Why is central London such a desert for up-and-coming bands?

The heart of the capital no longer has smaller spaces for the next big things to play. What does that mean for live music?

- Hamish MacBain

TO be clear from the outset: I am not here to reminisce, dewy-eyed, about the days in which you could blow smoke from a Marlboro Gold - or Lights as they were back then - onto a baker's dozen of mostly now gone Soho stages hosting then-in-ascendant musical greats.

The White Stripes' career-making, tabloid press-shaking turn at the 100 Club on Oxford Street in 2001. JustAdele-and-her-guitar at the 12 Bar on Denmark Street in 2006. Oasis at the Borderline in Orange Yard, Manette Street, in 1994 (a performance immortalised, in all its deliciously grubby glory, in the video for Cigarettes & Alcohol).

I have no intention of pouring scorn on Chateau Denmark's I Am Anarchy hotel suite. How anyone fail to see the irony of dropping upwards of £1,200 to sleep in the room where the Sex Pistols lived and... well, OK, fine, maybe I did come to pour scorn on that particular cultural monstrosity. Only a little, though. A tiny little bit of side-scorning.