Musical luminaries including Mick Jagger, Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Liam Gallagher are lending their support to a campaign to save The 100 Club, the historic music venue in London’s Oxford Street. Soaring business rates of £4000 a month and an annual rental bill of £166,000 have driven the club to the brink of bankruptcy, and unless the savethe100club campaign proves successful, it faces closure by Christmas.
Club owner Jeff Horton says: “The Government, Westminster council and even some of the commercial landlords say they want to help small businesses, they say they want to preserve London’s uniqueness, they want to help multicultural venues. Yet we’re all that and all these organisations have dumped on us from a great height.”
The savethe100club campaign aims to raise enough donations from individuals to buy out the club and take over its running as a Not For Profit organisation. This would make it eligible for Lottery or Heritage funding, and the new trustees would apply for heritage status to safeguard its future.
The venue began as the Feldman Swing Club during World War Two, when it proved a hot favourite with American GIs. It was renamed The 100 Club in 1964, when Horton’s father took it over. Over the decades the club has hosted legions of famous names from blues, jazz, reggae, rock and punk, including Muddy Waters, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, B B King, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Oasis and The Specials. With the Astoria, the Metro and the Marquee Club already gone, the closure of The 100 Club would leave central London denuded of music venues.
“The Kinks played there and it’s such an iconic venue, we shouldn’t allow things like that to close down,” says Ray Davies. “Everything is being overrun by the chain stores and the conglomerates and it’s such a pity that The 100 Club has to suffer like that.”
Davies also proposes an alternative solution. “Simon Cowell should underwrite the money needed to save The 100 Club. The amount of money he takes out of pop music, he could put some back in.”
- Support the savethe100club campaign here
Watch George McCallum's Save The 100 Club mini-documentary:
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