A free, searchable record of live music in the UK and Ireland, read back out of the music papers' own weekly gig listings.
Every week for forty years, the British music papers printed who was playing where: a dense page of listings, town by town, alongside tour announcements and venue adverts. Almost none of it was ever indexed. The big tours made it into books and onto Wikipedia; the Tuesday night in Dudley, the band you saw at the student union, the pub back room where someone famous played before they were famous, mostly did not.
This archive reads those pages back and turns them into something you can search. It is here to help you pin down the gigs you went to (the date, the venue, who was supporting) and, with luck, to jog a few memories along the way. It is a labour of love, not an academic catalogue: fairly accurate, honest about where it isn't, and getting better as more pages are read.
97,647 gigs from 669 issues, and growing. Each bar is one year; the pale ones are years not yet read.
Hover or tab to a bar for its count.
Coverage follows what has been scanned and read, not what happened. If a year looks thin, it is thin here, not in real life, and a missing gig is not evidence that it didn't take place.
Scanned issues of the papers are put through optical character recognition. A script finds the pages that carry gig listings, and a language model reads each one and writes a record for every date, venue and bill it finds. Those records are then checked: against the page's own structure, against each other (one act can't play two towns on the same night), and against everything else already in the archive.
Venues and bands are then tidied up by hand-reviewed lists, so that the thirty-odd ways the papers (and the OCR) spelled Dingwalls all land on one venue, and The House Of Love is one band however it was printed. Nothing is edited in place: the original reading is kept exactly as it was read, and every correction sits beside it with its reason.
Every gig carries an evidence grade, worked out from what the archive can actually check:
And some honest caveats:
Were you there? Is a date wrong, a band misspelled, a venue in the wrong town? When the site goes live, every gig will have a report a problem link that sends that record's details along with your correction, so all you need to type is what's wrong.
Especially welcome: memories of gigs the papers missed, and old listings, tickets or flyers that could fill a gap.
The gig records are released under CC0: public domain, free to use for anything, no attribution required (though it's welcome). Facts about who played where belong to everyone.
The scans and their full text are a different matter. They remain the copyright of their publishers and are not reproduced here. Instead, every record cites the paper, issue date and page it came from, so you can always go and check the original.
Want the data itself? See API & data.