“Somebody Has To Make A Scene” | How A Grassroots Scene Is Built From Scratch

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We chat to Feedbacker, a Croydon band determined to build their hometown’s rock scene, one DIY event at a time

There was a mosh pit in The Garage.

An actual garage, or shed of sorts: DIY soundproofed, covered wall-to-wall in Rinokun’s graffiti, and usually used by Croydon band Feedbacker as a recording studio and rehearsal space. On this night in August, the equipment had been cleared out and the space had been transformed into something else entirely. Inside, Feedbacker, Intake, Senyaxs, 3widow and Varlet took turns playing to a crowd packed into a room that had never really been intended to hold one. Outside, in the garden, Rinokun worked on a huge canvas in real time.

It was chaotic, intimate and, judging by the people throwing themselves around the room, extremely effective.

But the night wasn’t really about putting on a gig. At least, not only about that. For Feedbacker, it was an attempt to start building something that Croydon currently doesn’t have much of: a local rock scene.

“Really we had planned to do stuff like this from the start,” says Morgan May, Feedbacker’s lead guitarist and one of the event’s key organisers. “We’re really keen on building a local rock band scene in a place where there currently isn’t much of one.”

The idea wasn’t pulled from nowhere. In the aftermath of Covid, Morgan and the rest of Feedbacker became fascinated by the community surrounding The Windmill in Brixton, the small venue whose scene became associated with bands including black midi, Squid and Black Country, New Road. What interested them wasn’t simply the music coming out of the venue, but the way a scene could form around a physical place: musicians knowing each other, playing together, sharing audiences and creating opportunities rather than waiting for somebody else to provide them.

“From then we’d been keen on doing something like that,” Morgan says. “Since we started we wanted to do collaborative stuff with the people around us. It was always in the cards for us.”

The Garage Night was their first serious attempt at bringing that idea into reality.

Intake were an obvious place to start. Feedbacker already knew their frontman from school, and Morgan says they didn’t need much convincing once the idea was explained. The bill grew to include Senyaxs, 3widow and Varlet, while Rinokun contributed to the event’s visual identity, designing the initial poster before turning the garden into their own live canvas on the night.

That distinction matters. A scene isn’t only the bands on a bill. It is the people designing the poster, making the artwork, lending the space, helping with the logistics, bringing friends, playing shows and showing up for one another. It is a network before it is a genre.

“We want to give Croydon a scene and a network where everyone works together and supports each other,” Morgan says.

Making that happen, however, was considerably less straightforward than the sentiment suggests.

“Logistics wise it was a nightmare really,” he admits. The Garage is normally a fully functioning recording studio, and once the equipment was cleared out, nobody really knew how many people the space could accommodate. There was also the small matter of the neighbours. The organisers considered bringing them into the event, before deciding that doing so would probably mean having the whole thing stopped.

Instead, they leaned into the house-party feeling. The garden became part of the event, The Garage became a makeshift venue, and a considerable number of people had to pitch in to make the whole thing work.

It is easy, from the outside, to romanticise scenes once they have become established. The venues become landmarks. The bands become names. The photographs begin to look like documentation of something that was always going to happen. But scenes are often remembered as though they simply existed. Somebody has to make them.

In Croydon, that process currently looks less like a polished cultural infrastructure project and more like emptying a soundproofed garage, covering the walls in graffiti, dragging people into the garden, persuading other bands to get involved and figuring out how many bodies the room can take before the whole thing becomes impossible.

Then, somehow, the music starts.

And there is a mosh pit in The Garage.

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