Alien Ant Farm and CKY announce joint UK tour – with a £1 ticket levy for grassroots venues

Alien Ant Farm have announced a joint headline tour with CKY, which will come with a £1 ticket levy to help support grassroots venues. Find ticket details below.

The announcement of the upcoming 2024 shows comes on the heels of California nu-metal band sharing ‘~mAntras~’ last week – marking their first new album in nearly a decade.

Set to kick off towards the beginning of November, the shows will see frontman Dryden Mitchell and co. join forces with CKY for a run of joint headline dates across the UK.

The gigs follow on from a series of European shows, which kick off in October, and launch with an opening night at the Dreamland venue in Margate on November 9. From there, shows in Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham, Glasgow and more are lined up for the remainder of the month, before the shows wrap up with a closing set at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town on November 24.

Both Alien Ant Farm and CKY have also become the first first American bands to support Music Venue Trust (MVT) by adding an optional £1 donation to support grassroots music venues on the UK dates. The MVT will distribute donations to small, local, grassroots music venues across the country to ensure the music ecosystem continues to support new and developing artists.

“We’ve always loved our UK tours! For over 20 years we have been able to play shows all around our “home away from home” and we’re excited to see old friends and fans on this run. We’ve watched CKY as fans through the years but have never had the pleasure to meet and tour with them. We think this is a proper nice fit,” said Alien Ant Farm frontman Dryden Mitchell.

“As a band, we have seen the work that Music Venue Trust are doing for grassroots venues across the UK and were inspired to lend our support. We are honoured to be the first American bands to be involved in this initiative and would urge other artists who enjoy playing in the UK to follow suit.”

CKY’s Chad I Ginsburg continued: “We are beyond ecstatic and ready to cross the pond once again, and return to one of our most favourite places in the world to perform and tour, celebrating 25 years of CKY! We are playing songs spanning our career and looking forward to an amazing tour with AAF.”

Tickets, along with the optional £1 donation to Music Venue Trust, will go on sale on Thursday (May 2) at 10am BST. Visit here to buy tickets and check out a full list of tour dates below.

Alien Ant Farm and CKY’s 2024 UK tour dates are:

NOVEMBER

9 – Margate, Dreamland
10 – Southampton, 1865
12 – Bristol, O2 Academy
13 – Torquay, The Foundry
15 – Norwich, Epic Studios
16 – Birmingham, O2 Institute
17 – Nottingham, Rock City
18 – Newcastle, NX
20 – Glasgow, SWG3
21 – Manchester, O2 Ritz
22 – Bradford, Nightrain
23 – Patti Pavilion
24 –London, O2 Forum Kentish Town

The news that both Alien Ant Farm and CKY will be supporting grassroots venues across the UK with their tour follows a similar move by Enter Shikari last year. Last May, the band shared details of a 2024 run of UK tour dates, where £1 from each ticket sold was donated to the Music Venue Trust.

The idea was spurred by the band’s incentive to give back to the local venues which continue to support them throughout their careers.

“Grassroots music venues in the UK are under existential threat. Every time we lose another one we lose a vital part of our culture,” explained frontman Rou Reynolds at the time. “Bigger venues that benefit from the productive pipeline that grassroots venues provide need to support these smaller venues, as do the artists that have come up through them. Enter Shikari stands with Music Venue Trust in their efforts to bring more solidity and community to our brilliant UK live music scene.”

After the incentive from the band was announced, it was later reported that the UK was set to lose 10 per cent of its grassroots music venues in 2023, and further calls were made for larger venues to pay into the ecosystem and help protect grassroots spaces.

The Music Venue Trust revealed to NME that 67 venues had closed by September 2023, and 90 were working with MVT’s Emergency Response. It also shared a prediction that around 100 grassroots music would be lost from the UK by the end of the year – the equivalent of 10 per cent of the country’s independent gig spaces.

“It sounds like there’s a lot of focus on providing spaces for the real high-end of the music industry,” Reynolds told NME at the time. “There are a lot of new arenas on the way, while at the same time there is no support whatsoever for the grassroots circuit. There’s a very clear link between small venues and big venues – especially in the terms of providing new artists with a space to find their way in the industry and find their audience.

“We’re going to have all these new arenas without supporting the ways that artists can grow into them. It just all seems a bit silly!”

He continued, recalling how the band found it easy to enforce the £1 incentive. “The ticket prices are the same price as they were always going to be. We were keen to keep them below £40 and £1 from every ticket isn’t really going to effect us… More importantly, this is about getting those big venues to really start supporting this and helping the grassroots sector.”

“For us, it just seems like the obvious thing to do,” he added. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for these venues. The sad thing is that a lot of the venues that helped us are no longer here. I don’t want to see any more of them disappear. It’s not just me wanting to give back to associate some kind of personal sense of morality. We know how important these venues are.”

Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd hailed Enter Shikari’s example, and encouraged others in the music industry to contribute the keeping small gig spaces alive.

“I keep being told, ‘It’s too hard to find a way to connect the most successful bands with the most struggling venues’ – but it turns out it isn’t, because Enter Shikari just did it,” he told NME. “They didn’t ask anyone’s permission, they just phoned me up and said, ‘By the way, we’ve done this’.”

The pressures faced by grassroots music venues across the UK has continued into 2024, and the news of Alien Ant Farm and CKY supporting the MVT with their upcoming shows comes just weeks after various artists and figures from the live music industry headed to Parliament to push for a mandatory £1 ticket levy on all gigs arena-sized and above.

Held at the end of March, the Culture Media & Sport Committee headed to parliament and held evidence sessions with figures from across the industry to see what can be done.

“We’re a huge net exporter of music – where does that all start? It all starts at a grassroots music venue,” argued Davyd at the hearing. “Even if your career didn’t start there, then your inspiration and aspiration started there because you lived in a community with music. If you take that away, then we’re taking away the starter motor of our entire industry. We need to really think about that and plan for the future because we do not have a plan at the moment.”

The points raised by Davyd coincided with the report shared by the MVT in January, which found that 2023 was the “most challenging year”, and saw 125 UK venues abandon live music and that over half shut entirely.

Overall, it was found that venues’ rent had increased by 37.5 per cent, with them operating at an average profit margin of just 0.5 per cent, and MVT COO Beverley Whitrick highlighted how the demand for live music hadn’t disappeared.

“23.6million people visited a grassroots music venue in the UK in 2023, which is an increase on the previous year. Sometimes people say to us when they ask about closures, ‘Is it that people are not interested in going anymore?’ Of course, that’s not the case at all,” she said.

“The wish to see artists, to connect with them in small spaces in local venues is as high as it’s ever been.”