A recent gig at AntiSOCIAL. ₹500 entry, ₹500 cover charge, a thousand rupees gone before you've heard a single note, and you find yourself doing the maths that a student in this city has no business having to do just to stand in a room and listen to live music.

You can't begrudge venues their economics, not really, but one has to wonder how a student is meant to afford this, because this is precisely the age when you're supposed to be stumbling into the unknown nooks of the city you live in; the age when a stranger's chord progression is meant to rearrange something in you. It's difficult to see how any of that happens from behind a literal paywall.

We have never had more music at our fingertips (or more accurately, in our pockets,) and simultaneously, we have never had fewer rooms in which to hear it together, which sounds like it ought to be two separate problems but somehow, infuriatingly, keeps revealing itself to be the same one. Streaming gave everyone access and the digital world dissolved its barriers almost without anyone noticing, but the physical world, with far less fanfare, quietly put them back up: the democratisation happened online and stopped, hard, at the venue door.

Mumbai has never had enough third spaces to begin with, the places that are neither home nor office nor a transaction waiting to happen, the ones you're allowed to simply occupy. What little the city did have, largely by accident rather than design, lived in its bandstands, its open mills, and its unpoliced stretches of promenade. Those spaces are where this story actually begins. 

There was a time, not so long ago, when those economic barriers were easier to cross than they are now.

In the early 2010s, the Bandstand Revival Project (initiated by The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry) took it upon itself to platform young independent talent and, in doing so, introduced a Bollywood-crazed city to something it hadn't quite encountered before, bringing music back, crucially, to the British-era bandstands the city had otherwise left to rot.

Bandstands are an odd inheritance: colonial-era civic structures built for brass bands and municipal ceremony, scattered along the city's gardens and seafronts. They are currently left largely unused which is what the Revival Project understood. An unused stage is still a stage, and this cultural infrastructure, however outdated its original purpose, was sitting there waiting to be reactivated.

Multiple weekends a year, an eclectic lineup performed under open skies, everything from independent prog rock bands to classical fusion artists, none of it curated for a particular crowd so much as simply offered up.

(You may know him as the bassist for The Yellow Diary, but Stuart DaCosta was a key organiser of the Revival Project.)

The lineup went up on Facebook, the event was open to all, and so the audience that gathered was a genuinely mixed one: people from the industry, others hovering at the periphery of the scene (me), strangers to this world entirely, some of whom had come from a remote villages from around the country simply to see what the city was about.

You might walk past and stop without meaning to. You might still, years later, remember the particular dusk when you saw five kids in skinny jeans belting out strange sounds under the trees of Hanging Gardens, for no reason other than that the “door” happened to be open and you happened to be walking by. That was not a mission statement. It was an actual open door.

Around the same time in 2011, Control Alt Delete, a scrappy, community-run gig series that shifted between venues depending on who could host it, ran on a pay-what-you-want model, putting out open calls for bands travelling from other parts of India to crash at attendees' homes: slim budgets, maximum madness, and, on occasion, moshpits in the mills.

Even Blue Frog, then Mumbai's best-known live venue for jazz, blues and all genres of music actually, had a cover charge but no tickets, and free entry before 9 pm on most weeknights, a policy that Hard Rock Cafe more or less mirrored, so that across the city there seemed to be, at least for a while, a collective and largely unspoken effort to keep the barriers to live music low.

The first time I went to Blue Frog was when a friend's sister, bored to death by the inactivity of awkward 16 y/os, snuck us out and bundled us into a kali-peeli to Lower Parel.

What those spaces produced was never just an audience, but a city with a particular character, one shaped as much by who was allowed to wander in as by who chose to.

In some sense, the arrival of antiSOCIAL in 2015, the rock and indie venue that finally gave a scattered, DIY counterculture something resembling a permanent address (it was literally underneath Khar SOCIAL before getting a dedicated address in Mathuradas Mills). It formalised the underground by giving it a defined space but his may have quietly marked the beginning of the end.

Most of those spaces are gone now, and the venues that remain need tickets and cover charges simply to survive, which is understandable enough on its own terms, and yet those very charges are pricing out the exact demographic that a living music scene ought to depend on for its future. The economics sustaining the present are, in effect, quietly undermining whatever was supposed to come next.

The lack of venues in Mumbai means other things too. International acts (and messiahs), Karnivool, Animals as Leaders, Steven Wilson, and the like end up performing in hotel ballrooms and convention centre warehouses because the rooms that should exist don't.

Mumbai has always been starved of third spaces and yet the raw material for them has never actually been missing: the bandstands have existed for years, the parks have existed for years, the mills have existed for years, and the city's bones, whatever else has changed, are still there.

Is there a version of this city where that changes, where the underground gets to stay underground rather than relocating to a five-star hotel, where a student can still wander into something that changes their brain chemistry without having budgeted for it months in advance?

That version of Mumbai is getting harder to find. But the bones are still there, and bones, unlike everything built on top of them, are the one thing a city can always choose to build on again.

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