Hull’s venues are the city’s unwavering heartbeat

Attempts had been made to destroy Hull many times - first by the Luftwaffe, then by Thatcherism which dismantled the communities and industry which gave the city its lifeblood. So, in 1984, Paul Jackson opened The New Adelphi Club in defiance. Though its walls have changed from green to brown and back to green again, the venue is immovable; nothing, in aesthetic or spirit, has changed since Pulp, Radiohead and The Housemartins asked to perform there in their musical infancy and scrawled on its toilet walls. The impact that this strange, ramshackle place has had - not only on its artists but the broader culture to which they belong - is beyond measure. It all starts with a place: the first leg-up a long, long way from London.

“You’re going to have to stop me talking, because I will sit here and extol the virtues of Hull all day long,” says Sybil Bell, Founder of Independent Venue Week. She had chased Jackson relentlessly when it was launched in 2013 to have The New Adelphi Club host shows under its banner (“If you know Jacko, he’s cleaning the toilets at four in the morning, or cashing up, he’s so passionate about the place”) – and though it took until IVW’s second year, Hull, in its full technicolour of character and history, became part of a national movement. “I was just overwhelmed,” she remembers, telling me of her first trip to explore the city, “I left really welled up and slightly in tears. I honestly just felt so enriched by being there and meeting these people who just get on with it.” Hull and its venues captured the spirit of what Bell wanted to celebrate on a national scale.

She recalls The Independent Venue Week documentary made in 2019 with Radiohead’s Philip Selway which in part documented the legacy of The New Adelphi Club. Norman Cook, formerly of Hull’s own The Housemartins and later to become the culture-defining Fatboy Slim, met Jackson when he gave him a fiver to rehearse at the venue in 1984. When Bell bumped into Cook decades later, she introduced herself and told him that “Jacko” still ran The New Adelphi, and would he like to come back and play a show there? And so, for one night only, one of the UK’s most influential dance musicians returned to the stage that gave him his beginning and where the ink dried on his first record deal.

“Jacko said to me, ‘Now then, Sybil, I will not be dancing down at the front...’ Very quickly, we were dancing at the front, of course, and I was trying to catch Norman’s eye and wave at him to get Jacko onstage. He tried to resist at first, but we got this beautiful shot in our documentary of Norman grabbing Jacko’s hand and holding it high, bowing down to him. We had Philip Selway and Norman do an interview on the stage, and it was quite extraordinary having two of the biggest artists in the world chatting about what that particular venue meant to them on the way up,” Bell shares. “Jacko has always been very staunch that it is an open, safe place for everyone. It’s in the very bones of that building.”

The New Adelphi Club may be the most famous of the city’s venues, but it offers only a keyhole glimpse into a wider scene. “[Hull] really did stick two fingers up to the rest of the country and the corporate world,” she tells me. It’s a historically embattled and economically neglected part of the UK – and so they look after their own. Hull has its own unique phone network, its own ticketing system, train company and even its own telephone boxes (cream, now Grade-II listed). “This is a city that is truly independent,” says Bell. “People really look out for each other here. They’ve made it against the odds. It’s like, ‘If you’re not going to support us, fuck it. We’ll just do it ourselves.’”

The UK’s independent venues and the cultural lore that surrounds them is what makes the country exceptional, and yet in a post-pandemic landscape the narrative around their health has been bleak. The Music Venue Trust’s annual report has found that in 2025, over half of the UK’s grassroots venues made no profit with 6,000 jobs lost due to cuts and closures. “Independent Venue Week has always been meant to be positive and celebrative – and that doesn’t mean we’re immune to the challenges that are going on – but that narrative dominates everything,” says Bell. “We need to change it.”

“We want people to get excited about going out. I’ve said this from day one, but brow-beating people over the head saying how awful it is won’t get people excited about going to their local venue. Yes, there are challenges, and there’s a time and place to discuss them, but for one week of the year can we focus on the positives? The venues are saying they can’t get investment because everyone thinks they’re on their way out, but who is going to trailblaze and change that narrative? IVW has always been about community, and our focus is straight back on the people who run these places and keep them going all year round.”

Hull, even as a socially and economically under-served part of the UK, has forged a remarkable ecosystem as an act of resistance. The Warren is a youth project which provides vital support services to young people in the city, whether it be mental health support, help finding a job or getting involved with the arts. It’s run by the young people, for the young people. It would be impossible to tell the story of its impact on Hull’s music scene without Stewart Baxter. Since 2005, he had worked with young people at The Warren where he provided access to a free recording studio and rehearsal space with the support of their own record label, talent development programme and events team. By night, and in every other hour he had, he played drums in LIFE – one of Hull’s most successful exports of recent times, hardwired with the city’s punk-driven, DIY ethos.

Though he has since left The Warren, the spirit of his work continues under the banner of Hinterland Creative where he continues to develop talent across photography, creative direction and production. Notably, he went on to direct IDLES’ music video for “POP POP POP” – while still being firmly, and uncompromisingly, anchored to Hull. Bell insists that much of their charity work under Independent Venue Community was inspired by the path he forged for young people at The Warren.

“There aren’t that many venues which would allow young artists to get on stage, make mistakes and learn how to fuck up. For me, from being at my first gig at The New Adelphi at fifteen-years-old, and all the people I’ve mentored over the years, it’s always been a safe space where you can learn on the job. I’ve seen it over the years with hundreds of artists, not just in the live performance but in the organisation of the gigs – the stagecraft, the sound, the lighting, the opportunity to be involved in all of that. I think that’s not to be taken for granted,” says Baxter, “because that’s not normal. I’ve never been a religious person, but the Adelphi was definitely my Sunday service.”

It was not only performing, but the radical act of watching someone you know perform in that 200-cap room, which Baxter attributes to changing his life. “It wasn’t the touring bands but the local bands which blew my mind,” he shares. “Because when you’re young and you see a local artist on a stage, what that does is so powerful because it gives you permission to do that yourself. And I think you need that permission when you come from somewhere that is quite poor and there’s not a lot of opportunity. What I saw at The Adelphi instilled in me that being a musician was possible, and I’ve built my whole career and life on the back of it. From my band’s perspective, Independent Venue Week has put us on tour countless times. Sybil has been our number one champion. They’ve linked us up a network of venues around the country, and now we go and support and perform and tour these places. When you’re looking at The Adelphi and Independent Venue Week, it’s been the difference between doing it or not doing it; succeeding or not succeeding. It’s been absolutely huge.”

Chiedu Oraka is Hull’s hip-hop titan whose music portrays the Black, working-class experience from the council estates of North Hull. His social poetry and floor-filling tracks caught the ear of Chris Martin, who invited Oraka to support Coldplay on both nights of their stadium dates in the city. Against all odds, his achievements have charted on a national scale, supporting Skepta, CASISDEAD and performing for the BBC Music Introducing Stage at Glastonbury. “I don’t think there would be a Chiedu Oraka if it wasn’t for independent venues, because where would I be able to express myself?”

The first venue he ever performed in was The New Adelphi Club. “It was a random Saturday night, and I found myself onstage rap battling with this crew from Leeds. That was the first platform I had to spit some bars in a proper venue. I remember feeling on top of the world. I was probably very rubbish at the time, but I was young, hungry and faced with this situation where it was either sink or swim. I think independent venues made my audience diverse, and I could build my own community and tribe. In Hull, because it’s a smaller city, all the people who love music are in the same space – you get the moshers, the punks, the indie lads, all the different groups who ordinarily might not be there to see a rapper but always welcomed me.”

This year, in celebration of Independent Venue Week, four of Hull’s independent venues are uniting to uplift the community and each other. One of the driving forces behind Dayrider Festival is The People’s Republic co-founder David Rothay, notably a guitarist and songwriter in The Beautiful South. Music, and more vitally providing a platform for local musicians to showcase their talents, was always part of the venue’s DNA since it opened in 2016. The line-up also sprawls across The New Adelphi Club, Dive HU5 and The Polar Bear Music Club – each playing a fundamental part in Hull’s ever-evolving cultural story.

The blueprint for Rotheray, as a musician and as a venue owner himself, was – seemingly just like the entire city – The New Adelphi Club. “There’s a community around it not just of musicians, but the arts in general. It was a seabed of interesting people and talent,” he shares. “I think with bands, artists or venues – you want other people to take it up. Someone like [Paul Jackson] at the Adelphi, that’s his aim. He wants to inspire people to have their own Adelphi. You don’t do it for money or a plaque on the wall, you do it because you want people to be a part of it, take it up and export it somewhere else.”

“We didn’t even ask them, they just got it together,” says Bell of Dayrider Festival, true to the Hull’s spirit. “What’s really lovely is they can see that Independent Venue Week is going to make a big difference to them. It’s bringing something buzzy to the city and giving people a chance to be proud of the talent they’re producing. They’re using their collective power to make something even more special happen.”