The venue is Council run with the venue manager being Richard Haswell who is also co-director of the Summer Sundae & Big Session music festivals held at the venue.

Richard has been suspended from his post as hall manager(as reported openly in the local paper). The hall had a budget overspend of £1.4million covering 2007 and 2008. I'm led to believe that an overspend of this size is acceptable in sponsored arts - the council has also over spent on a new theatre in Leicester to the tune of £35million. Richard's superiors held off on employing a financial officer for the hall for at least one of those years and there was no marketing department for the period. Richard has effectively been sitting at home for the past fortnight and has not been told why he has been suspended or how long the suspension will last. His senior managers, the one's who held off on finance and marketing posts being filled, continue with their work while Richard's job as a short term 6 month contract has been advertised in the local paper.

Local politicians are now taking pot shots at each other whilst words such as "cover-up" & "scapegoat" are bandied about local internet forums.

Why am I telling you this? Because through a public backed venue and most importantly, Richard's vision, the people of Leicester get to see 100 odd bands every summer for £99 or so over 3 days. Typically the sort of bands covered by 6Music and even The Word. The Big Session has had the likes of Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Imagined Village and gets 6000 people to Summer Sundae's 18000. We've been lucky enough to get Massive Attack, Elbow, Paul Weller, The Unthanks as stand alone gigs as well over the last 18 months.

With the sort of behaviour that could eventually be seen as gerrymandering by the city council, the local business community would lose £3m+ in business and we would lose our bloody nice festivals and the Hall would be turned into a wedding venue if certain parties have their way.

There's lots more to this than I can bore you with here but I'm striving for some sought of national platform rather than scrappy pieces in the local paper. A platform that actually knows something of music and it's live staging - Andrew's post has given me opportunity.

Apologies for the intrusion.
Ed.

Locally reported "facts"
http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/demontforthall
http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Montfort-Hall-recruiting-temp...

Wonderful reader's letter where the cause of the problem is highlighted. Obviously.
http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Mont-playing/article-1418407-...

And for what it's worth, a Facebook group.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=151367673462

LOLLLZZZ and so on.

The Arts Desk is an effort by a quite amazing core of people, and a large team of writers of which I am just one, to prove that we journalists can be trusted to be experts in our specialist fields, which - present company accepted of course - an awful lot of commissioning editors seem to have forgotten in the all out chase to all cover the same few lowest-common-denominator BIG artists/events that will deliver the mythical "eyeballs" onto the page.

TAD - very much like The Word - is about the belief that people want something substantial to read and will read it and be loyal to it if it proves consistently good. I think everyone involved feels there's too little in this country that can stand up alongside US stuff like New York / The New Yorker / Vanity Fair / McSweenys stuff like Believer and we're trying to rectify that.

It is also exploring some very interesting angles re new methods of revenue generation that are very necessary "in the current climate", but can't really say anything about that for the moment - it's all very new and it's a long hard road to get such a big project settled into its groove...

Both sites bookmarked, they look very interesting and reliable what's more but that net question comes up again: who's going to pay the folk who do this?

Here are some Arts Desk pieces of mine on:

Fleetwood Mac last night

The lovely The xx

Some scary ambient music

Dinosaur Jr

and
Kode 9

And here is our latest CD review round-up

If you like (or, in fact, if you dislike) any of it please do steam in on the comments, and please pass on via 'social networking' etc anything you feel worthy of recommendation, thankyou kindly!

X-Factor style product placement will now cease.