The meaning of the music venue: Historicizing the Click Club

This article focuses on a venue/music night in 1980s Birmingham called the ‘Click Club’. The history of the club is documented via a critical account of a 2016 exhibition entitled ‘Is There Any One Out There’, which celebrated the venue and the many bands that performed there. It is noted that since the club’s demise, Birmingham has gone through a process of physical and cultural regeneration, celebrating some of its local icons such as Black Sabbath and the Electric Light Orchestra to highlight its musical identity. Memories of the Click Club are regarded as ‘lost’ from more mainstream depictions of musical histories of the city. By engaging with what is described as an online ‘community of memory’, the article documents not only the origins and memories of the venue and formation of the aforementioned exhibition, but also the wider historical conceptualizations of the music venue as cultural product, through which meanings are made.