap duo’s return, having first split in 2016 before making a celebrated comeback in 2024.
“After we took our hiatus, a lot of shit stuff happened,” Alexander-Sule told NME. “I’m not saying that us leaving made the world shit, but Brexit happened, Trump happened, COVID happened, the cost of living went up in a big way. Everyone’s just been a bit beaten up by the world, then we came back – carefree and not giving a shit. I think people latched on to that.”
Not only that, but over the last decade the UK has lost over 300 of its treasured grassroots music venues – the places where Rizzle Kicks learned the ropes to prepare them for playing to massive crowds at Glasto.
“Back in my day, you’d proper cut your teeth in all those venues,” said Alexander-Sule. “We were between Brighton and London, so before we got signed we’d played 20 venues in Brighton. Brighton’s small, so I’d be very interested to know how many of those still exist. The one we’re playing next – Patterns – we played there a lot. It used to be called Audio and it was one of the first shows we ever did.
“That was the venue I went to see loads of my friends play at. It wasn’t a big venue, but for us as young, up and coming artists, it was a mini bucket list thing to play there or Green Door Store. If you did that at grassroots level it was like, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve completed Brighton!’”
Rizzle Kicks will be returning to Patterns for the Everywhere At Once festival, having not played there in 15 years but excited that “it’s so cool that it’s still knocking about”. So much of the band’s history is embedded in Brighton, that they’re predicting it’ll be “more than a show,” adding: “you can feel the love there because we’re all so in it together.”
Beyond getting back to where it all began, the duo said they needed to get involved as “any light that can be shone on grassroots venues is incredible” – especially now that opportunities are disappearing for new generations of artists.
“There’s nothing wrong with blowing up on TikTok, but I’d be curious to see how these artists go on to cope with performing to audiences that aren’t their own crowds,” said Alexander-Sule. “That’s how you build confidence as an artist: in doing these grassroots venues. My generation of artists may have been the last to make a name for themselves based on their live performance.
“I remember in the 2000s, people would say, ‘Have you heard of these guys? I saw them here’. It was organic and people were seeing music at venues and watching support acts. A&R scouts would be at those venues every night. Now they’re called A& analysts and they just sit on TikTok every night looking at numbers. You don’t get the same authenticity. You can mask a lot on social media and present yourself in a certain way. When you’re going to these live shows, there’s nowhere to hide and people are seeing your authentic self all the time, and you learn things all the time.”
The rapper added that this shouldn’t be chalked up to nostalgia or sentimentality, but simple practicality for future artists to survive.
“We see most of our money come from [playing] live, and I don’t think that would be the case if we didn’t have the opportunity to really hone our craft,” Alexander-Sule added. “Playing live is the biggest thing for us, but if we didn’t put all that time and attention in, we wouldn’t be here.”
Another band who cut their teeth on the smaller stages before going on to make history are Madchester legends Inspiral Carpets. They’ll be playing three shows in Chester, Shrewsbury and Stoke across the weekend for Everywhere At Once, simply because “we’re big fans of keeping the live music scene alive,” said keyboarist Clint Boon, “and that includes grassroots venues.”
“Any band of our generation, whether it’s the other Manchester bands, or the bands that followed likes Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C., Wunderhorse – we need those small venues that only hold 150-300 people. It’s impossible otherwise to go straight from being a garage band to then headlining Manchester Apollo. The first step is getting into those smaller local venues like The Boardwalk, The Roadhouse, The Night & Day. They’re an essential part of the journey of any successful band. It’s crucial we keep these venues as part of our culture.”
The plot thickens, as not only did Boon figure out how to become a rockstar in grassroots venues, but in the late ’80s the band famously also hired a then unknown lad by the name of Noel Gallagher as a roadie and technician to tour the circuit with them in his pre-Oasis days.
“I don’t think we’d even made a record when Noel joined us,” Boon recalled. “We might have made our first single when our first singer left and Noel auditioned to replace him. He didn’t get the job, but we took him on as a roadie. We were very much in that world of travelling up and down the UK in a transit van with band members sat in the back on the amplifiers. Noel saw first hand what bands need to do to get on that ladder to success.
“Still to this day, he gives the Inspirals a lot of credit for taking him on that journey and showing him a lot about the industry and how to operate.”
Even then, Oasis still still put the the hours in by touring up and down the grassroots circuit in the back of a van.
“Any band credited with organised success has a much longer backstory behind it,” Boon told NME. “For Noel’s first year in Oasis, he was still setting our equipment up and learning. They had a good three or four years before their first big taste of success.”
From Oasis’ first UK headline tour in 1994, only six of the 15 remain open today. Boon admitted that without these spaces of this size, we simply wouldn’t have Inspiral Carpets or Oasis, noting that “it would be impossible to get to where bands like us are without these venues.”
Looking ahead to the weekend, Boon shared that he had spent a lot time in Stoke Sugarmill as a DJ and as a musician, and still gets excited at the idea of going back into these places. “It’s what we’re all about,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a small stage, a big stage, an arena or a stadium – it’s what we do. We get up and we play. I’ll never tire of that.”
With a new album ready to go and coming in January, Boon said that Inspiral Carpets would be airing some fresh material at the festival, but ultimately fans should expect “the hits and the crowd favourites.”
“As a band, we’re performing better than ever. Something magical has happened since we reformed back in 2023,” he added. “It feels like everything has gone up a notch. That joy we’ve got now is quite an infectious thing for people to see. Our happiness and appreciation for where we’re at is what resonates with people, but we can never forget where we came from.”
Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom in Norwich will be hosting gigs across the weekend, including one of three intimate shows from Tinie Tempah. Live events manager Ben Street told NME how it would “add some extra focus and audience excitement” on a weekend that would otherwise have been lost to Glasto.
The venue used to be a strip club before becoming a venue under another name and then a hub for the local music community before attracting touring acts. Before long, they were putting on shows like Wunderhorse supporting Sorry and early gigs by the likes of Keo, CMAT and Olivia Dean.
“This is a brilliant time to do this festival, because there’s been such a focus on the rate at which venues are disappearing and the government not making it that easy for us,” said Street. “There are lot of people that would choose to go to their local venue over a big arena show. That really pushes that hope. We have a really devout community that would rather come to Voodoos to see something new or local than see Oasis with 30,000 other people. These venues are still the beating heart of a lot of communities.”
Street said that the network of venues in UK had “reached catastrophe point,” but were optimistic that “now things are happening.”
Looking ahead to the weekend, Street had a simple message for music fans: “Come to Voodoo Daddys, but there will be amazing gigs happening at spots all across the country. If you’re looking for something to fill that Glastonbury gap but you want to speak to the band after, this is the chance to see bands up close that wouldn’t normally be playing venues to about 200-300 people.
“This is the opportunity to see something special. We’re a dive bar and a pizza joint, so we’re the archetype of a venue like this.”
Everywhere At Once comes at a time when the UK is reeling from “the complete collapse of touring” with only 12 locations left on the primary or secondary circuit for artists where it used to be 28 back in 1994. After decades of decline and the spiralling cost of living and touring, thousands of fans and communities are now without nearby access to live music and countless opportunities for artists are lost. It was recently revealed that over half of UK grassroots venues made no profit in 2025, with 6,000 jobs gone.
MVT CEO Mark Davyd said he hoped this weekend would be an opportunity for fans to rediscover their local venues, and that he was grateful for artists from Tom A. Smith to The Divine Comedy for getting involved.
“We put a call out thinking, ‘Who could we get to go back to a venue we and they really believe in?’ We were trying to shake things up a bit,” he said. “A lot of people will know the story of The Lathums, The Cause, The K’s, but beyond that Becky Hill has a really close association with The Marr’s Bar in Worcester, we wanted to tell the story of where Tinie Tempha has played, and it got very deep and a lot of big things popped up.”
“The scale and scope of it is quite difficult to get your head around. These venues really matter to artists and people have been working really hard to pull off something really special.”
He also said that away from the intimate underplays of bigger artists, fans should also “get out and see something new and give a new artist a chance.”
“Huge input has gone into over 400 venues creating over 1,000 events with around 2,500 artists,” Davyd added. “What it now needs is for the grassroots audience to go out. This is all for them and about celebrating the spaces that are still here after the last 12 years of struggle. Our big message is go to the website, put your postcode in and you can see everything going on around you. Just go celebrate how fantastic it is that these venues are out there. It’s been really hard, but there’s still brilliant stuff happening.
“There’ just about every type of music along with comedy and spoken word, so much from every genre. If you can find me someone who can’t find something they don’t like, then I’m going to say they don’t like music! This is a weekend for music fans.”
Everywhere At Once runs across the UK until Sunday 28 June. Visit here for events and all information.
