Home Grooves: A History of Singapore’s Live Music Venues

However beautiful and blistering, live music is an ephemeral experience. The venues that play host to it may not have that much longer a lifespan, in a land-scarce, fiercely competitive city of skyrocketing rentals like Singapore. In the face of such transience, Home Grooves is a love letter to the country’s iconic live music spaces from the 1960s to the present.

Part of Esplanade’s 20th anniversary series PopLore – A Year of Singapore Popular Music, the exhibition documents the evolution of the live music scene and its pivotal role in pop culture as well as the careers of notable bands and musicians. Through archival photographs, interviews and physical memorabilia such as musical instruments, albums and costumes—contributed by musicians and aficionados—Home Grooves pieces together the story of different decades of live music.

From swingin’ 1960s venues such as National Theatre and Golden Venus, to the enterprising ’80s when bold entrepreneurs ventured to expand the cultural landscape, and on to the explosion of indie and jazz establishments and spaces in recent decades, the beat goes on. Listen to a playlist, test your knowledge with a little pop quiz and marvel at the resilience of a scene that keeps reinventing itself, undimmed by moral panics, pandemics or technological disruption.