Venue Stories - Narratives, Memories, and Histories from Britain’s Independent Music Spaces - Fraser Mann
Sitting on the Bench in Leicester's Charlotte
Venue Stories - Narratives, Memories, and Histories from Britain’s Independent Music Spaces - Fraser Mann
Ed Garland [+]
Writer and Independent Scholar
Description
This mosaic-essay explores and revisits Leicester’s The Charlotte. Its temporal centre is a half-empty drum and bass night headlined by Doc Scott sometime in the first decade of the 2000s. Doc Scott’s aesthetic as a DJ emphasises a seamlessness between future-facing tracks. His personal significance for me stretches back to my childhood. He represents chronological and audible continuity. He is also one of the custodians of what DJ Storm calls the essential ‘drama’ of the Metalheadz sound and, when I saw him, he had, according to a recent interview, ‘both personally and musically […] lost’ himself. Through the lens of this night, which I attended alone, I explore The Charlotte’s varied history. This is a story in which I participated in a small way as the drummer for a local band and as the attendee of many gigs. One of the venue’s unique features was the bench built into the plywood walls that housed its front-of-house mixing desk. This amplified the bass tones when you rested your back against it. This bench is the physical centre of this writing. Around it the mosaic-essay’s short fragments coalesce.