Celebrating grassroots music venues and culture
​through interactive virtual reality.

Dead Good Venues is a project dedicated to celebrating and archiving the cultural value of independent music venues past and present.

This first iteration of the project, still in its prototype stage, comprises a fully immersive, explorable and interactive VR space built to replicate the former Leeds music venue The Duchess. It presents the story of The Duchess - pieced together using memories and objects collected through interviews with those involved - in a documentary formatted like no other. This is not just a 360-degree film, or an ‘on-the-rails’ experience. Participants are in total control of how they travel through the space and interact with the artefacts and information, dictating how the story unfolds in a sandbox, ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ fashion.

Inside the virtual space are: recreations of artefacts scanned in from owners who were there; interviews with people involved with the space (owners, promoters, musicians, punters); photograph and video galleries; visual material based on information, memories and documents gathered by our team; digital recreations of posters, magazines, artwork and paraphernalia associated with The Duchess. There is also a motion-captured performance by a contemporary band, which participants can watch in an accurate recreation of the gig space in The Duchess.

All of this combines to create an interactive museum commemorating the space, celebrating the value of grassroots music venues, and warning of the cultural damage that would be done should more venues like The Duchess be forced to close down.

​Strap in and experience the magic of grassroots culture, and share in the memories that shaped a city’s music scene and defined a generation of talent.​

Part of the research project was to recreate the venue in virtual space as it was through peoples memories. This is a little video of the drop-in session we hosted at The Fenton in Leeds.

Honk kindly recorded and performed live motion capture for the project. This is a little behind the scenes of that process. We captured the mocap in Delicious Clam with Ed Crisp.

Huge thanks to John Keenan, Patsy Matheson, Denis Copeland, Tony Woolgar, Paul Cockroft, James Hindle, Andrew Bannerman-Bayles, Mark Stokes, Mike Farmer, Ed Crisp, Delicious Clam and Honk.

​Please get in touch
[email protected] or [email protected]