On the Road: The story of Trowbridge’s vital DIY hub The Pump

It’s just after 9pm on a freezing cold Saturday night in January, and Jay and JB from French instrumental math-noise two-piece PNEU are setting up drums and more amplification than is strictly necessary for the size of the room on a rug in the middle of a tiny barn at the back of The Lamb pub in the small Wiltshire town of Trowbridge. They ask that the lights be turned off as they have a small lamp next to the drum kit which they assure me will be sufficient. I check that they’re ready to go, and head outside to shout to everyone milling around in the garden: “PNEU are about to start!” Everyone wanders in and takes their places… I find a spot basically IN the drum kit and realise I’ve forgotten my Loops… Too late now… Jay and JB start playing, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, this is loud! I feel like I’m standing underneath a jet plane as it takes off. I look around. There’s a teenager by the wall with his hands over his ears, looking distressed. Behind the amps, I see a friend, huge grin on her face, and there’s a lad with a mohawk going nuts in the corner. There are maybe 50 people here to see a weird French band that no one’s heard of before, and it feels AMAZING!

Hi. My name is Simon and I put on not-for-profit shows here in my hometown of Trowbridge. The venue is called The Pump and it’s in the back garden of The Lamb. They let us use the space for free, and in return, they get all the bar sales – an arrangement that suits us both. We get to do this fun thing called music, and in return, we bring people into the pub who maybe wouldn’t be there otherwise. I get on fine with Paul, the landlord, and tonight he’s very kindly letting the band have a couple of rooms for the night. PNEU only asked for a meal and somewhere to sleep, but we do well enough on the door that I can give them and Stef Kett, who had opened the show and is also staying over, £130 between them. It’s not much, and it’s not what they’re worth, but it’s something.

The Pump has been a venue since 1970. It started out as a folk club run by a group of volunteers headed by folk musician Pat Drinkwater. They turned what had been a run-down storage room into a space that could host live music, installing a seated balcony (the seats came from Frome Cinema) in order to increase capacity. In the early days, they had pie-eating contests and raffles between the bands, and it quickly became one of the most popular folk clubs on the circuit – people such as French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli and singer Maddy Prior have played here – and it’s been in use as a venue ever since.

With impeccable timing, immediately before the pandemic hit in 2020, it was taken over by Kieran Moore, who had been putting on shows in Devizes, Swindon and Trowbridge for nearly 20 years. After navigating lockdown, he started making the venue more diverse, still doing the folk nights but broadening the range of music to just about anything. He started putting on indie shows, techno nights, folk, blues, country, punk, metal, rock, spoken word, ska, soul and hip-hop, building an audience slowly but surely.

I got involved in around 2022. After lockdown, when we were allowed back out and gigs were on again, I went to everything I could… I met Kieran through the shows he was doing at the Town Hall (we found we liked a lot of the same bands and supported equally terrible football teams) and then migrated to The Pump. I was there every week regardless of genre and got to know everyone pretty quickly. I started showing up early and staying behind afterwards and generally getting in the way. I loved the community as much as the music, and soon I was doing odd jobs around the building and doing doors on gig nights.

I was also going to a bunch of shows in Bristol and Bath and would come back and tell Kieran, “I’ve just seen this band and they’re awesome! You should have them here.” In the end, I think he just got fed up and told me to try booking a show myself. This was May 2024, and I started emailing bands I liked to see if they’d like to play. Other Half were the first band I asked, and they said yes straight away. They asked for £100 to cover petrol and stuff, and with my business savvy, I replied that that wasn’t enough and that I’d give them £150. Dear reader, that night we lost £50. I asked my two favourite local bands, Steatopygous and Nobody’s Dad, to support and that was that.

The night itself was incredible, revelatory for me – seeing a room full of people dancing to bands I loved on a night I’d organised was the biggest buzz. I don’t think I got to sleep till 4am because if I went to bed the night would be over and that would suck. I now put on a couple shows a month and sometimes some of them break even. Margins at this level are impossibly tight.

People ask how to get involved, and I say, just show up – that is literally it. I always think the audience plays as much part in a night being good as the bands. At this level, everyone is as important as each other. It doesn’t work if the sound tech doesn’t show up, and clearly the bands need to be good, but if there’s no one to see them, it sucks. With the space we have, we only really need 30 people downstairs for it to feel pretty full and for it to feel special. And it DOES feel special. Like, these are moments that will never happen again. Some of these bands won’t exist next year but they did tonight and it was great.

The Pump is run entirely on goodwill by a team of volunteers, and with the arrangement we have with the pub our costs are as low as they can possibly be. Maintenance of the building and the equipment, designing and printing posters and flyers and distributing them around town, booking bands, listing the shows, making ticket links, running the nights, doing doors and lights and so on is all done in our spare time. We can occasionally pay a sound tech but that’s it. Everything else goes to the bands.

According to Music Venue Trust figures, 53 per cent of grassroots venues failed to turn a profit in 2025. Thirty of them closed. If we had to pay for the space, or if people wanted paying for their time, this would be impossible. I work maybe 20 hours a week for free at The Pump – more than the (part-time) paid job I have. Even after all this, we regularly make a loss. The shows that make money just subsidise the ones that don’t and, as long as we break even across the year, it’s all good.

So why do it? Firstly, it’s hella fun. When a night works, like PNEU, the feeling is amazing – just knowing that we made something happen, that we gave a bunch of people a really fun night is awesome. People thanking us at the end, telling us they’ve had a great time – it’s just such a nice feeling. I’ve spent my entire life being shy and scared and The Pump has given me a confidence and a sense of self-worth I never had before. It’s given me community and a sense of belonging I haven’t had since I was a teenager. I’ve made friends for life doing this. Plus, I get to walk to the shows…

But we also do it just because small towns like Trowbridge need something like this and SOMEONE has to do it. We’re about a 40-minute train ride from Bristol, so most touring bands will go there if they’re going anywhere. Having even some of them come through here means something. I really do feel grateful when I message a band I like, to see if they want to play in a town they’ve never heard of, and they actually say yes. When I started doing this, the realisation that that was even possible, that you can literally just DM IRKED or Gimic or tethered and ask them? And then they might come? NO WAY!

We’re also giving local bands an opportunity and a space to perform. We run a series of nights called The Future Sound of Trowbridge, for which we get external funding, in order to showcase new young bands. Because we get that funding, we can make it £5 to get in and still pay all the bands, pay a teenager to do lights, another to take photos, another to design the posters and run social media, and yet another to check people in and give them their wristbands. It gives local kids something to aspire to. They’re no longer just playing in their parents’ garage with maybe a gig at school to look forward to. If they can get 30 minutes together, they can play in a real venue on a real stage and it’s inspiring. There are bands round here now that literally only started because they came to watch a Future Sound show and thought ‘I want to do that!’

We benefit too because we get to run our eye over all these bands and invite the best ones back as support for bigger acts. I even started a cassette label (Sketch Book Records) because I was so taken by one of them – a teenage feminist punk band called Steatopygous. They played a Future Sound show back in 2024 when they were just 15/16, and they totally blew me away. They were kind of sloppy and chaotic but also the coolest fucking thing I’d ever seen. When Kieran needed a band to test out a new [mixing] desk, he asked them, and in the course of that, they recorded rough versions of three of their songs. I got to hear them and, having played them over and over that night, excitedly messaged the band to ask if I could put it out. They said yes (actually it was more like “OMFG THAT WOULD BE SO SICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OFC YES OMFG THAT IS SO SICK WTF??!?!???!??!!!!!!!!!!!”), and I tried to figure out how to do it. We’ve since sold out two runs of the tape, and it got featured in The Quietus’s end of year Top 10 Punk and Hardcore releases.

Without The Pump, that would never have happened. I’ve since put out a further six tapes, all but one being by other local bands I’ve seen at The Pump, and have basically adopted Steatopygous. I put them in the studio last summer to record an EP, which will become my first vinyl release, and when they finish school in the summer, I’m taking them on tour to celebrate. We’re going as far as Glasgow and Brighton and for them and for me not only is it just the most exciting thing ever; it’s something that would not be happening if this small town didn’t have a grassroots music venue.

And it’s not just me. This place has opened up so many opportunities for so many people. A supercool young woman called Meg came here as an anxious 17-year-old as part of a Prince’s Trust scheme to help us renovate. Kieran invited everyone who took part in that to come back for the show at the weekend, and Meg was the only one who did. She started off running the door, helping out here and there, until one day she asked Kieran if she could have a go on sound. He taught her how to use the desk until she was able to tech on her own and she now does it for a living. That would not have happened if this small town didn’t have a grassroots music venue.

You see articles when a venue closes about how sad it is because Coldplay or whatever played their first show there, and look, they went on to be famous and it’s such a shame there’ll never be another Coldplay now. That’s fine; the bands that make it big always have to start somewhere, and places like ours give them the space to make mistakes and to learn and to get better. But most bands DON’T get big, and most bands DON’T make any money. It’s as much of a hobby for them as it is for us. And that’s fine too.

Small bands and local bands playing to their friends in a tiny room has value irrespective of what happens to those bands in the future. Radiohead played their first show as Radiohead at the Psychic Pig in Trowbridge, so I guess that means that that show has some kind of historical importance. But it ALSO had value on the night. You don’t have to wait five years to find out “Was tonight good? Was it worth it?” And you don’t judge what’s fun now based on what happens next and who goes on to be famous. You know it in the moment because it’s fun in the moment – and that’s all it needs to be.

It’s 6pm on a Wednesday night in November. Slash Fiction are soundchecking and they sound incredible. The Yacht Club have arrived and are completely blown away by the venue. They love that’s it’s ramshackle and lived-in and oddly shaped and has junk all over the walls. I’m kinda nervous – we’ve sold five £6 tickets in advance, and I need £250 to pay the bands. Is anyone gonna come? I’ve spent months telling everyone I know how ace it’s gonna be – was anyone listening? The money doesn’t matter, but I feel bad because these are two of my favourite bands right now, and I want them to have a good time. I’ve had trouble sleeping the past few days because I’m worried and I just want it to be good. The openers are teenagers, so hopefully their friends will come?

It’s three hours later and The Yacht Club are on stage. Downstairs is full and the teenagers (they DID bring their friends!) have started a circle pit. I look up at the guitarist and can see them grinning incredulously – like, ‘What is happening here? We’re an intricate mathy emo band – we don’t get circle pits, wtf?’ I saw both bands last night in Bristol (#superfan), and everyone was standing, holding pints and nodding. They come to a town they’d never heard of and get THIS reaction. We’re out of the way and bands don’t play here every night, so when they do, we know we have to make the most of it. I just wish some of them would have bought tickets in advance because it would have saved me the stress – but right now, it feels AMAZING!

Getting people out is hard. We put posters up around town, and we obviously use social media, but the latter only really reaches the people who already know about us. There are enough regulars for the folk shows and the punk shows and the youth nights that we mostly do OK, but there are definitely people we are missing.

It still seems crazy to me every time someone new comes and tells us they’ve lived here for 20 years and had no idea we existed. I talk to them and tell them the history, tell them about the other shows we’ve got coming up, ask about their lives, make them feel special and hopefully they’ll come back. I make crappy photocopied flyers for every show, and I give them out to people when I give them their wristbands. I get to say, “If you like tonight, you should totally come to this. It’s gonna be Knocked Loose, followed by Heriot, followed by Every Time I Die, and that’s sick, right?” I also make snacks for all my shows, so I guess that helps too. If you don’t like the music, come for the samosas…

Like most venues, tickets are cheaper in advance to encourage people to buy ahead. For the ones that attract an older crowd, it’s less pronounced as they want the security of knowing it’s all sorted, but for the punk and indie shows, we regularly sell more on the door than we have in the two months since it went on sale. Some venues end up pulling shows if there’s not enough advance interest, but because of who we are and the fact that we’re volunteer-led, we’re able to take the hit, and mostly it works out fine.

We also do discounted tickets for U18s/unwaged people. I’ve got to know a lot of the kids that come now and they know that they can pretty much pay what they want.

Music needs to be accessible, and money shouldn’t be a barrier. It makes no difference to what we take on a night if I let them in free vs they don’t come at all, so I let them in free, or they give me £2.60 because that’s what they’ve got right now. None of them take the piss and when they do get part-time jobs, they come up to the booth with a big grin on their faces, saying, “I can pay now!” The only people who try it on are older – friends of the bands or whatever – like “Do you know who I am?”

And with the Future Sound shows, we’re giving them something to do on a Friday or Saturday night. Up-and-coming touring bands help put our tiny town on the map. And with Matt and (other) Simon’s monthly acoustic club and the bigger acts that Kieran brings to town (Tom Robinson, Chris Difford, Eliza Carthy and so on), we’re giving the older generation that came to The Pump 20, 30, 40 years ago a link to that past.

Getting involved here has opened up so many opportunities for me, and I will be forever grateful to The Pump, to Kieran and to everyone else. I now have friends and a community to be a part of: I help Kieran and Matt on their shows and he, Meg, Andy, Esme, Jo, Hayden and Tom et al help me on mine. Without The Pump, I wouldn’t have a label, and I wouldn’t have these friends, and I wouldn’t be spending my summer driving the sickest band in the world around the country. The Pump fucking rules and we are so lucky to have it. If you’ve got one in your town, then cherish it. Show up, dance if you want to. And, if you can, try and buy a ticket ahead of the show…

Taken from the June/July issue of Rolling Stone UK. Buy it here.