From Black Sabbath riots to vegetal pongs, Resonant Places is a tribute to a selection of the live music rooms which lit up Cardiff back in the day. Don’t look for them, they’re not there anymore… pop down to the Senedd instead, where David Taylor of Cardiff Music History has assembled this exhibition. Noel Gardner asked him about it.
Cardiff Music History, which David Taylor began in 2017, is a physical and digital archive of matters relating to music in Wales’ capital city. Resonant Places follows Wasteland Of My Fathers, a punk-slanted exhibit from 2023, and the more generalist City Of Sound, CMH’s first public display in 2022. Both of those were held at the Wales Millennium Centre under the Llais festival banner; this time it’s at the nearby Senedd’s Pierhead gallery and has been put together by Taylor independently over the last two years.
Resonant Places is subtitled ‘Revisiting Cardiff’s Lost Music Venues’ and focuses on eight of them, all of which closed decades ago: Bogey’s, the Capitol Theatre, Casablanca, Grannies, the New Moon Club, Smiley’s, Sophia Gardens Pavilion and the Top Rank Suite.
Some iconic concerts of yore are accounted for in Resonant Places, with emphasis on less generic anecdotes – for example, one Thin Lizzy fan blagging their way into the Irish band’s Capitol gig with a homemade ticket, and an account of Black Sabbath’s chaotic, wildly over-capacity Sophia Gardens date in 1981. Conversely, photos featured here tell a thousand words whether they’re professional shots or amateur snaps, with Andrew Rees’ pictures of the late-70s punk scene and Jon Girling’s images of the clientele at Casablanca among the featured work.
Taylor also promises tickets and flyers – these are from all sorts of venues, not just the aforementioned eight, and date back to the 1910s in some cases – a feature on infamous punk fashion boutique Paradise Garage, and a wall featuring screenprinted Cardiff University posters from the early 1970s, dedicated to the artist who made them – Dave Daggers, who died in December. A paper fanzine has also been made, adapting Resonant Places into the printed medium.
How did this exhibition come together exactly – how long did it take from conception to now, and did the Senedd approach you or vice versa?
After the punk exhibition at WMC, I really liked the idea of trying to produce and curate the next exhibition myself. Cardiff Music History became a Community Interest Company in 2024 and I started working on an idea for a different exhibition which was scrapped, so flailed around for a bit and then came up with the idea for Resonant Places mid-2024. When I approached the Pierhead, it was booked up until September 2026, which suited me fine – plenty of time to work on the exhibition.
The idea came about from feeling very familiar with some of these lost venues through Cardiff Music History, without having ever visited them. I really wanted to know more about the experience of walking through the door, up the rickety stairs, the people working the doors, the staff behind the bars, the venue owners. So I was after stories that put you there amongst the cigarette smoke and the spilled Newkie Brown.
Is Resonant Places’ format essentially along the lines of City Of Sound or are there things you’ve done differently?
Above all else, City Of Sound was a really good opportunity to figure out what Cardiff Music History should be. We did short audio documentaries for it with local musicians and they would reference venues and pubs in Cardiff that are long gone. It made me realise that aside from re-discovering amazing items for the archive, the value of Cardiff Music History is in telling people’s stories and where possible telling the social history of Cardiff through its music scenes. So from the beginning there was a clear vision for Resonant Places – all text would come directly from people that visited the venues, so directly from people’s lived experiences.
One pretty essential thing missing from City Of Sound was that there was no music! Resonant Places has a soundtrack – a pretty eclectic soundtrack, from 1960s child singer Deano to Butetown reggae band Bissmillah to my favourite local anti-fascist skinheads The Oppressed.
The eight venues focused on here date from I guess the early 60s (Capitol Theatre as a music venue) to the 80s sometime (whenever Bogey’s became Bogiez?) and it seems that information about them has been quite haphazardly preserved… has that been your experience? How much of a challenge has it been pulling info together?
In Resonant Places you won’t necessarily find out the history of the venues, although there are some stories from some venue owners that touch on the history. It’s important to have the facts and figures, but the nature of this exhibition circumnavigates that a bit. I couldn’t find the year the New Moon Club opened, but with the overall mission being to find memories and stories that give you a feel of the venues, that seemed like a minor detail. Apparently, the first thing you’d be greeted with as you approached the club was the smell of rotting fruit and vegetables from the market on Mill Lane right outside the venue. Isn’t that more interesting than the year it opened?
Were there other places that you might have included if time and space allowed?
The New Ocean Club was going to be featured. I get the impression that it was a venue that had some amazing bands playing there in the mid-80s, but not one people had a strong attachment to. The Square Club definitely would’ve been one to include as it feels like a venue that people really remember fondly, and had a strong community around it.
Is there anything standout that you’ve discovered in the course of putting this exhibition together?
I just loved hearing people’s stories about what they used to get up to. I loved interviewing Brian Quinn, who ran Smiley’s. He DJed around Cardiff under the name Crazy Captain and used to make his own fireworks that he would set off while DJing, mixing who knows what into old paint tins and pretty much setting off flaming smoke bombs inside the venues.
Apparently he was banned from DJing at the Top Rank when he almost set fire to the venue. The curtains were fireproofed, but the decades of dust on the curtains weren’t. He set off one of his homemade fireworks which sent flames leaping up the 20ft high curtains. That was the last time he was booked at the Top Rank. A disregard for health and safety that is incomprehensible in 2026.
Do you get the impression that in our current age, records of musical history are being well archived? A lot of it is easily accessible via social media and elsewhere online but could disappear from view, like with Myspace.
It does make you wonder what an exhibition in 30 years’ time, documenting what is going on today, would be like – digital flyers and digital album releases. Having said that, I put on around 50 gigs in the 1990s and 2000s and I didn’t bother keeping a flyer for any of them.
I think archiving is usually done after the fact. No-one really thinks their band or the gig that they put on is particularly significant at the time, but roll on a couple of decades and the bands have split up or even made it big; the venues have closed; the buildings have been knocked down or converted into flats. There is a whole history there that feels a lot more significant than it did at the time. I guess the difference is an old paper flyer can survive by accident up in someone’s attic, while digital history has to be actively saved.
Resonant Places, Futures Gallery, Senedd, Cardiff Bay, Sat 12 Sept-Thurs 5 Nov.
Admission: FREE. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
