To see The Black Heart really performing at full pelt and understand why it serves a genuine function that goes beyond serving drinks, one only has to look at Camden’s Desertfest each May. As well as hosting a stage for the weekend (alongside other Camden venues like The Underworld, Electric Ballroom and The Roundhouse), it genuinely feels like the centre of the whole thing. The street outside houses the festival wristband exchange, it naturally becomes the main meeting point, and once the bands are done, it’s where the party continues until long past bedtime. If Camden has a musical heart, here’s a perfect illustration of why The Black Heart is it.
Over the summer, they put on socially-distanced gigs, opened for drinks, and tried to give people back a bit of what they were missing. But inevitably, like so many venues and pubs, The Black Heart is in trouble because it can’t open as it should, and what’s happening to them is happening to beloved places across the country: caught between the inability to successfully trade as they normally would, and a government who don’t give a shit, bills are piling up and they can't pay them. They proudly boast that they have retrained their staff “because we are a family”, which is both admirable and a self-evident description of what they're all about that's recognisable to anyone who’s been there, but they’ve also had no government support, and being cool, sadly, doesn't pay the rent. If it did, the place would be set for the century.
London would be a worse place without The Black Heart. In a city that so often feels too big and disparate for cohesive things to occur, it is the rarest of things: a natural, genuinely warm home for everyone. And it, and places like it, need saving. Because, as boring as it is now, having to stay at home with no gigs, it’s going to be even more bleak when we’re allowed back out and we find there’s nowhere left to go.
You can donate to The Black Heart's crowdfunder here.
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