“WHERE will the new Oasis play if there are no venues for them to play in?”

So asked Steve Lamacq, indie DJ, writer of legend and a man who has been surviving on a diet of cider, dry-roasted peanuts and late-night kebabs for more than three decades. If anyone knows about small music venues, it’s him.

And if Steve Lamacq is worried, we should all be worried.

He pointed out that of the 25 venues played by Manchester’s answer to Slade on an early tour, only 12 now remain.

Lamacq was speaking at Venues Day 2015, organised by the Music Venue Trust. Venues ranging from Cardiff’s Clwb Ifor Bach to London’s Koko got together to network, swap tips and figure out how to keep convincing people to come out on a rainy Tuesday evening to see a band or artist who might change their life.

Coincidingly, the Mayor of London’s Music Venues Taskforce recently launched a rescue plan for the capital. It reports that London has lost 35 per cent of its grassroots music venues since 2007, from 136 to just 88 today.

Between meaningless words and phrases like “iconic” and “Brand Britain,” the report mentions the demise of the Astoria in London. I’m not sure it exactly qualified as grassroots, being a mid-size venue alongside the Marquee Club, Denmark Street’s superb 12 Bar Club and Madame Jojo’s in Soho.

There’s probably some irony that the report opens with a quote from Frank Turner, the folk-punk protest singer turned libertarian. “Something needs to be done to protect these spaces,” he writes, which clashes somewhat with his earlier warnings of the evils of state intervention in the arts.

And the language of the report misunderstands why people make music and just sees the numbers — it talks of London’s venues “incubating” 1,000 businesses a week. “If one band has a hit song, then another piece of lucrative British intellectual property is created, one that has been beta-tested in these spaces,” it wibbles.

The report does not help itself by suggesting that the point of grassroots music venues is to help find the next Ed Sheeran.

But it does raise good points, particularly how property-price mania, rising business rates, gentrification and the lack of the “Agent of Change” principle in local authority disputes, leading to new residents making noise complaints against long-standing music venues.

The Freebutt in Brighton is one of many venues that had to shut due to persistent complaints from an irate neighbour.

If the report’s recommendations that local authorities and the police should cut excessive licensing requirements for small venues, while adopting the Agent of Change principle, it will have done its job.

But there is a wider context at play too, of course. Venues are struggling to survive in an era of permanent austerity, massive university fees, mind-boggling rents and people preferring to preload on cheap supermarket booze than splash out at their friendly neighbourhood venue.

The report reveals that at the Village Underground in Shoreditch, the average spend on booze at a live event is just £6.27 per person.

And, as Andy Inglis, former co-runner of the Kilburn Luminaire points out, one of the unintended consequences of 2012’s Live Music Act is that many more rooms — not just pubs and bars — around the country are now able to host live music evenings, putting even more pressure on small live venues who charge entrance fees.

Venues are also having to compete with massive cultural changes, not least the rise of messing about online as a leisure option. Candy Crush, YouTube and its less salubrious equivalents, Netflix, Spotify, the ability to access pretty much any music or culture online whenever you want and dead-eyed social media perma-scrolling are all factors in the concomitant collapse of music as a tribally and culturally important force.

To rephrase Lamacq: Where will the new Oasis play if bands like Oasis are a thing of the past?