Small live music venues are vanishing fast, and bands are looking for new spaces to play their first gigs. Jim Carrollreports

Here's another one to pin on those property developers who are changing the face of the country as fast as the banks can hand out cash. Every couple of weeks, another venue that used to play host to live music disappears from a town near you. A couple of months later, it will have been replaced by a bland building complete with Spar/Centra, cafe and apartments.

While there's nothing new about vanishing venues - after all, Dublin has seen The Funnel, McGonagles, the Baggot Inn, the New Inn, The Underground and The Fox & Pheasant, to name but a few, disappear from the live listings through the years - there now appear to be fewer and fewer small live music venues. Without these spaces, you don't have the laboratories where the next big things of tomorrow are hatched.

Of course, new venues are still opening, but many of these are just short-term punts. New entrants quickly discover that hosting a couple of rock'n'roll bands in the back isn't quite as glamorous as it sounds.

Dermot Lambert has encountered a good number of those venue owners. He runs Garageland, a company which has hosted more than 1,500 gigs by nearly 2,000 new bands in the past six years in venues around the State.

"If you run a music venue, you're going to alienate yourself from certain things," says Lambert. "You won't have a good evening trade, for example, because bands will be soundchecking and that puts off people. Owners have to accept that bands are smelly, they make a terrible racket and they have a lot to learn when they start off. They will empty venues and they do sound awful, but so did Coldplay when they started out."

Lambert reckons there are more venues in Dublin now than there were a decade ago, but he notes a lack of understanding by owners of what the business involves.

"A lot of bar owners think they're going to make a fortune by having bands playing and that's a bad way to start out. You could have 10 shit nights in a row or get three or four bands giving out about you on the internet. If that's going to bother you, don't open a venue."

Lambert points to Eamon Doran's in Temple Bar as an example of one venue which is getting it right. "They have really turned right round in the last two years and they now have a consistent policy of booking live bands. You know when you walk into a place if it's run by someone who actually likes music."

Nationwide, Lambert points to a lot of gaps. Like many, he laments the closure of The Lobby in Cork - "It may have been a small room, but it was perfect for a lot of bands" - while he describes the venue situation in the south-east as "haphazard".

"Waterford really lacks a good venue for new bands. You have two really supportive radio stations there with Beat and WLR, so a new band can reach 150,000 people via the radio stations, but they can't get a gig."

In Limerick, Shane MacCurtain from the Roots club night can count four live music venues which have gone missing in action in the past three years. "The Boat Club, the High Stool, the Savoy Bar and the Globe are all closed and they will not be re-opening as venues."

While there has been one new arrival (The Underground at Baker's Place) and Dolan's Warehouse continues to promote live music, MacCurtain says "venues appear less likely to take a risk on something new and different. As a result, there has been a reduction in smaller venues for different sounds in the city centre.

"It may have something to do with the scenario that it has become more difficult to tempt people out to events. Yet people still have that creative spirit, and audiences still want to appreciate and experience live music. I've heard of a Congolese musician, for example, playing to 200 people in a GAA club a couple of miles outside the city. But the space for that isn't in the city-centre any more."

MacCurtain sees this lack of readily available and accessible spaces as part of a bigger, city-wide problem.

"Limerick has become a lot more homogenous in terms of the music you'll hear and the kind of buildings which are going up. It's a common occurrence to see these huge apartment blocks arriving where there's nothing or nowhere for those who live there to go."

Yet there's little perceivable audience anger about what is happening. "When the Boat Club closed, there was a general outpouring of anger and upset about it. But then the apathy thing kicks in and a few weeks later, people just accept it," he says.

MacCurtain can foresee bands ending up in some interesting spaces in the future. "While there are still a few venues available for bands, I think there will be an increased onus on more traditional arts spaces to help out, especially if the bands and events in question are less commercial in nature."

After all, as Dermot Lambert notes, there is still an audience who want to see bands. "We've been running gigs solidly for the last two-and-a-half years on Sunday nights in Doran's, which is supposed to be a crap night of the week for gigs, and you'd be surprised by the amount of people who will come to see the gigs.

"Bands really need spaces so people can see them play. Without that kind of investment, you just won't have bands."

The death of live Dublin

The Underground, Dame StreetThe tiny subterranean room where A House, Stars Of Heaven, Something Happens, Into Paradise, Whipping Boy (top), Therapy (centre) and countless others took their first steps. Now a lapdancing club.

Baggot Inn, Baggot StreetThe carpets were always sticky at Charlie McGettigan's venue where every Irish band from The Blades and Moving Hearts to the crop of 1990s successes cut their teeth.

New Inn, the LibertiesSpit-and-sawdust club which saw gigs from That Petrol Emotion, Whipping Boy, Engine Alley and Therapy in the early 1990s.

The Funnel, Temple BarA much-missed venue which was home to the late-1990s wave of electronic music-influenced acts such as the Redneck Manifesto and Decal.

The Attic, Burgh QuayGreen Day once played a benefit gig in this tiny room. Home to a host of Irish bands from the 1990s including Pet Lamb and Mexican Pets.