Save Our Scene is launching a Spotlight Series to highlight the people and collectives who make the UK’s music scene the individual and vibrant place it is. Together, we can nurture this crucial ecosystem.

Andrew Carthy, or Mr Scruff, has been a central figure in the UK’s nightlife scene for over 30 years. During that time he’s seen it all, and, due to his equal-opportunities approach to genre, really, played it all. But his most recent tour is a little bit different. Playing exclusively at small venues across the UK, Mr. Scruff is partnering with Liveline, with a pound from each ticket sold going right back into supporting the UK’s grassroots venues. We catch up with him during the middle of this tour to understand more about the motivations behind this decision, what he feels makes the perfect venue, and what he’s happy to leave behind in 80s Manchester clubbing culture.

SOS: So, you've finished your ‘miniature arena tour’. How was it?

It was great! It came together in such an organic way and I feel that’s really seeped into how smoothly it's running.

It all started as I was having conversations with MVT (Music Venues Trust) as they were keen to collaborate in order to show they weren’t just an organisation for people in the live music industry. My agent then suggested doing a tour of little venues, and both yourselves and MVT had been highlighting that our music ecosystem is at a breaking point so much recently that it seemed a no-brainer.

Theming it this way just echoed the focus of The Liveline Fund, which is to persuade the billionaires to chuck a couple pennies to the people at the start of the talent pipeline. It’s all been a bit DIY, and there’s a healthy dose of, ‘well if I can do it, you lot up there with your big arena tours and Ticket Masters definitely can.’

The issue is, a lot of big organisations, like Spotify, Live Nation and Oak View (which sounds like a long-life cake manufacturer) do have charity arms, but they’re there just to make themselves look good. They’re happy to have a £2 print at home charge that no-one uses, and to charge you an extra £50 to be able to actually see the stage, but a pound to go to grassroots venues?! They couldn’t possibly have that, their shareholders would be outraged!

SOS: Can you tell us a little more about your decision to support Liveline with this tour?

"I’m doing this partly because the people who should be, aren’t. What I don’t want to do is just raise a few thousand pounds for Liveline, pat myself on the back, say ‘aren’t I nice’, and then disappear.

One other reason I did this was to provide a lot more visibility for fantastic venues. In terms of redressing the gap between the ‘have too muchers’, which are venues with all money and no vibes, and the spots which are all love no money, the answers are already there. Venues just need to share information with each other.

And a sort of off-shoot of that is that this tour was kind of research. So, I’m currently working with MVT right now to create an FAQ for artists, venues, promoters, ticket platforms who also want to support Liveline with their tours, so there’s a central space to access all of this information.

It's easy to moan about the billionaires, and confronting them via boycotting and shining a light on their bad business practices are incredibly important, but it's equally important to know how the people who are doing it right, not only survive, but uplift each other."

SOS: So, in that vein, let's chat a little more about some of the amazing venues you’re visiting on this tour.

"The venues that I really rate are the ones who have it technically together, but also have real characters working there. So, The Adelphi in Hull has been going for well over 40 years, and they’re all their own people who do things at their own pace. You go in with an idea of how you do stuff, and that gets completely dashed. It’s a little disarming, but then you realise that those people, and their force of personality, is the venue, and that's the reason it's worked so well for so long.

Hope House in Leeds which is home to Cosmic Slop is also amazing. It's a youth arts establishment, and they use a room for events to fundraise for the charity, but it also just happens to be one of the best venues in the world. It’s not technically even a proper venue, but the love and obsessiveness that's gone into it is so impressive.

Another one is Sneaky Pete's in Edinburgh, which has just a 90-person capacity. Because of the size of the venue, they basically have to do two gigs a day, 365 days of the year. When they're changing over from a live-band to a club night, which they have to do in about 45 minutes, all members of the bar staff are also putting cables away, and I’m sure the sound engineer hops on the bar as well.

It’s like watching a load of ants on the natural history programme, you look away for one second and something new has been built, and it's like, ‘How did that happen?’

Every good venue feels like family. It’s so different to a shiny co-operate venue, playing there feels like work, playing at these venues feels like life."

SOS: You’ve been DJing for over 30 years, what are some of the big changes that you’ve seen in the nightlife space?

Mr Scruff: "COVID-19 really did change everything. Prior to this, you had more of a mix of generations in clubs. Young people would come to established events, and it would be like entering a musical family. They’d bring their style and exuberance, and the older regulars were steadier and would show them how to behave in a club, like don’t get too drunk and don’t be sick on anyone. Basic manners. And as the older people moved through, more young people would turn up, and things would get replenished.

A bit of that got lost during COVID-19, as older people got used to staying in earlier and some of the younger people didn’t start going out.

We also all reach for our phones a lot more. Clubbing used to be about going somewhere to get away from everything and contributing to something. As soon as you’ve got your phone out, you're somewhere else. If you're filming, you're not helping. You’re actually sucking energy out of the room.

But I don’t want to get misty eyed about the days before technology, because on the other hand, there are a lot of young collectives now which are putting on amazing events. Because of a lot of the socio-political environments we find ourselves in, it feels like activism and mutual support are coming back to social spaces, which is really heartening.

And also, things have changed, but they’re cyclical too. In some ways, 2025 feels like the early 80s, when things were pretty bleak, but there was a lot of creativity and resourcefulness."

SOS: You grew up partying and playing around Manchester. If you could take one thing from that time and transfer it to nightlife now, what would it be? And what would leave behind?

Mr Scruff: I’d leave behind gangsters controlling the door, there was a lot of unregulated security, which was… colourful, should I say. And a lot of this was to do with racist door policies. Many of us were working in Black music and culture at the time, and a lot of people who were really pivotal to that couldn’t get into the venues where their music was being played.

So, I’d definitely leave that behind. But in terms of what I'd transfer, I actually feel there are so many people in their teens and 20s now that are doing what crews and collectives were doing in the 80s and 90s.

DJing is half curating and half performing. It’s like collage, you’re taking something and putting it next to something else, taking something old and weaving it into something new. Young people are recontextualising genres of old, which is so fun for the older generation. What is a little bit different is the knowledge about music from all over the world, not just of its existence, but the cultural context of it and what it stands for, which is amazing.

So now, there’s all these chemical reactions going on, people are taking something that inspires them, paying homage to it, sharing it, and by doing so - creating something that’s a little bit new. It makes you feel part of something, which is great, because as a DJ, you’re often working alone.

SOS: And finally, what’s exciting you right now?

MS: For me, it's always the potential in an empty room. If you’ve got lovely speakers and lovely staff, it's that feeling of deciding what tune to put on first. Each song and record is a word in a musical sentence. As long as you can string that together, and get the pacing, intonation and punctuation right, you can pull people in and tell some kind of story. So the real fun is deciding your first song, because then, you’ve started your sentence.