Music Venue Trust has announced the first tour to be funded by its newly launched Liveline Fund, with Essex rock trio Bilk set for a 20-date run through UK grassroots venues this autumn. Tickets go on sale Friday 13th June at 10am.
It’s a landmark moment for the charity, and for Liveline itself, a fund that redirects a portion of arena and stadium ticket sales, via the Grassroots Levy, to directly support smaller venues, promoters and artists. With early backing from artists like Sam Fender, Katy Perry, Coldplay and Enter Shikari, the scheme is now enabling full national tours for acts at the beginning of their careers.
For Bilk, the support unlocks a tour they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. “This tour is obviously gonna be chaos,” said frontman Sol Abrahams. “We’ve been wanting to do a tour of grassroots venues for a while as we’ve seen a lot of these places keep closing down and it ain’t good for music.”
Sol, who spoke candidly to whynow in late 2024 about the band’s rise and the importance of live music spaces, added: “Everyone deserves a chance to grow and get seen by people if the music is good. We need real life, we need real energy, real connection, in the flesh, in person. That’s what it’s about.”
Read our November 2024 interview with Sol Abrahams
The tour marks an effort to reconnect the national grassroots circuit, many parts of which have fallen silent. In 2024, MVT reported that only twelve UK cities were regularly hosting small-venue tours. The Liveline model, developed alongside Save Our Scene, aims to reverse that trend by making longer tours financially viable again.
“This is exactly what The Liveline Fund was created for,” said George Fleming, founder of Save Our Scene. “Once a staple of the live music scene, these kinds of 20-date runs have become almost impossible due to soaring costs.”
MVT’s Rebecca Walker said the charity has been laying the groundwork for sustainable touring through its Revive Live and United By Music programmes. “We are practically demonstrating the positive impact that contributions from arena and stadium ticket levies can have for the grassroots sector when we act collaboratively.”
We’ve previously reported on the scale of the crisis facing UK venues, and the radical solutions MVT has been developing to address it.
Read more about the Music Venue Trust’s work here
Bilk, who fuse punk, indie, UK rap and wry Essex humour, released their debut in 2023 and followed it with Essex Drugs and Rock and Roll earlier this year. With recent sold-out shows across Europe and a headline night at the Electric Ballroom, they now return to the sweatier, stickier rooms where they first cut their teeth. The kind of rooms that Liveline is fighting to keep open.
